The Cal 100: No. 43 -- Ann Curtis
We count down the top 100 individuals associated with Cal athletics, based on their impact in sports or in the world at large – a wide-open category. See if you agree.
No. 43: Ann Curtis
Cal Sports Connection: Ann Curtis was a student at Cal when she won the Sullivan Award as America’s top amateur athlete and when she prepared for the 1948 Olympics
Claim to Fame: Curtis set at least two world records, and she won two gold medals and a silver medal at the 1948 Olympic Games. She won the 1944 Sullivan Award, and was the only woman and the only swimmer to win that award in the first 26 years it was presented (1930 through 1955). She was named the 1944 Associated Press female athlete of the year as well.
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Cal did not have a women’s swimming team or allow women to use its pools when Ann Curtis attended school there from 1944 to 1948. But while she was a Cal freshman she was named the winner of the 1944 Sullivan Award as America’s top amateur athlete as well being named the 1944 Associated Press female athlete of the year.
And her preparation for her Olympic success four years later was accomplished while she was a Cal student, despite the logistical challenges. Curtis had to travel about 15 miles to Treasure Island twice a day every day to train in the Navy’s 50-meter pool while keeping up with her studies at Cal.
It paid off in the 1948 Olympics in London. At the time, there were only five Olympic swimming events for women, and Curtis medaled in three of them, taking gold in the 400-meter freestyle and the 4x100-meter freestyle relay and silver in the 100-meter freestyle. Her second-place finish in the 100 was considered an upset, and she said afterward she felt she "had let down the world." But she more than made up for it in the relay, taking over the anchor leg in third place and passing two world-class swimmers to finish first.
She no doubt would have won more Olympic medals if the 1940 and 1944 Olympics had not been canceled because of World War II. The 1944 Olympics would have taken place during Curtis’ prime swimming years. Still, her 1948 performance was impressive enough to warrant a parade for her in San Francisco when she returned home from London.
Curtis stopped competing after the 1948 Olympics, and her swimming career lasted only six years, but she competed and won at all distances, from the shortest (100 yards) to the longest (1,500 meters). She was featured on the cover of Newsweek, Colliers and many other magazines during her heyday. MGM offered her a movie deal, but she turned it down, partly because she feared the studio would want her to do water ballet, which she detested.
Louis de B. Handley, who was considered America’s top swimming expert at the time, ranked Curtis as the best female swimmer ever.
There are discrepancies regarding how many world records she set, with the New York Times claiming she set five, while other sources say she set just two. The fact that many American swimming distances at the time were in yards while Olympic events were in meters as well as events being held at short-course and long-course pools may account for the differences.
In 1959, Curtis and her husband, Gordon Cuneo, opened the Ann Curtis Swim Club and School of Swimming.
She died in 2012 at the age of 86.
--The Cal 100: No. 44 Chris Humbert
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