Joan McLagan with her dog, Twinkie, at her home in Vancouver, on July 17, 2012.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Joan McLagan’s Olympic career lasted precisely three minutes and 24.3 seconds.
Under overcast skies and cool temperatures in an outdoor pool next to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the Vancouver schoolgirl finished last in her heat in the 200-metre breaststroke. Whatever disappointment she felt was tempered by the knowledge she was only 13 years old. More Olympic competitions were surely on the horizon.
Instead, the world went to war and the Olympic Games were suspended. Her peak competitive years were mostly spent in domestic competition. She was twice named Canada’s woman athlete of the year during the Second World War, but she never again returned to the Olympics.
The death of Mrs. McLagan, at 99, leaves American swimmer Iris (née Cummings) Critchell, 101, as the last known living competitor from the notorious 1936 Summer Olympics, remembered as the Nazi Games.
By the time of the 1948 Olympics in London, Mrs. McLagan had married, retiring from competitive swimming to instead instruct girls and young women in athletics.
Described by sportswriters as a “nifty naiad” and “comely Canadian mermaid,” the petite athlete set an unofficial world record for the 50-metre breaststroke in 1940.
Her greatest performance on the world stage came at the 1938 British Empire Games when she claimed a bronze medal. Canadian officials agreed to add her to the team only if she paid her own way to the competition in Australia.
Mrs. MacLagan was twice named Canada’s woman athlete of the year during the Second World War, but she never again returned to the Olympics.Courtesy of the BC Sports Hall of Fame
Joan Marjorie Langdon was born on Dec. 2, 1922, in Ventura, Calif. She was the second of three children and the only daughter of the former Hannah Mary Thirlby and Richard Langdon, both of whom were born in England. Her Oxford-educated father met his future wife while tramping through South Africa. The couple’s first son was born in Vancouver in 1919 before they moved to California two years later. Mr. Langdon worked for a seed company before becoming a successful realty broker. He made friends there with a neighbour, the writer Erle Stanley Gardner, best known for his detective fiction featuring the defence lawyer Perry Mason. The family home, filled with artworks and souvenirs from Africa, was one in which the parents spoke Swahili to one another when they did not want the children to eavesdrop.
After returning to Vancouver, Mr. Langdon spent summers as a gold prospector in B.C.’s Cariboo region until he narrowly escaped with his life as a landslide swept away his equipment. “When a mountain starts chasing you,” he said years later, “it’s time to go.”
The girl learned to swim by attending free classes sponsored by the Vancouver Sun newspaper. She had just celebrated her 11th birthday when she was one of 13 children selected to take part in a Christmas charity gala swim event at the city’s Crystal Pool.
Her natural ability was spotted by coach Percy Norman, who recruited her to his Vancouver Amateur Swimming Club. Mr. Norman, an all-round athlete who had won several open-water races across Burrard Inlet, once slept on a park bench in Toronto so one of his swimmers could have a hotel room to himself before an important race.
At the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, James Worrall carries the flag for the Canadian team during opening ceremonies.Supplied
Under her coach’s tutelage, the young swimmer emerged as one of the best in the club’s stable of emerging talent. In the summer of 1935, when she was aged just 12, she won a race across English Bay and placed third in three-metre diving in the provincial junior championships.
Her weekdays were spent in class at Lord Roberts school in the city’s West End. Training sessions were held down the street at the waterfront Crystal Pool, where her twice weekly regimen included 30 minutes of laps on Thursdays in a pool shared with the public and an hour on Sundays when they gloriously had the water to themselves.
“We swam more as an avocation,” Mrs. McLagan told The Globe and Mail in 2012.
Early in 1936, she set national junior records in the breaststroke and as part of three-girl relay teams. In June, she set a Canadian record in the 200-yard breaststroke at the Crystal Pool with a time one-fifth of a second less than three minutes.
That performance earned her a surprise invitation to attend the Olympic trials in Montreal the following month. She was hospitalized on arrival with suspected appendicitis but was released without needing surgery.
In the pool, she lost both the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke races to Monica Trump, a 16-year-old high school student from Victoria whose parents would not permit her to travel to Germany later that month. Miss Trump’s spot on the Olympic roster was filled by her runner-up.
Money was tight in that Depression year. Vancouver mayor Gerry McGeer raised funds to aid athletes from his city. The Canadian Olympic Association, which was part of the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada, provided official dress uniforms for the team consisting of a crimson blazer with white piping, mother-of-pearl-buttons, and a white stitched maple leaf on the breast pocket. Men got white pants, women a white skirt.
Described by sportswriters as a 'nifty naiad' and 'comely Canadian mermaid,' Mrs. MacLagan set an unofficial world record for the 50-metre breaststroke in 1940.Courtesy of the BC Sports Hall of Fame
Young Joan faced a dilemma. The girls and women were instructed to pack a white dress and fancy shoes for formal events, and she did not have the money. By coincidence, she bumped into Mr. Gardner, the mystery writer, in the lobby of the Windsor Hotel in Montreal. After learning of her predicament, he paid for the required wardrobe.
The 120-member Canadian delegation departed the city bound for Europe aboard the Canadian Pacific steamship Duchess of Bedford, known as the Drunken Duchess for its tendency to be rolled by waves. The athletes travelled on cabin class tickets, which granted them access to an onboard gymnasium, as well as better food and less spartan quarters than that to which many were accustomed.
Athletes were expected to train during the week-long voyage, though the swimming team was disappointed when they saw the pool, which Mrs. McLagan later described as being “not much larger than a bathtub.” The women tied a rope to one end of the pool before wrapping the other end around their waist, so they could at least swim in place.
Once in Berlin, the women stayed in a dormitory named Friesenhaus near the Olympic Stadium. The athletes renamed it Freezing House.
She marched in the Opening Ceremonies with her teammates behind a banner reading Kanada in a stadium in which Adolf Hitler was the centre of attention. What happened next is debated to this day.
“The teams saluted Herr Hitler as they marched past,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1936. “The Empire teams saluted in different ways, but the Canadians gave the Nazi salute. The Australians, like the British team, turned their eyes right.”
The pro-Nazi crowd roared in approval at the Canadian salute. Afterwards, the Canadians insisted they had offered a traditional stiff-armed Olympic salute.
“People thought we were using the Hitler salute,” Mrs. McLagan said a decade ago. “It wasn’t, of course. It was the Olympic salute.”
She got little chance to sightsee in Berlin after her event, in which, coincidentally, Iris Critchell, the lone surviving Olympian from the 1936 Games, also competed. The young Canadian was not permitted to leave the dormitory without being accompanied by the team’s chaperone.
One of the highlights of her European sojourn occurred in London when an aunt took her to the opera. Encouraged to bring a guest, she invited a 21-year-old pole vaulter named Charles Joseph Sylvanus Apps, who a few months later would make his professional debut with hockey’s Toronto Maple Leafs. “Not a romance,” Mrs. McLagan would later insist, “a friendship.”
Just four months after her Olympic competition, the 13-year-old was again competing against local high schoolers in Vancouver, representing Lord Roberts in intercity school championships in which she won the 50-yard breaststroke.
She had another showdown with Miss Trump in a 220-yard race at Crystal Pool with the winner to represent Canada at the British Empire Games in 1938. The Victoria swimmer held the lead with a record-setting pace, as her desperate rival tried to catch up. About 25 yards from the finish, the Vancouver swimmer, calling on her “magnificent fighting heart,” in the eyes of Don Tyerman of the Vancouver Daily Province, pulled slightly ahead to win by a foot. Both swimmers beat the national record for the distance.
Despite the victory, she earned only a provisional, pay-your-own-way spot on the Empire Games team. Happily, the funds were raised through local subscription, including proceeds from a boxing card and pass-the-hat events.
She brought with her homework and schoolbooks aboard the liner Aorangi, as she was going to have to write exams after missing several weeks of schooling for the long journey to Sydney, Australia.
She trailed from the start in the 220-yard breaststroke, as England’s Doris Storey took a lead she never relinquished to the trailing Carla Gerke of South Africa. The Canadian swimmer slipped into fourth place behind an Australian swimmer before she managed, according to one sportswriter’s account, “a brilliant spurt at the finish, fairly leaping from the water with her ‘butterfly’ stroke” to claim the bronze by a touch.
Two years later, she broke the world record for the 50-yard breaststroke during an exhibition at Kelowna, B.C. The standard went without international confirmation because of the war, the same cause of the cancellation of the Olympics that summer.
She was awarded the Rose Bowl, also known as the Velma Springstead Trophy, as Canada’s top female athlete in 1942 and 1943. She also won the Sir Edward Beatty Trophy as the Dominion’s top swimmer in 1943.
She graduated with distinction from the Vancouver Normal School for teachers that year. By the time she retired from competitive swimming, she had set six national and many more junior records.
Hired to teach physical education to girls at Victoria High School, she spent summers as chief instructor for the Vancouver Sun’s free swim classes, the same program in which she had got her start.
An avid gardener and voracious reader, Mrs. McLagan lived independently in her Vancouver home until taking ill two weeks before her death on March 15 at Chilliwack General Hospital, outside Vancouver. She leaves a son, Neil McLagan, and a daughter, Mary Sudbury, as well as five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
She was predeceased in 2006 by her husband of 61 years, Ross Moir McLagan, a fellow Vic High teacher who had served as an officer in the air force during the war. She was also predeceased by her brothers Mark Langdon, who died in 1998, aged 78, and David Langdon, who died in 2017, aged 92.
Her athletic achievements went uncelebrated for several decades until she was honoured in a ceremony at the swimming venue for the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria. She was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 1998 and the B.C. Swimming Hall of Fame in 2016.
The esteem in which she was held by her peers for her precocious aquatic prowess is reflected in an honour that has gone mostly unnoticed by succeeding generations.
Seventy-nine years ago this month, at age 20, she became only the second person to have her name inscribed in Vancouver’s Civic Merit Book. The first had been Lt.-Col. Charles Cecil Merritt, who won the Victoria Cross for bravery during the Dieppe raid and who spent the remainder of the conflict as a prisoner of war.
“In a seaport such as ours, swimming should be acclaimed and supported as the queen of all sports,” the Daily Province editorialized. “Inscribing the name and feats of Miss Langdon in the city’s Book of Merit along with that of the hero of Dieppe should encourage others to seek high proficiency in this most beneficial and most useful of all sports.”