Obituary

Inge Sørensen, born 18 July 1924, and a Danish swimmer who held the distinction of being the youngest Olympic Games medallist in swimming and second-youngest in any individual event, has passed away. She was 86. Bronze medallist in the 200m breaststroke at the 1936 Summer Olympics at the age of 12 years and 24 days, Sørensen was born in Skovshoved, Gentofte, and died in New Jersey, USA, on March 9.

She was the girl who refused to heil when Hitler walked out to present the medals for the breaststroke race won by Hideko Maehata (JPN) ahead of Martha Geneger (GER), before the two countries those top two represented would plunge the world into war. 

At home in Denmark, Sørensen was known as ‘Little Captivating Inge’, a moniker granted to her by radio journalist Gunnar ‘Nu’ Hansen while reporting live for Danish Radio from the Olympics in Berlin. The nickname inspired a popular song.

The bronze medallist returned home from Berlin to Denmark by train, her arrival marked by 30,000 screaming fans. She was paraded through the streets of Copenhagen to the harbour, where she was met by a boat that then set sail to the blow of bunting homeward bound to Skovshoved, just north of the Danish capital. 

In one of her last interviews, she told a Danish paper that she had been blessed with raw talent and had hardly trained. She then apologised for bragging.

“I trained one hour a week at the swimming hall in Østerbro," said Sørensen. "The rest of the time was in the harbour or at the beach in Skovshoved - where I played in the water with my friends and swam out to the stone that I called ‘my dad’s stone’. If I really wanted to do something special, then I might swim to the stone two times. I was a sort of natural talent, who lived by the strength in my legs and barely felt the water’s resistance at all, because I was so thin. I had nothing like the other swimmers’ power. Oh, that sounds like bragging - nobody wants to hear about that.”

Sørensen, who gave up watching television because she hated to see how commercial sports had become, held a special place in Danish hearts for having defied Hitler. Professor Hans Bonde from the University of Copenhagen wrote the book ‘Football with the Foe: Danish sport under the swastika’ in 2008. It dealt with a difficult theme: how athletes and the Danish football federation, among others, co-operated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Denmark from 1940-1945.

The Nazis had used ‘Aryan’ female sports stars as examples of their supposed superiority, Bonde recalls. The evidence is nowhere best portrayed than in Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Olympia’ film of  the 1936 Olympics and its propaganda machine.

“Women swimmers were incomparably the most popular sportspeople of the time, and attention was primarily focused on Ragnhild Hveger, Inge Sørensen and Jenny Kammersgaard,” Bonde writes. But unlike Hveger and Kammersgaard, Sørensen was “less willing to compete in games with the occupying forces”.

Hveger, one of the most successful swimmers in history, and Kammersgaard, both went down in Danish sports history as "Nazi sympathisers", as the Copenhagen Post put it. But Sørensen was different: Nazi leaders wanted her to race German champion Annie Kapell - but the 12-year-old shook her head and that was that.

Fear more than conscience may have been at play, Bonde tells the Post: “We don’t know her motives. Since she didn’t have any hesitations to meet the Germans during the war in Denmark, the argument that it was her parents’ fear that prevented her from going to Germany to compete seems probable."

Sørensen broke 14 Danish records and three world records as an 11-year-old. When  she took Olympic bronze at 12 years and 24 days she became the second youngest female winner of a medal after Luigina Giavotti, an 11-year-old Italian gymnast who took silver in 1928.

At 20, when Sørensen took a swimming instructors' course, she was forced to retire as a competitor because of prevailing amateur rules. She moved to Sweden and coached national-team swimmers there. Sørensen married fellow swimmer and engineer Janus Tabur in 1948 and the couple settled in the US in 1951. On three occasions, they sailed their own boat across the Atlantic on visits home. 

Half of Inge Sørensen’s ashes were scattered over her garden in New Jersey, the other half will be placed on the family grave in Ordrup Kirkegård.