On Sept. 9, 1954, 16-year-old Marilyn Bell became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario, completing the 51.5-kilometre crossing from Youngstown, New York, to Toronto’s CNE breakwater in just under 21 hours.
Bell wasn’t the swimmer organizers expected to make headlines that day. The Canadian National Exhibition had put up prize money for American marathon swimmer Florence Chadwick to attempt the crossing, and Bell, a Toronto teenager, entered largely uninvited, to prove a Canadian could do it too. Chadwick pulled out of the water partway through. Bell kept going, fighting lamprey eels, cold water, and oil pollution for nearly a full day before touching the breakwater to a waiting crowd.
She became a national celebrity almost overnight, and the swim is still cited as one of the defining Canadian sports moments of the 1950s.
