Hungry Like the Wolffe
How far would you be willing to chase an impossible dream?
By Elaine K Howley
Front crawl might have been a better choice
Marathon swimming is an all-or-nothing proposition. You either reach the far shore or you don’t. Pass-fail. Yes-no. Take-it-or-leave-it. here’s no such thing as “almost” in swimming the English Channel. As the delightfully exasperating aphorism states: “Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” But with such binary situations, another truism can apply, too – if at irst you don’t succeed, try, try again. Ater all, practice makes perfect, right?
Well for one storied marathon swimmer, practice – despite his copious amounts of it – never did quite make perfect. But it certainly did give him a leg up on the competition when training other swimmers and marketing himself as the person who knew the Channel best, despite never having actually bested it.
THE GALLANT GLASWEGIAN
Born in Glasgow in 1876 to a watchmaker father, Jabez Wolfe, afectionately known as Jabby, grew to be a large man. In an interview with Raymond Raife published in Boy’s Own Paper in 1914, Wolfe, was listed as standing 5 feet, 9 inches tall, and being barrel chested. “…I having produced a tape measure – he allowed me to ascertain that his chest measurement is 50 inches, waist 37 inches, and biceps and calf exactly the same—namely 16½ inches,” Raife reported.
Wolfe made his irst foray in the English Channel in July 1906 when he set out from England. Two other attempts quickly followed before the season closed. Undeterred, he returned in 1907 for another four tries. Attempts eight through 11 came in 1908 and 1909. In 1910, Wolfe tried swimming from the other, presumed easier, direction. He set out from France on 31 July in yet another failed attempt. Two attempts in 1911 and another in 1913 all ended in failure.
If you’ve started to lose count of the number of times he tried to swim the Channel, take heart – estimates of the number of attempts Wolfe made range from 19 to 22 or more depending on the source, and it doesn’t seem likely that consensus will ever be reached on exactly how many credible attempts occurred. What matters is that there were an awful lot of them, likely more than any other swimmer, and all of them ended shy of the shore.