Читать книгу Little Wonder - Sasha Abramsky - Страница 9

Chapter 3

Scaling the Heights in Switzerland

An Elizabeth Main photograph of Dod and two companions during the first-ever winter ascent of the Swiss Drei Blumen, February 23, 1896. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

Lottie Dod’s absence from the public eye didn’t last long. While she never aggressively courted the media in the same way as did Babe Didrikson—the great American track-and-field star, golfer, basketball and baseball player, and quintessential self-promoter—more than a quarter century later, she did know how to hold her own in the spotlight.

Hers was a world increasingly fascinated by the sporting hero, by the unlikely accomplishment against the odds. Figures like Thomas Stevens, who in 1887 circumnavigated the globe on a penny-farthing bicycle, captured the attention of writers at the growing number of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, and through them the imagination of the populace. Or Nellie Bly, the globe-trotting New York World journalist. Or impresarios such as Buffalo Bill, whose Wild West show opened in London two months before Dod won her first Wimbledon title, thrilling crowds with the performers’ derring-do. Or the cricketer William Gilbert Grace, who played for an extraordinary forty-four consecutive seasons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dod, with her effortless transition from one sport to the next, with her breaking of one record after another, with her ability to compete against the best of male athletes, was tailor-made for stardom.