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Women. Major feature of the Olympic track & field events was the performances of U. S. Negroes. Major feature of the Olympic swimming was the performances of Dutch girls. The Netherlands' equivalent of Jesse Owens and No. 2 celebrity of the Games turned out to be a ponderous 17-year-old from Rotterdam named Hendrika Wilhelmina Mastenbroek, who won both the 100 and 400-metre free style races, helped her team win the 400-metre relay. Because her pretty teammate, Dina Senff, took the 100-metre backstroke title, little Holland won every swimming event on the program except the 200-metre breast stroke which went to Japan. The high-powered U. S. swimmers got no first prizes at all.
To keep their weight down, Dutch swimmers train on beans, go in heavily for dancing. That this process is eminently successful, Dutch trainers feel to be conclusively proved by the fact that Swimmer Mastenbroek, whose hobby is cooking, weighs a mere 150 Ib. while 18-year-old Willy den Ouden, until last week rated the world's ablest girl free-style swimmer, as yet shows few signs of outgrowing her 242-lb. mother.
Netherlands' girl athletes have not yet outclassed the U. S. in events which require grace as well as brawn. Bright blonde Dorothy Poynton Hill last week retained her title at platform diving. Springboard diving championship went to Marjorie Gestring, 13-year-old Los Angeles schoolgirl.
While Holland's formidable female swimmers were winning the medals last week, the move to end the women's Olympic Games entirely or hold them far away from the men's Games gathered momentum. Major problem of the women's Olympics is determining whether or not the competitors are women. Gossip about Fulton, Mo.'s Olympic track star Helen Stephens, last week failed to produce a repetition of the embarrassment that occurred at Amsterdam in 1928 when debate about the sex of a Japanese broad jumper named Hitmoni did not end until she was ungraciously described in an official statement as "It." In Berlin famed Ted Meredith, onetime (1912) Olympic champion runner, now coaching Czechoslovakian girl athletes, related the sad case of his ablest sprinter, who qualified for the Olympics in record-breaking time, then decided to turn male. Said gloomy Coach Meredith: "I argued with her but lost the decision. She is now a male athlete. There are many cases like this in Central Europe."
Baseball. Since sport has become a major item in Nazi Germany's program of self-improvement, popularity of all sporting spectacles in Germany has jumped far beyond anything ever seen in the U. S. Berlin's 110,000-seat Olympic Stadium was packed every day of the Games, even when practically nothing was going on inside it. In the Stadium last week assembled two amateur U. S. baseball teams, one of college players, the other of members of the Pennsylvania Athletic Club, to "demonstrate" the sport. If any two such teams bothered to play in the U. S., even the families of the players would probably not find time to watch them. Germany's blind devotion to sport was emphasized last week less by the fact that this encounter was watched by a crowd of 100,000, much bigger than any that has ever witnessed the World Series, than by the fact that almost no one in it had any idea what was going on.