the Swimming Association of Great Britain) first started a "plunging championship" in 1883. By 1900 the "plunge for distance" event was being regularly mentioned in reports on U.S. swimming meets, and was mentioned in the New York Times and Brooklyn Eagle at least as far back as 1898. The event is best remembered today for its one-and-only Olympic appearance in 1904. William Dickey of the USA won the gold medal with a distance of 62 feet 6 inches, which remains the Olympic record. However, there were only five participants in the event, all from the United States and the New York Athletic Club. Dickey's teammates Edgar Adams and Leo Goodwin took the silver and bronze medals, respectively. Dickey's Olympic victory was far short of the world record at the time, which for a 60-second limit competition had been set at 79 feet 3 inches by W. Taylor of Bootle, England in September 1902. (Without a time limit, Taylor had also traveled 82 feet in 73.6 seconds.) Though it never returned to the Olympics, the event remained a standard event in U.S. amateur and collegiate sporting events for some time. By 1912, S.B. Willis, a plunger at the University of Pennsylvania covered 80 feet in 60 seconds, breaking the prior U.S. record of 75 feet 11 inches held by Millard Kaiser. By 1917 several attempts had been made to abolish the event at college and other competitions in the United States, and the NCAA dropped it in 1925. The English A.S.A. reportedly ceased holding its official plunging championship after 1937, though some sources say it ran through 1946. Female swimmers also competed in the plunge. American swimmer Charlotte Boyle (also a 1920 Olympian) set the American record a few times between 1917 and 1920, reaching 66 feet at an exhibition meet in March 1920. Two Detroit Northern High School students, Helen Nolan and Dorothy McWood, set records in the early 1920s, which McWood reportedly setting a new American record of 66 feet 10 inches in April 1922. Hilda Dand set a new world's record of 71 feet in 1925. On the men's side, Bootle's last record of 82 feet 7 inches set in 1906 stood for 14 years, until broken by two inches by 17-year-old Fred Schwedt of Detroit in 1920. English swimmer Francis Parrington smashed that record in 1926 by traveling 85 feet 6 inches, and in 1933 he hit