George Breen

• Born: July 19, 1935
• Birthplace: Buffalo, New York
• Died: November 9, 2019
• Place of death: New Jersey

Sport: Swimming

Early Life

Of all the great modern swimming champions, George Thomas Breen seemed the most unlikely to succeed. He was born July 19, 1935, in Buffalo, New York, and had a normal childhood. In high school he was a lightweight crew rower with Buffalo’s West Side Rowing Club. For college, he attended Cortland State Teachers College, a small school in upstate New York. His college did not have a crew team, and he was neither big enough nor fast enough to play college football.

The Road to Excellence

At seventeen, after failing as a freshman to make the Cortland State football squad, Breen decided to try his luck with swimming. Most successful competitive swimmers train in a 25-yard or 50-meter pool, and they usually start before age ten and retire before age twenty. Breen practiced in Cortland’s 20-yard pool and did not begin swimming until the age of seventeen; no one expected him to succeed.

In his first time trial, Breen thrashed away awkwardly, taking 6 minutes 30 seconds to complete a quarter-mile race. “All those turns and walls to push off from in that 20-yard pool kept him from drowning,” reflected James “Doc” Counsilman, the famous Olympic coach from Indiana University. Counsilman started coaching at Cortland about the time that Breen decided to focus on swimming. “I was so bad,” said Breen, “that a coach without Doc Counsilman’s patience would have thrown me out of the pool for cluttering up his workouts.”

The Emerging Champion

Breen’s humble, overage rise from a half-drowned beginner to the best distance swimmer in the United States was a classic success story. He swam constantly, and with his persistent effort and awkward stroke, he eventually overtook whomever swam in the lane next to him. He started late, came on fast, and became the best—if never the most graceful—swimmer. In his fifth college year, as a twenty-two-year-old Cortland postgraduate student, Breen abruptly changed from an awkward, average swimmer to a world-record holder. His big moment was at the US Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Indoor Nationals at Yale University in Connecticut, in April, 1956. He not only lowered the world record by 13.1 seconds in the 1,500-meter freestyle, but he also finished 1 minute 18 seconds ahead of Frank Brunnell, a veteran national swimming champion. No one had ever finished so far ahead of the second swimmer in the seventy-five-year history of the US Nationals. Most of the American coaches among the vociferous capacity crowd shook their heads in disbelief and wondered how fast Breen could swim if he had proper technique. Mike Peppe, the great Ohio State coach, called the race “the single most brilliant effort in swimming I have seen in my thirty years of coaching.” Breen, he said, was “undoubtedly the greatest long-distance freestyler this country has ever seen.”

Breen’s win was a total surprise to everyone but himself and his scientific coach Counsilman, who had figured out that his awkward thrashing, no-kick style was hydrodynamically more efficient than the much smoother stroke of other, more conventional, swimmers. Breen’s world-record swim made him seem unbeatable even if matched against the young vegetarian from Australia, Murray Rose, and the even younger Japanese swimmer Tsuyoshi Yamanaka. The head-on race between these three leaders of distance swimming was set for Melbourne, Australia, in the 1956 Olympic Games. Breen never understood resting or tapering for a race, and he went all out at the Olympics, ultimately earning three medals. He lowered his own Yale world record to an incredible 17 minutes 52.9 seconds, the first metric mile (1,500 meters) ever swum under 18 minutes. This, however, was in the preliminaries; in the finals, he finished third. Murray Rose’s winning gold-medal time did not equal Breen’s world-record preliminary time.

Continuing the Story

Breen continued to set world records and was captain of the 1960 US Olympic team. At the Rome Olympics, he helped the American team win a gold medal in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay in addition to winning bronze once more in the 1,500-meter freestyle. After finishing his graduate work at Indiana, he went on to win the Eastern College Championships as the head coach of the University of Pennsylvania, where he served until 1982. He became one of the world’s top swim coaches, US Olympic and Pan-American team manager, and chair of the US Olympic Swimming Committee (1972–96). Continuing to work even part time over the years, often with clubs, by the second decade of the twenty-first century he was coaching for the Jersey Wahoos Swim Club. By serving swimming as an athlete, a coach, and an official, he paid back the sport that took him off the football bench and propelled him to the top of the swimming world.

Following a battle with pancreatic cancer, Breen died in New Jersey on November 9, 2019, at the age of eighty-four.

Summary

George Breen won twenty-two national titles and was a member of two Olympic teams, even though he did not get his start in swimming until age seventeen. He made up for lost time and served as proof that there is no age limit to begin a sport. In 1975, he was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame, and in 1997 he received the USA Swimming Award.

Bibliography

"George Breen." Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame, www.buffalosportshallfame.com/member/george-breen/. Accessed 29 July 2020.

"George Breen, Swimming." Almanac, University of Pennsylvania, 19 Nov. 2019, almanac.upenn.edu/articles/george-breen-swimming. Accessed 29 July 2020.

Levinson, David, and Karen Christensen, eds. Encyclopedia of World Sport: From Ancient Times to Present. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1996.

The Olympics: Athens to Athens 1896-2004. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004.

Wallechinsky, David, and Jaime Loucky. The Complete Book of the Olympics: 2008 Edition. London: Aurum Press, 2008.