Nov/Dec 2022 (Volume 14, Issue 6)

 

By Michael Swanger

 

By all accounts of her childhood, Zoe Ann Olsen could have made a splash in the world as a dancer were it not for her incredible athletic aptitude as a springboard diver that eventually earned her two Olympic medals. At age three the Iowa native won her first tap dancing contest and three years later she won a summer trip to Hollywood where she appeared in two plays in the Edda Edson Theater Workshop, took third in a diving meet and made a guest appearance with the Hollywood Starlets where some donned her as a “new Shirley Temple.”

 

But at two-and-a-half years of age, Olsen had learned how to swim and her life’s calling was set in motion as she would go on to win 14 national titles, as well as silver and bronze medals in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, respectively. 

 

Olsen, who was born on Feb. 11, 1931, in Council Bluffs, grew up in La Porte City. The daughter of Art Olsen and Norma Bragstad Olsen, her father was an 11-letter winner at Northern Iowa who served as a coach and principal at the local high school and managed the municipal pool in Cedar Falls. Her mother taught swimming and was considered a pioneer of synchronized swimming. 

 

During her youth, Olsen played the piano, violin and clarinet, she sang, and she enjoyed bouncing on the family’s backyard trampoline. She attended school in La Porte City where she was a high school majorette and honor student. 

 

At age nine, Olsen won first place in girls’ and women’s diving at a meet in Wisconsin where she was the youngest of more than 100 competitors. Two years later she made headlines in the Des Moines Sunday Register — “LaPorte City Girl, 11, Tops State Swim” — as the only two-event winner in the state’s Amateur Athletic Union swimming meet, capturing first place in diving and the 40-yard freestyle junior race.

 

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