Lynne Cox

Lynne Cox

File:Lynne Cox.jpg Cox in 2012
Personal information
Nationality	American
Born	1957 (age 66–67) Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
Sport
Sport	Swimming

Lynne Cox (born 1957 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American long-distance open-water swimmer and writer. In 1971, she and her teammates were the first group of teenagers to complete the crossing of the Catalina Island Channel in California. She has twice held the record for the fastest crossing of the English Channel (1972 in a time of 9h 57 min and 1973 in a time of 9h 36 min). In 1975, Cox became the first woman to swim the 10 °C (50 °F), 16 km (10 mi) Cook Strait in New Zealand. In 1976, she was the first person to swim the Straits of Magellan in Chile, and the first to swim around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

Cox is perhaps best known for swimming 2h 5 mins in the Bering Strait on 7 August 1987, from the island of Little Diomede in Alaska to Big Diomede, then part of the Soviet Union, where the water temperature averaged around 43 to 44 °F (6 to 7 °C). At the time people living on the Diomede Islands, only 3.7 km (2.3 mi) apart, were not permitted to travel between them, although the Eskimo communities there had been closely linked until the natives of Big Diomede were moved to the Russian mainland after World War II. Her accomplishment a few years before the end of the Cold War earned praise from both US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the signing of the INF Missile Treaty at the White House, Gorbachev made a toast. He and President Reagan lifted their glasses and Gorbachev said: "Last summer it took one brave American by the name of Lynne Cox just two hours to swim from one of our countries to the other. We saw on television how sincere and friendly the meeting was between our people and the Americans when she stepped onto the Soviet shore. She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live".

Another of her accomplishments was swimming more than a mile (1.6 km) in the waters of Antarctica. Cox was in the water for 25 min, swimming 1.22 miles (1.96 km). Her book about the experience, Swimming to Antarctica, was published in 2004.

Her second book, Grayson, details her encounter with a lost baby gray whale during an early morning workout off the coast of California. It was published in 2006.

In August 2006, she swam across the Ohio River in Cincinnati from the Serpentine Wall to Newport, Kentucky to bring attention to plans to decrease the water quality standards for the Ohio River.

In 2011, she published South with the Sun, both a biography of Roald Amundsen and a chronicle of her 2007 swimming expedition to Greenland, Baffin Island and Alaska, tracing Amundsen's Northwest Passage expedition.

The asteroid 37588 Lynnecox was named in her honor.

Works

• Swimming to Antarctica, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004 ISBN 0-15-603130-2
• Grayson, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006 ISBN 0-307-26454-8
• South with the Sun, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011 ISBN 978-0-307-59340-5
• Open Water Swimming Manual: An Expert's Survival Guide For Triathletes And Open Water Swimmers, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013 ISBN 978-0-345-80609-3
• Elizabeth, Queen of the Seas", Schwartz & Wade, 2014 ISBN 9780375858888

Awards and Honors

• 2014 California Book Awards Juvenile Finalist for "Elizabeth, Queen of the Seas"

External links

• Lynne Cox Speaking Engagements, contact information
• Lynne Cox website
• BBC article on the US-USSR swim
• CBS News on the Antarctic swim
• Lynne Cox reading Grayson online multimedia e-book (Chapter 1).