Vallen Corbett looks through historic photos and newspaper clippings of her mother, Olympic gold medalist Martha Norelius, at her home on Saturday, August 3, 2024. Vallen Corbett speaks during an interview while surrounded by historic photos and newspaper clippings of her mother, Olympic gold medalist Martha Norelius, at her home on Saturday, August 3, 2024. Vallen Corbett poses for a picture with her mother’s 1928 Olympic gold medal at her home on Saturday, August 3, 2024.
Her newspaper clippings have yellowed. But because Vallen Corbett first dusted them off only recently, when she opened a box and spread them out on her dark wooden dining room table, their edges are still crisp, and their type still juts off the pages. The stories they tell are all about Corbett’s mother, Martha Norelius.
She has contemporaneous accounts of her record-setting swims. She has effusive profiles. And she even has a large cartoon, sketched into the New York Post in 1931.
The clippings stitch together the story of Norelius, who lived in three countries, married four husbands, birthed five children, won two Olympic gold medals and set a record that stood for 96 years — all squeezed into a life that ended when she was only 45. “Isn’t that amazing?” Corbett said, laughing. Norelius, Corbett’s mother, was the .
In the 1924 Paris Olympics and the 1928 Amsterdam Games, she won gold swimming the 400-meter freestyle, becoming the first woman to win the event in consecutive Olympics. No woman — — matched that feat until July 27, when Australia’s Ariarne Titmus went to Paris and successfully defended her 2020 Tokyo gold in that event. Norelius’ father and coach, Charles, was an Olympian himself.
He competed as a swimmer in the 1906 Games for Sweden, and Corbett, his granddaughter, knows that he later drove his daughter to similar heights — but only from glimpses of his coaching she saw as a child. So, the Norelius story is one of ambition, achievement and sacrifice. Her 1928 gold medal, the one Corbett keeps framed under a cross in the entryway of her home in Baton Rouge, represents a triumph that no athlete equaled for nearly a century.
But it came at a cost. “I think she had a very hard life,” Corbett said as she sat next to her old newspapers. “I don't think you get to be that good without somebody pushing you hard, and I think her daddy pushed her really hard.
I'm not sure if she ever had any choice.” A collection of photos of Olympic gold medalist Martha Norelius. The lure of the water swims through Corbett’s veins.
As a kid, she once tried to swim, with her grandfather’s help. But one ambitious dive off a three-meter board ended in a smack. The wind was knocked out of her, and she was forced to fight for air beneath the surface.
“And so, I thought, oh, he's gonna say, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’” Corbett said. “When I got to the steps, his face was down in the water, and he said, ‘Are you even trying?’” Corbett imagines that her mother didn’t live a normal life. She couldn’t have lived anywhere for longer than six months, she thinks, she likely couldn’t find enough time to make friends, and she might not have even gone to high school.
Instead, she spent all her time in the pool, training rigorously to harness her innate talents — until she was the best in the world. “I think the story should be the sacrifice you have to make to attain that level of performance,” Corbett said. Norelius was only 16 when she won gold at the 1924 Games, which means she was only 20 when she defended her title at the 1928 Games.
As her star ascended, she befriended , the Olympic swimming champion turned Tarzan actor, and Coco Chanel, who once dressed her in an ornate gown she wore to a party in New Orleans. Corbett has a photo of her wearing it. The acclaimed sportswriter Grantland Rice once wrote that if there ever was a human built for swimming, it was Martha Norelius, who had “beauty of line, length and symmetry, all the evidences of power — power and grace combined.
” But that strength faded when she contracted an illness in 1951. She took her children down from St. Louis to Pass Christian, Mississippi, where she fought the disease in bed while her three children played on the beach.
By 1955, Norelius was dead from complications of a gall bladder operation, according to an obituary published in the St. Louis Globe Democrat. “She was just really sick,” Corbett said.
“We would go out on the pier and crab. I don't remember her doing that. I remember us swimming, and we would be by ourselves.
I'd be seven years old, and I'd be at the beach by myself, swimming.” Why did Norelius move her family to the Mississippi coast? “She wanted to die by the water,” Corbett said. “She was tired.
” Martha Norelius’ 1928 Olympic gold medal alongside a photo of her and other Olympians taken at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. A week after Norelius’ record was matched, her daughter ambled into her house’s foyer, where she looked at the gold medal on her wall. She wore a pink collared shirt.
Her hair, parted neatly on the left and swooping around her right ear, had greyed. But the medal — wafer thin and only a couple inches wide — still had its shine. “She set that record,” Corbett said.
“It wasn’t until that Australian girl matched it this year. But it stood for 100 years.” After her mother died, Corbett moved back to St.
Louis. She tried to pursue a swimming career, but a kidney condition prevented her from training seriously. Eventually, she landed at a boarding school in Grand Coteau and followed her friends to LSU, where she met her late husband Jim, the son of LSU’s athletic director.
The couple had three children and a dental practice. Today, Corbett has only a faint memory of her mother. She hardly remembers the painful days she spent near the water, so she carefully preserves her triumphant times, the ones stored in the aged newspapers and photos Corbett keeps in her home.
The mementos take her back 100 years — to the Olympic pools of Paris. “That's where she grew up, so that's her familiar place,” Corbett said, “and I'm kind of like that too. I'm happiest when I'm by the water.
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