Hedy Bienenfeld

Hedy Bienenfeld

Personal information
Born	17 October 1907
Died	1976
Sport
Sport	Swimming
Club	Hakoah Vienna
Medal record Women's swimming Representing Austria European Championships 1927 Bologna 200 m breaststroke Maccabiah Games 1932 Israel 200 m breaststroke 1932 Israel 100 m backstroke 1932 Israel 4x100 m freestyle 1935 Israel 200 m breaststroke 1935 Israel 4x100 m freestyle 1932 Israel 100 m freestyle

Hedy Bienenfeld (17 October 1907 – 1976) was an Austrian swimmer who won a bronze medal in the 200 m breaststroke at the 1927 European Aquatics Championships. She competed in the same discipline at the 1928 Summer Olympics, but did not reach the finals.

Until the 2000s, Bienenfeld remained the only Austrian to win a swimming medal, together with Fritzi Löwy, who finished third in the 400 m freestyle at the same 1927 European Aquatics Championships.

Biography

In 1924, Bienenfeld won the annual five-mile open-water Austrian competition Quer durch Wien (Across Vienna) on Danube that gathered about 500,000 spectators. Next year she was second, after Löwy who swam freestyle. Since then she became a popular swimsuit model for Austrian magazines. She also won nearly every national breaststroke title in the 1920s–1930s.

In 1930, she married her swimming coach, Zsigo Wertheimer (1897–1965). Being Jewish, they fled Austria before World War II and moved first to London and then to the United States. There, they worked as swimming instructors in New York and then ran a successful real estate business in Florida. After the death of her husband, Bienenfeld returned to Vienna. There she helped financially to her lifelong rival and then close friend Löwy who was fighting with breast cancer. Bienenfeld had no children.