Vicki Draves

Early life and education Manalo was born in the South-of-Market district of San Francisco to Philippine chef and musician Teofilo Manalo and English maid Gertrude Taylor. Her parents met and married in San Francisco.

At the 1944 national AAU championships, the men's 1942 platform champion, Sammy Lee, befriended her and introduced her to his coaching friend, Lyle Draves, who ran the swimming and diving program at the prestigious Athens Athletic Club in Oakland. Manalo then started training with Lyle Draves, adding platform diving to her springboard diving repertoire. Lyle Draves left the San Francisco Bay Area for Los Angeles in disgust at the racism in the Fairmont Hotel Swimming and Diving Club. Manalo commuted to Los Angeles, and placed second and third at the Outdoor Nationals. In 1945, on the death of her father, she returned to her old job as a secretary in the Army Port Surgeon's office in San Francisco.

When the war ended, Manalo finally moved to Southern California for good. She married her coach on July 12, 1946, and won the National Tower Diving Championship (10 meter platform), in 1946, 1947 and 1948. Prior to competing in the 1948 Olympics, Draves won a total of five United States diving championships. Despite not finishing first in either springboard or platform events of the Olympic trials in Detroit, Draves made the team.

On August 3, 1948, she won her first springboard title in the London Summer Olympics. Draves followed up that win with the gold medal in the 10-meter platform on Aug. 6, becoming the first woman to win both titles.

After her Olympic victory, the Manalo-Draves couple visited the Philippines for the first time upon the invitation from the Manila Jaycees. The 29-day visit to the Philippines had them staying in a Malacañang Palace suite and visiting her father's relatives in Orani, Bataan, where he was born. She gave platform diving exhibitions at the Rizal Stadium and in other Philippine venues, and also for Philippine president Elpidio Quirino. Draves appeared in a Life layout in 1949, being named one of the magazine's top two U.S. athletes at the 1948 Olympics.

After starting a family in the early 1950s in Glendale, Draves and her husband operated a swimming and diving training program at Indian Springs in Montrose and later moved the program to Encino. They continued to reside in Tarzana for 35 years, raising their four sons – David, Jeffery, Dale and Kim – to be skilled divers. Draves worked as a secretary while her husband remained a coach and swimming director.

Later life and death In the mid-1960s, Draves was an advocate for the Filipino Education Center when the second wave of Filipino immigrants came to America and largely settled in the South of Market district.

In 1968, she joined sprinter Jesse Owens, football player Tommy Harmon and race car driver Sam Hanks at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas to help raise $700,000 for the City of Hope National Medical Center.

Honors Draves was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1969. In the same year, she was acknowledged as one of Los Angeles Athletics Club's outstanding athletes.

In October 2006, a two-acre park (one acre per gold medal) in San Francisco was named Victoria Manalo Draves Park in her honor. It was on the same site, on Folsom and Sherman streets, where she had formerly attended Franklin Elementary School, four blocks from where she was born and raised. aged 85, from pancreatic cancer aggravated by pneumonia.

Legacy On August 3, 2020, Draves was honored with a Google Doodle in recognition of her achievements.