Vicki Draves
Draves in 1948
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| Personal information | |||||||||||||
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| Full name | Victoria Manalo Draves | ||||||||||||
| National team |
 United States
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| Born | December 31, 1924 San Francisco, California |
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| Died | April 11, 2010 (aged 85) Palm Springs, California |
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| Sport | |||||||||||||
| Sport | Diving | ||||||||||||
| Club |
Los Angeles Athletic Club Patterson School of Swimming and Diving |
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Medal record
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Victoria Manalo Draves (December 31, 1924 – April 11, 2010) was an American competition diver who won gold medals for the United States in both platform and springboard diving in the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. Draves became the first woman to be awarded gold medals for both the ten-meter platform and the three-meter springboard. Additionally, Draves became the first American woman to win two gold medals in diving. She was born in San Francisco.
Victoria Manalo was born in the South-of-Market district of San Francisco to a Filipino chef musician father, Teofilo Manalo, and an English maid mother, Gertrude Taylor. Her parents met and married in San Francisco. She grew up with just her parents, her twin sister Connie, an older sister Frankie, and a younger brother, Sonny, who died as a child. Manalo couldn't afford to take swimming lessons until she was 10 years old and took summer swimming lessons from the Red Cross, paying five cents admission to a pool in the Mission district. Draves was involved in badminton, basketball, and softball in highschool. She graduated from Commerce High School on Van Ness Avenue in 1942 and worked a temporary civil service job in the Army Port Surgeon's office to add to the family’s meager income.
Manalo was introduced to diving at age 16 by Jack Lavery. It was Lavery who introduced her to Phil Patterson, swimming coach of the Fairmont Hotel Swimming and Diving Club. Due to being Filipino, she changed her name to Vicki Taylor to be accepted in Patterson's school. Patterson's military stint during World War II caused Manalo to stop diving for a year. She instead found a job at the Presidio military base. Manalo later joined the swimming program at the Crystal Plunge in North Beach headed by Charlie Sava and was assigned Jimmy Hughes as her coach. Her 50-100 dives after-school diving practice diving continued even to her enrollment at San Francisco Junior College (now City College of San Francisco). At age 19, Hughes guided her to a third-place finish in her first national AAU diving competition at the Indiana national meet in 1943.
At the 1944 national AAU championships, the men’s 1942 platform champion, Sammy Lee (diver), 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, 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.
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