GREAT EXPECTATIONS AT WORLD MEET.
EMBOLDENED WOMEN RIDE WAVE OF SUCCESS HEADING INTO WORLDS
They were the feelgood story of the Rio Olympics; Canada’s unheralded, party- crashing women’s swim team leaving mouths agape and all reasonable expectations in their wake.
Six medals as a group and an Olympic record for teenage sensation Penny Oleksiak in the 100- metre freestyle put the world on notice, and the genie isn’t being stuffed back into the bottle of Canadian success that washed up on Copacabana Beach. Eleven months later, this nation’s elite female swimmers are still riding that Rio wave and some will arrive in Budapest as medal favourites for the FINA World Championships starting Friday.
Sydney Pickrem of Clearwater, B. C., swam to the second fastest time in the world in the 200- metre individual medley this year, while Kylie Masse of LaSalle, Ont. owns the time to beat in the 100- metre backstroke ( 58.21 seconds), coming ohso- close to former English s wimmer Gemma Spofforth’s world record of 58.12 from 2009. Oleksiak and the relay teams will be counted on for trinkets, as well.
Fast times and the Rio medal haul surely applies pressure to perform in Budapest, but Swimming Canada’s high performance director John Atkinson was playing down that aspect of the women’s resurgence.
“We’re coming here to do a job and that’s perform, and every athlete knows that they’re here to do that, and they don’t need anybody putting extra pressure on them by saying they’re going to win a bagful of medals,” Atkinson said Thursday during a conference call with reporters.
But the news is out. And White Rock, B. C.’s Hilary Caldwell mused openly about the delicious prospect of putting two Canadians on a world podium: herself and Masse, who beat Caldwell in the 200-metre backstroke at trials in Victoria.
“I definitely didn’t like being out- t ouched. Two hundred back is my event, and I’ve got the Canadian record and I don’t like to lose,” the 26- year- old Cald- well said from the team’s training camp base in Ostia, Italy. “But I think it was also a good thing for me. It was a bit of lighting the fire under me to be faster this summer. And I think we have the potential now for two women on the podium in the 200 backstroke and t hat’s a pretty incredible statistic.
“I couldn’t tell you the last time that Canada has had two people on a podium in one event, if ever.”
No, she couldn’t do that, because it has not happened at a world championships, and it’s happened only once at an Olympics, well before her time. Cheryl Gibson took silver and Becky Smith bronze in the women’s 400 IM at Montreal 1976.
Having the confidence to talk about that possibility now is an indication of how high the Canadian women have raised the bar. Caldwell thinks they will approach these worlds with a completely different attitude because of that recent history.
“I think any time that a team has a success like we did last summer it just lends a certain swagger to everybody on the team. We can walk on deck knowing that people are looking at what we’re doing and people have been watching our results and seeing what we’ve been doing all year and knowing that we’re a threat.”
Women’s team members say they knew it in Rio. They just weren’t broadcasting it.
“I think we all kind of knew we had what it takes and you just have to, on that day, put the race together and get up on that podium,” said Pickrem. “In putting the races together, we finally had the results we knew we could accomplish.”
The men’s team was denied podium access in Rio, and the balance of power is in the competent and competitive hands of the women. That fact acts as motivation.
“I think the men’s team really wants to see that success on our side, as well,” said 19-year-old backstroker Javier Acevedo of Scarborough, Ont. “That rivalry, maybe the women won’t admit it or the men won’t admit it, but I’ ll say it; I think there is a little bit. We want to spread our wings as well, like they did. Now that we’ve been together another year, and having seen last summer that anything is possible, we think we can do special things this year.”
Oleksiak, now 17, was the poster child for the women’s Olympic breakout, carting home two individual medals — 100- metre freestyle gold, 100- metre butterfly silver — and two relay bronze. She was later named the Lou Marsh Award winner as athlete of the year in Canada. She knows external expectations have been raised postRio. She doesn’t care, but she knows.
“I think people will always have expectations for me and people always try and tell me their expectations to I guess, like, motivate me,” said Oleksiak. “But I really don’t pay attention to anyone else’s expectations. Like, I honestly don’t really care. But I’m definitely trying to reach my own expectations and right now they’re just to swim fast and to hopefully go around my best times and maybe under them.”