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Kylie Masse cradled Canada’s latest swimming medal of the Rio Olympics as she spoke to the press, and when a reporter asked a question from the side of the scrum, she turned to answer. A TV type said, “Sorry, can you look at the cameras,” and Masse turned back, gracefully abashed. “Sorry,” she said, “Never done this before.” She stopped. She turned back. “Sorry, what was the question?”
She could be excused, and Canada could be excused, if they had never done this before. Canada didn’t win a medal at the pool on Tuesday night, so that was a change. The women’s 4x100 freestyle relay team won bronze on Saturday; that team’s anchor swimmer, 16-year-old Penny Oleksiak, won silver in the 100metre butterfly on Sunday; Masse, of LaSalle, Ont., won bronze in the 100metre backstroke Monday. Three medals, three days.
“They’ve performed when it matters in the moment,” said John Atkinson, the head of high performance for Swimming Canada. “Other haven’t. Perform when it counts.”
On Tuesday night at the pool, it was the big show, headlined by Michael Phelps coming back for the men’s 200-metre butterfly title that barely eluded him in London. This time the 31-year-old simply broke Chad le Clos of South Africa, the man who beat him in 2012; le Clos kept looking over at Phelps, but faded and finished fourth. Phelps won his 20th gold medal by four one-hundredths of a second over Masato Sakai of Japan, and finger wagged after it ended. Phelps would anchor the winning men’s 4x200 free team to close the evening, and won gold No. 21. The fly was far from his best race, but Michael Phelps, at his end, is settling accounts.
He held it together through the first medal ceremony, just; he walked slowly around the pool, looking around. He climbed up and kissed his mom and his fiancee and his baby boy, Boomer. He seemed to be trying to remember it all, maybe.
Coming into these Games the Yanks had 230 of 522 gold swim medals alltime, and had added six more before this night was over. America shakes off after a race and a medal falls out.
Canada, meanwhile, is a minnow, but growing ahead of schedule. In the past three Summer Olympics, Canada won five swim medals, total. Canada hasn’t won more than three medals at a nonboycott Olympics since 1976. The two medals in London came from Brent Hayden, who subsequently retired, and Ryan Cochrane, who is likely in his final Olympics here in Rio. The reliable target for 2016 — discussed among Canada coaches, but never said aloud to the swimmers — was zero to four medals.
They now reckon they might have one to three left. They came in aiming for 14 finals, double London, and that is on track.
Sydney Pickrem, a 19-year-old Floridian whose family came from Halifax, finished sixth in the final of the 200metre individual medley.
An imported Canadian made the 100 free final: Santo Condorelli, the 21-year-old who was born in Japan and raised in Portland whose mom’s family is from Kenora, tied for the third-fastest qualifying time in the semifinals at 47.93, while Yuri Kisil missed, tying for 11th.
After Atkinson arrived from Britain in 2013, Swimming Canada started looking at times, plus physical attributes, plus mental attributes, all through the system: the kids with the right proportions, the paddle feet, the big hands, the steel. They identified athletes training elsewhere who had Canadian passports, and swimmers like 16-yearold Arizona-based Taylor Ruck, one of the stars of that women’s freestyle relay, were invited in.
“It’s technical skills, how do they swim? It’s psychological — how do they stand up and perform when it counts, not in some little swim meet where it doesn’t count,” says Atkinson. “So the performance stan- dards we’ve brought in in the last three years are based on performing when it counts at the trials. To come to an Olympics or the world championships you have A standards and B standards. We went with only A.”
They ramped up the pressure, because the Olympics is pressure, and the world championships are pressure, and if you can’t swim under pressure, you can’t win. Hockey is a gladiator academy in this country; you have to pass a lot of tests. Swimming tried to add tests.
The Scarborough Pan Am pool was an additional plank, and treated Swimming Canada very well in terms of training time — that is where the women’s relay team trained in advance of the Games. They came in early to Rio, to get their feet settled. They seem settled.
It is a fractious time in swimming, with doping allegations flying everywhere. It’s a messy time. On Tuesday night, it was an evening for the biggest dogs.
But the little Canadians are coming. They may even be here.