Canadian swimming great launches comeback at 36
Healthier, happier Hayden sets sights on Tokyo Olympics
The most enduring image of swimmer Brent Hayden, before he announced the unlikeliest of comebacks on Wednesday, was of a seemingly happy Olympic medallist.
There he was in the London 2012 pool, fresh off a bronze-medal swim in the 100-metre freestyle. It was success at last for an athlete who had, in his own estimation, failed at two previous Olympics.
But that picture was about 900 words short of the real story. Hayden, now 36 and determined to buck the odds and advance from the Canadian Olympic trials in April to the Tokyo Games in July, said the traumatic circumstances preceding his retirement from the sport seven years ago led him back, indirectly, by way of time in the gym.
“The last seven years, I’ve been staying in shape, but actually not at the pool.”
It was no longer a refuge. In fact, he said, though 2012 ended well, it was the worst year of his life. His training had been plagued for years by debilitating back spasms that became so bad during the pre-2012 Games camp in Italy that he could barely move and had to spend four crucial days out of the pool.
“I remember asking my coach, ‘Should I just retire before the Olympics?’ He didn’t like that at all. We got into a heated debate. You could say he found a way to push my buttons and made me realize how unacceptable that thought process was. Letting off all that stress I had been bottling up for four days made me feel better.”
Two days later, he was back in the training pool, en route to that cherished medal. But he still wasn’t whole. He said personal issues outside of the sport had him spiralling toward depression. He basically had the team psychologist on call.
“I never fell into the hole, I guess you could say, but I was teetering on the edge.”
The podium visit in London came as a huge relief, but it was momentary. Yes, he had made up for Beijing, where he should have medalled, had his head been in the right place.
“I thought I was too good, basically.”
But he looked down the road and it was dark.
“I got the medal, but without a solution to my back and without a solution to this spiral toward depression, I didn’t want to keep going down that hole. I had a wedding coming up and thought, ‘I’m just going to close this chapter of my life and open a new chapter and just move forward.’”
He’s seven years removed from that decision and he couldn’t be happier to be back in the pool again. He caught the comeback bug while he and wife Nadina were spending the summer in Lebanon, a country rife with Olympic-sized swimming pools.
He was offered free access to the pool and other facilities at Jeita Country Club and soon discovered that years of weightlifting had changed his body.
When he staged a swim camp for a small team in Beirut, the kids asked him to do a sprint and he had Nadina time him through 25 metres and shoot video.
“I did a time that was really close to what I would have been doing in 2012 when I was at my best,” he said.
Hayden sent the video to Brett Hawke, a former competitor from Australia who is now a top swim coach at Auburn University.
“He messaged me and said: ‘Dude, you look like you’re in race shape.’”
Hayden then reached out to former coach Tom Johnson at UBC, who was supportive. So were Swimming Canada officials, who gave him a spot at their high-performance centre in Vancouver. He’s been training there once a day, six days a week, since September and the results are promising.
A couple of weeks ago, he did some 50-metre sprints from a dive and posted his best training times.
He has no idea how this will turn out, but he and Johnson are taking it one lap at a time.