OLEKSIAK’S READY TO ROLL WITH LOFTY EXPECTATIONS
A day later, the words of Penny Oleksiak’s mom Alison seem apropos as the Canadian swim team ponders what happens next.
“Are you prepared for the onslaught of attention that comes with this?” someone asked the mother of a 16-year-old instant legend.
“Totally not,” she said. “We’ll roll with it.”
For the swim team, and its high-performance director John Atkinson and head coach Ben Titley — and the 11 women (and, let’s face it, girls) who won six medals in the Rio Olympic meet — take out “attention” and substitute “expectation.” The bar has been set now at a level not seen since 1984, at a Los Angeles Olympics that was boycotted by Eastern bloc countries.
Can they sustain it, or even improve on it? Can Oleksiak?
“Success is difficult to sustain,” Titley said at an end-of-meet news conference Sunday. “We’ve talked about that the last couple of days in team meetings. What’s great? Great, for me, is longevity, being able to sustain success over a long period of time. That’s why Michael Phelps is the greatest of all time.
“So that’s the next part of the challenge.”
He was talking about Oleksiak, whose individual gold and silver and two relay bronzes accounted for one-third of the medals Canada claimed in the opening week. But he might have been talking about the team.
Oleksiak seems so level-headed, it’s hard to imagine her not progressing through the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and beyond, but nothing is guaranteed.
“But the reason she’s sitting here now is because she’s able to move through water quickly. She’s not a brain surgeon. She doesn’t save people’s lives. She swims up and down some water very, very quickly,” Titley said. “So understanding what the core business is about, focusing on that … if you want to be great, great is about being successful at what you do over a long period of time.
“But she’s done great. The way she’s handled it … I’ve been extremely proud of her as a person, not just a swimmer.”
Atkinson ran some numbers by us Sunday and they weren’t the kind administrators came up with in the bad old days when Canadian female swimmers were winning just two Olympic medals total from 1988 through 2012.
In Rio, Atkinson said, “11 team members depart with a medal. We finished equal fourth on total medals. We finished seventh on gold medals and if you did a points score, we finished sixth overall and the women’s team were actually third. So from my perspective, it was a great performance.”
By the women, it surely was. But what’s happened to the Canadian men?
“When you look back to 2012, the two medals we won in the pool were Brent Hayden and Ryan Cochrane. And they were, and had been for many years, the mainstays of the Canadian swim team,” Atkinson said. “Many a time we’d go to a swim meet and look to Ryan Cochrane on the last night to win the (1,500 freestyle) medal to bring back to Canada.
“When I got here in 2013, Brent had retired, and because male athletes develop longer and maybe reach their peak in the mid-20s, to create a male team in three years is very difficult. What we do have here, though, is the men’s four-by-100 freestyle relay team that made the final. The winner of the men’s 100 freestyle in 2013 at our trials would have finished ninth in our trials in 2016.”
For now, all the glory will fall to Oleksiak, who seems unfazed by it all, even when she was followed everywhere by a TV crew Sunday.
“Yeah, it’s a little weird,” she said, but she’s had a whole week to get used to it.
“I guess I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. I didn’t expect to come to this meet and medal as much as I did, and I definitely did not think I’d make that many finals. It was all just unexpected and … I don’t want to say overwhelming, but just out of the blue, I guess. I mean, I trained hard this year, but I didn’t think that I could do what I did.”
The team has given Canada a jump-start on the 19 medals and 12th-place finish the Canadian Olympic Committee set as a goal for Rio.
And their star might just be asked to carry the flag in the closing ceremonies.
“I think I would totally stick around if I was the flag-bearer,” said Oleksiak, whose parents had originally planned to take her home, being a minor and all.
“It’d be awesome and to walk out holding the Canadian flag — I’d just love to do that.”