Olympic trials no place for the timid
Swimmer Mike Brown wore a tattoo of the Olympic rings and a red Maple Leaf over his broken heart.
One of Canada’s top swimmers for the past decade, Brown retired after missing a medal by 9/100ths of a second at the Beijing Games. He launched a comeback 18 months later and was regarded as a good bet to make it to London until he became completely unravelled Thursday night, finishing a distant fourth in the 200-metre breaststroke at the Olympic trials.
He was completely devastated afterwards, bolting from the pool. He took about 10 minutes to compose himself before talking to the media. He then broke into tears and required another five minutes.
Heck, the 28-year-old from Perth, Ont., had poured everything into his comeback, only to have it go awry at the most critical time.
That’s the nature of Olympic qualifying. Canadian rower Darcy Marquardt, whose fiancé Richard Hortness will be trying to qualify in the 100-metre freestyle Friday, only half-jokingly compared it to the life-and-death battle in The
Hunger Games recently. “Honestly, the trials is harder than the Olympics,” said Scott Dickens, who qualified for his second race in London with a win Thursday night ahead of his good friend, Brown. “This is the hard part. London is the fun part. Going to race (at the Games) is all about racing. There’s no do-or-die situation. If you don’t make the cut (at trials), you’re not going. Here, there’s so much on the line.”
Even Canadian swim star Ryan Cochrane, who’s in a more comfortable position than anyone at these trials, is feeling the stress. He stamped his golden ticket to the Games with a convincing win in the men’s 400-metre freestyle Thursday night. But it’s his friends he’s worried about — guys like Stefan Hirniak, who looked in a solid position to represent Canada in the 200metre butterfly in London but came up empty Wednesday night. “The mental side of it is the hard- est thing you can ever experience because you want all your friends to make the team, you want it to be a positive, but it really never is a positive the whole way through,” said Cochrane. “Four years ago, I didn’t know what to expect so I was anxious then. So I said you have to be ready for that mental side of it this time around. You really can’t be. I don’t know if I even want to watch the rest of the meet. I’d rather just see the results and then deal with it afterwards because it is so stressful.”
Cochrane said all this before his longtime Canadian teammate Brown even raced.
Brown is a popular guy on the Canadian squad, a standup fellow whose biggest performance ever came at the world championships in Montreal in 2005 when he grabbed a silver medal in the 200metre breaststroke.
He’d retired to a job in real estate, but watching his friends compete at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics fired his competitive juices and next thing he was back in the pool. He’d thought his comeback was moving along just fine — but had no answers for Thursday night.
“I’ve always been one to excel and really perform when it matters, perform on the day that it counts in the highest pressure situations,” said Brown, having regained his composure. “I’ve never caved before. I don’t really want to say that I caved tonight because I’m so baffled about how it went down.”
It was a good night for women’s swimming — Canada qualified a 4x100-metre freestyle team (in order of finish in the women’s 100-metre freestyle: Barbara Jardin of Montreal, Samantha Cheverton of Pointe Claire, Que., Brittany Maclean of Etobicoke, Amanda Reason of Windsor), while Jillian Tyler of Calgary and Tera Van Beilen of Oakville earned Olympic spots with their 1-2 finish in a strong 100-metre breaststroke field.