LIFE IN THE FAST LANE
We catch up with Penny Oleksiak, Canada’s Olympic swim hero, and find she isn’t slowing down.
WINDSOR, ONT.— Penny Oleksiak spoke with media last week about how things have been going since she burst onto the Canadian sport scene by winning four Olympic medals in Rio and what might come next for her.
In a nutshell: life is good but sometimes tiring — she goes to public high school and swims nine times a week along with the multiple other daily demands of being an elite athlete — and no, she’s not thinking about what she might do at the next Summer Olympics.
“A lot of people say ‘Oh, you’re going to 2020 and 2024’ but I don’t know,” said 16-year-old Oleksiak. “I’m just focusing on next week.” Well, that’s here now, and she is making her debut at a senior world swim championship.
It’s the first time she’ll swim for a global audience since she leapfrogged her way from promising teenager to sky’s-the-limit swimming phenom. But she doesn’t seem more nervous about that prospect than she was on the pool deck in Toronto, where she was joking around in the background of her coach’s television interview.
This event, the world short-course championships from Dec. 6-11, is a career highlight for some swimmers but it’s barely a blip on the radar for Oleksiak, her coach Ben Titley said.
Titley, head of Swimming Canada’s high performance centre in Toronto, has far bigger goals for her in the long run, and that means not thinking about medals at all in the short term.
Readjusting to school — she’s taking Grade 10 and 11 courses at Monarch Park Collegiate — coming to terms with her status as one of Canada’s most recognizable young sports stars, and managing all the regular trials and tribulations that come with being a teenager, these are the things that top Oleksiak’s to-do list right now.
“Those are more important for me as goals and challenges because they’re important for her in terms of her overall development and growth,” Titley said.
According to the medal count, she’s arguably already the greatest swimmer Canada has ever produced. In fact, no Canadian summer athlete in any sport has won four medals at a single Games.
But that all happened over the span of six days in an Olympic bubble, and Titley argues that the true test for any athlete is the test of time. Can she keep this going? “What she does in the future is going to determine more how she’s going to be judged,” Titley said.
Going into Rio, she was a 16-year-old who could do no wrong. She had broken through with incredible swims at the Canadian Olympic trials in order to make the team in multiple events in Rio. But it was expected she’d simply gain valuable experience, not make repeated trips to the podium.
The 2016 Olympics was her first major senior international competition and, as a swimmer, Oleksiak would normally be expected to peak in her 20s, which is one or even two Olympic cycles away. But she left last summer’s Games as the nation’s sweetheart who carried the Canadian flag in the closing ceremony.
Plenty of athletes who have found early success in their careers have later struggled under the weight of the expectations that come with that. That’s why Titley and Oleksiak’s parents are trying to make sure that doesn’t happen here.
She may be a six-foot-two swimmer with an astonishing turbo boost in the final leg of a race, but she’s still every inch a typical 16-year-old girl.
“We consciously try to keep things as normal as possible for her,” her mom Alison said.
Oleksiak is the youngest of five and her parents, Alison and Richard, have already raised a family of athletes, including Jamie, an NHL defenceman, and Hayley, a university rower, so they are good at this.
They’ve always told their kids that when they commit to something to give it their all, but they’ve also tried to make sure winning and sport isn’t all they think about, Alison said.
Oleksiak’s competitive drive in the pool and her busy social scene with her friends suggests she’s picked up both sides of that equation.
“I hate finishing a race and knowing that I could have done better or even in practice finishing a set and thinking ‘Oh, I wish went those times that I went at the end for the whole set,’ ” Oleksiak said.
“I just need to know that I tried my best, whether it is in practice or racing.”
What her best might ultimately mean, Oleksiak is in no rush to contemplate.
Ask her what it’s like to have people throw ‘greatest ever’ her way and she just shrugs.
“I don’t know, I haven’t even really thought of my medals lately,” she said.
“I think I am just trying to look forward, prepare for worlds and after that all the other meets I’ll go to. I’m just trying to improve every day.”