Lineup snafu sinks Canada’s hopes
Wrong order on lineup card costs Canadians silver medal on Day 1 of championships
WINDSOR, ONT.— In turns out Canadian women are fast in the pool, even if it is half the length they’re used to.
But it also turns relay victories can be just as fleeting in the water as they’ve proven to be on the track for Canada’s athletes in the past.
Taylor Ruck delivered bronze in the first women’s medal race of the sixday world short-course championships. The freestyle relay team, anchored by Penny Oleksiak, followed that up — albeit briefly — with a second-place finish in the final women’s event of the night.
However, moments after the relay squad exited the pool feeling they had done a great job, they were disqualified. The loss of that 4x100-metre freestyle silver medal is because Canada’s team didn’t swim in the order that was submitted to race officials.
“This is by no means the fault of any of the athletes,” John Atkinson, Swimming Canada’s high performance director, explained afterward. “The athletes swam in the order they were instructed to swim in, but that wasn’t the order that was submitted on the relay card.”
The official card Canadian officials submitted had Michelle Williams swimming the anchor leg, not Oleksiak, the team’s 16-year-old Rio Olympics star.
“We’re sorry for the athletes … we have to take it on the chin. It’s not a good situation but they are a good group, they are a strong team, they work together for the highs and lows of things that happen in sport and they will bounce back. This is Day 1 of a six-day world championships and they’re going to come back from this and show everyone what they can do in their other events,” Atkinson said.
In the days leading up to these world championships, athletes and coaches played down expectations for how successful the swimmers, who won six medals at the Rio Olympics, might be here. It’s early in the season and short-course — a 25-metre pool instead of a 50-metre Olympic-sized one —doesn’t play to their strengths, the Canadian contingent said.
But, paperwork snafus aside, there’s seems to have been little need for any of that.
Ruck, Canada’s other 16-year-old swim star from Rio with two Olympic bronze relay medals to her credit, came within 3/100ths of a second of the Canadian record in the 200-metre freestyle heats. And that was her first-ever short-course race.
In the final, she obliterated the Canadian record with her 1:52.50 bronze-medal finish in a race that was on world-record time through the half, with veteran swimmers Italy’s Frederica Pellegrini finishing first and Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu second.
“I didn’t even come to this meet expecting to place in finals and then all of a sudden I’m third,” said Ruck, who lives and trains in Arizona.
Ruck almost had two medals Tuesday, having anchored the relay in the morning heats to a new Canadian record before stepping aside in the ill-fated evening lineup.