Rio sensation pools resources
Coach, club switch to help Oleksiak manage pressures
Penny Oleksiak burst from the pool to the podium at the Rio Olympics, her first senior international competition. Barely 16, she was Canada’s youngest-ever Olympic champion, our first athlete to win four medals at any Summer Games, and she carried the flag in the closing ceremonies.
She was the wide-eyed, six-foot-one shooting star who captured Canadian hearts, and now she’s taking steps to make sure she doesn’t crash to earth before the next Olympics.
On Thursday, Swimming Canada announced that she was leaving their highperformance centre in Scarborough and returning to her old coach, Bill O’Toole, at the Toronto Swim Club downtown.
“It’s about life,” Swimming Canada high-performance director John Atkinson said in explaining the move.
“Physically, people are capable of great things, but I think you have to safeguard the mental capacity of each young star that comes along, and be respectful of what they need to deal with outside of just pure sport, particularly Olympic sport,” he said.
For Oleksiak right now, that seems to be a better balanced life that allows her demanding training in the pool to more easily coexist with high school, the social life of a teenager and the increasing obligations that come with being a star athlete.
Since Rio, there’s been more swimming and winning, including relay medals at this summer’s worlds and junior worlds (she’s still that young), plus a bronze medal in Canadian-record time at the 100-metre short-course worlds last December.
And there’s been a lot of action outside the pool.
Oleksiak, now 17, has an agent and publicist, plus a sizeable social media following.
She’s also signed partnership deals with ASICS Canada, RBC and ME to WE — an organization she’s now with in Africa.
Swimming Canada’s centre, where she swam the past two seasons under head coach Ben Titley, is a one-stop shop for elite swimmers, but it’s also at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre on the eastern edge of the city. Getting there from home and high school in the Beach for nine training sessions each week made for an unforgiving schedule. At one point last year she was studying until 3 a.m. and back at the pool at 7 a.m.
By returning to the Toronto Swim Club, Oleksiak will train at the University of Toronto pool and she is expected to attend the nearby Blyth Academy, making her daily schedule even more manageable.
She trained with O’Toole as an agegroup swimmer and won six medals at the 2015 world juniors with him as coach. He’s also the one who made her multi-event success in Rio possible by ensuring she continued to work on all the strokes rather than specializing in backstroke, her best event as a 12-year-old.
In Rio, she tied for gold in the 100metre freestyle, won silver in 100metre butterfly and anchored two relay teams that took bronze medals.
She’ll be in good company at the U of T pool with backstroker Kylie Masse, Canada’s first female world champion in swimming and fellow Rio Olympic medallist, who trains there with coaches Linda Kiefer and Byron MacDonald.
“I’m excited to be returning to the Toronto Swim Club to continue my training and I look forward to future collaborations with coach Ben Titley as I prepare for Tokyo 2020,” Oleksiak said in a statement.
Swimming Canada will work closely with O’Toole and Oleksiak in her new training base and provide whatever support they can through her next few years of transitions, Atkinson said.
There’s finishing high school, deciding on university and the broader challenge that many young athletes face in coping with the transition from anonymity to superstardom and all the expectations and pressures that come with that.
“(Her success) came along very quickly, because in 2015 she was at the world junior championships in Singapore and nobody really knew who Penny Oleksiak was,” Atkinson said.
“It is very different when you’re going under the radar than when you have all that expectation on you . . . Over the last year there’s been a lot of collaboration between Penny and the centre and our staff, so that she can do the things that16- and17-yearolds do but also do the things that Olympic champions are expected to do,” he said.
“She’s a supremely talented young lady who will continue to have a great future in the sport, and that’s why we’re all working on it together, wherever she is.”