Swimmer deals with setback
Dengue fever snuff s out golden dreams of Olympic hopeful Annamay Pierse.
She never saw the mosquito, and it was another 17 months before Annamay Pierse felt the full horror of its bite. The pain may never entirely go away, but Pierse is trying day by day to get better.
Friday was a good day. Pierse dived into the familiar pool at the University of B. C., where she had put in thousands of hours to become the fastest in the world, and swam the 50- metres butterfly just for fun.
“It was a little hard,” she smiled upon emerging from the water at the Mel Zajac International Swim Meet. “I haven’t swam it in probably four years. Let’s just say that was my best time and go with it.
“I just have to have fun and love the sport for what it is.”
Pierse’s time in the heats was 30.52 seconds, only 2/ 100ths off her best for an event she never swims. The world record holder in the 200 breaststroke was 43rd on Friday. She had a blast a couple of lanes over from her baby sister, Patricia, a highschool senior from Edmonton who will be swimming at UBC next season.
“She was faster than I was at that age,” Annamay, 28, said. “She could break my record.”
Annamay Pierse is the fastest woman in history over 200 metres in the breaststroke, but she won’t be going to the London Olympics this summer because a mosquito bit her at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in India.
The swimmer contracted a severe case of dengue fever.
She came home to Vancouver and went to bed and a few days later thought she was going to die.
“It felt like every single bone in my body had been broken,” she explained a few months ago. “My nose kept bleeding and my mouth kept bleeding. I couldn’t eat. I lost a lot of weight very fast. I couldn’t do anything. Basically, I curled up in a ball, wishing things were over.”
Eventually, Pierse recovered. But her swimming career did not.
Unable for months to train properly, she struggled throughout 2011 and wasn’t swimming fast times when she went to the 2012 Canadian Olympic trials in Montreal at the end of March.
It was just 2009 when Pierse skimmed across four lengths of a pool in Rome at the world championships to set a new world record in the 200 breaststroke of 2: 20.12. No woman has ever gone faster.
But in Montreal, Pierse finished fifth in 2: 27.14, easily beaten by Olympic qualifiers Tara Van Beilen and Martha Mccabe, Ontario girls who have been helped along by Pierse’s wake on the UBC team.
“I remember touching the wall and looking up and feeling relief that I had made the team,” Mccabe, 22, said Friday after advancing from heats in the 100 breaststroke. “Then I noticed that Annamay hadn’t qualified and my heart sank. She made a huge impact not only on myself personally, but on the entire program. She opened doors for everyone.”
Swim Canada chief executive officer and national coach Pierre Lafontaine said: “What we have today in our women’s breaststroke program has everything to do with her. Annamay set a tone in our national team a few years back that was unbreakable. It was fierce. She helped make the team what it is today. She set the tone for what greatness should be.”
Pierse said she is honoured by comments like these and grateful for the outpouring of support. But at her core, she is a swimmer, a competitor, and she couldn’t go fast enough to make the Olympic team.
“I did everything I possibly could,” she said. “I had all these medical issues, especially Dengue fever, which broke me. My body just wouldn’t respond the same way it used to and just wouldn’t recover. It was a lot more difficult just to do half the things I used to do [ in training]. I guess in some ways it’s good because I know how tough I am. But it does make it harder when something’s taken away from you for nothing that you did.”
At her age, a swimming comeback is unlikely. She has a degree in psychology but plans to try a career in fashion design. She said she takes things a day at a time.
“It’s still emotional at times,” she admitted. “Some days I’m good and some days I’m not good. I’ll hear about the London Olympics or commercials for it will come on and I still have to sit there and take some deep breaths and realize, ‘ OK, that’s not going to be me.’ But I still want to be supportive of my teammates who are going to the Olympics to represent our country.
“Swimming has been such a big part of my life for 22 years. This is not something that’s easy to get over. It will take a while. I’m not an angry person, although I did have a long time when I was angry, bitter and upset about things. But life is not fun when you’re angry; I know that. You realize there are other things that make you happy. And you need to be happy.”
Pierse’s spirits were boosted last weekend when her boyfriend, paddler Mark Oldershaw, won a World Cup canoe event in Poland to qualify for the Olympics. So she will be going to London after all.
Lafontaine wants to keep Pierse involved in Swimming Canada and said her greatest contribution to the sport may yet be ahead of her. There is a lot to leave behind. “Being a national- team member has meant the world to me,” Pierse said. “There’s not very many people who can say they broke a world record or hold a world record. I can tell someone, at one point, I was the best there ever has been in the world. That’s pretty cool.”
Nearly two months after the swim of his life, Tommy Gossland still seems a little embarrassed by his over- the- top reaction to making Canada’s Olympic team.
The Nanaimo native had just finished fourth in the 100 metres in Montreal to secure the fourth spot on the quartet that will swim the marquee 4x100 freestyle relay in London and he was screaming and hollering like a kid who’d just unwrapped the best Christmas present ever.
Then, as he scrambled over to celebrate with winner Brent Hayden, the 2011 world championship silver medallist and a training partner in Vancouver, he got awkwardly stuck on the top of one of the lane markers.
“I was pretty pumped,” he says now with a sheepish grin. “For a good three or four days after, I couldn’t even swim. It took like a week to come back down from that.”
It was all kind of surreal, he says. And more than a little surprising to many as Gossland — who was third in the 50- metre butterfly Friday at the Mel Zajac Jr. International at the UBC Aquatic Centre — had never been on the radar for Sport Canada funding.
The UBC swimmer is part of a group of freestylers training with Hayden at the National Swim Centre in Vancouver. Head coach Tom Johnson said Gossland contributed to the good environment and support created around Hayden, but his own career had plateaued.
“In the summer last year, after the world championships, I said ‘ Tommy, you can stay in the group and I’m going to coach you, but I can’t help you financially. You just haven’t been able to show us anything in performance.’ ”
In January, when Johnson took several swimmers to Hawaii for three weeks for some crucial warm- weather training as part of the lead up to the Olympic trials, Gossland was left behind. He had gone in 2011, but Johnson says he simply couldn’t justify bringing the swimmer this time.
Gossland, 23, recalls it as more of a group decision. He didn’t think he could take the time away from school and “I felt like I needed to focus on me more.”
And, in any event, he didn’t have the money, having tapped out his parents’ limited resources over the years.
He says his parents are going to have to take out another line of credit to get the family — Gossland has two sisters and a younger brother — to London to watch him compete.
“I feel bad. I really want to pay them back one day for everything.”
So he stayed in Vancouver this winter and swam with his university team. And he somehow found another gear.
He had one of the all- time great performances at the CIS championships in February, with five gold medals in a short- course pool, including a sizzling 47.82 in the 100 freestyle. At the Olympic trials, he went 49.98, a long- course career best.
Hayden ( 48.53), Richard Hortness ( 49.21) and Colin Russell ( 49.69) will make up the rest of the relay team.
“The last three years I’ve had my eye on this year,” said Gossland, who graduated Thursday. “I had some performance issues over the years, I guess, but I knew that it came down to this season and I just made sure I did everything I could to make it come together and it’s worked out.”
He was a 19- year- old pool lifeguard during the time of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. And he made sure to schedule his weight room checks when the swimming finals were on television.
“I remember Ryan Cochrane’s [ bronze- medal] swim. It was pretty busy in the weight room, but I just turned off the music, cranked up the TV and started screaming at it. I remember thinking I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be there competing at that level.”
Canada, which was ninth in the relay at the 2011 worlds, will be in tough in London, even with the brilliant Hayden as the anchor.
The French, Americans and Australians are the medal favourites. Johnson says if the Canadians swim “really well” they might crack the top five.
Gossland, however, says he’s got more in the tank and believes he can get to the mid48 second range for his leg. He knows there will be some lightning fast swimmers from other countries, but he’s not going to worry about who else is on the starting blocks.
“I perform my best when I don’t know who’s beside me. That way, I don’t get psyched out. I made it here. Everyone else made it here, so it’ll just be a good fight.”
Gossland graduated with a kinisieology degree but plans to go back to school to study mechanical and electrical engineering.
He wants to continue swimming and has one eye on the 2016 Olympics, but it might depend on “whether I can even afford to live in Vancouver.
“If I can, I’ll take it year by year and see how far I can go with it.
“I still get up every day liking swimming and wanting to improve.”