Come hell or cold, Tatjana dreams Rio
ON TRACK: Tatjana Schoenmaker has to repeat a qualifying time TATJANA Schoenmaker this week got an untimely reminder of the icy training hell that awaits her this winter.
Thanks to a temperamental pump at the outdoor Tuks pool in Pretoria, the water was a tad chilly, but nothing compared to what she will face in late May.
“Ohhhh, it’s so cold,” said the first-year financial sciences student, almost shivering at the memory of the near zero air temperatures that accosted her last year and the years before.
“We always have to take off the covers wearing gloves, and then you have to take off your clothes and get in the water.
“That’s when you feel swimming isn’t such a good idea,” smiled Schoenmaker, who is on track to make the SA Olympic team for the 2016 Rio Games in August.
There’s not much sympathy to be had from Russian coach Igor Omeltchenko.
“He tells us how he used to cut ice off the top of the water to create lanes so he could swim,” said Schoenmaker, who has no Russian links despite her first name.
If Schoenmaker qualifies for the Olympics, she will depart with the SA team to Europe and the Americas on a lengthy preparation camp from early June. To make the team, all SA swimmers must achieve qualifying times at the national championships, which also serve as the Olympic trials, in Durban in April.
Schoenmaker clocked a 2min 26.50sec qualifying time in the 200m breaststroke in Stellenbosch last weekend; she can surely do it again next month. “I did the time in hard training. I’ll be more rested at nationals.”
So far she is the only female swimmer to bag a 2016 qualifying time, hopefully allaying fears that South Africa could deliver an all-male senior swimming team for the second year in a row.
“It’s unfair for people to assume there’ll be no girls in Rio. Karin [Prinsloo] and Vanessa [Mohr] got qualifying times for London 2012. All three of us just want to get there.”
She dismisses the theory that women don’t like to risk their femininity amid the tough slog of training. “We really work hard. We don’t take it easy, it’s not like we back off.”
SA has produced several breaststroke stars over the years, notably Penny Heyns, Terence Parkin and most recently Cameron van der Burgh, but Schoenmaker was already in her chosen stroke by the time she’d heard of them.
She wasn’t even born when Heyns won the Olympic breaststroke double at Atlanta 1996.
Schoenmaker, 18, took a shine to swimming from an early age. “I also did athletics and my parents told me to run slower in a race so I didn’t make the team because it would have clashed with swimming.”
She is still working out the best way to finesse studying alongside training up to five hours a day, which includes some stretching exercises with a Russian ballet teacher organised by Omeltchenko.
“I don’t want to sacrifice the Olympics and I don’t want to sacrifice studying.”
Qualifying for the Rio-bound team will transform that into an easier choice.
We work hard. We don’t take it easy, it’s not like we back off