Sink or Swim

When I was fourteen, I only cared about one thing: making the Nova Scotia swim team for the Canada Games, a nationwide mini-Olympics held every four years for young athletes on the rise. For eight months, our coach drilled us with punishing sets in the pool (and pep talks out of it), all in the service of the Games trials. Once, after practice, he presented me with a red bathing cap with the name of one of his former national team swimmers on it and told me, “You’ll be even better than she was.” On the first night of competition that May, he hired limousines to chauffeur us to the pool, several kilometres across the Halifax harbour. We were stars, he said. That weekend, I won both my backstroke events with ease. Granted, this was not especially rare or difficult; the Nova Scotia swimming community was small and insular, and the competition rarely fierce. But I posted times that put me in the top three in my age group nationally and was a strong medal contender going into the Canada Games.

The top two swimmers from each province in each event were in Saskatoon three months later, and I recognized many of them from the pages of Swim magazine. We traded pins in the athletes’ village, but I felt queasy. The girls — the ones from Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and Alberta whom I was up against — appeared much taller in person, their uniforms more expensive than mine, and they seemed to laugh so effortlessly, without a care. Not me.

Just before my race, my coach patted me on the shoulder, smiled, and told me to get in there and fight. I nodded but couldn’t smile back. When the gun went off, I threw myself from the blocks, kicked hard underwater, and then glanced over at the girl in the next lane; just ten metres into the race, and she was already ahead. Then and there, the thought that occurred to me was as simple as it was defeatist: “I don’t want this badly enough.” As if following an inviolable order, my muscles tightened. I fell back and never recovered, and didn’t make the final. Despite our high hopes, none of my Nova Scotia teammates won a medal.

On the morning of August 15, 2004, Canadians awoke to news reports about a “catastrophe” that had befallen our compatriots overseas. The stories referred not to army losses or a deadly earthquake, but to our national swim team in Athens. On the first day of competition at the Summer Olympics, the pinnacle of amateur sport, none of the Canadian swimmers made it past the preliminary heats in their events. By meet’s end, only two would make it to the finals, and for the first time in forty years we didn’t win a single medal. Worse, our swimmers looked dazed and bewildered after their races, and some even appeared to give up during them.

To casual fans, the national swim team’s collapse at Athens was precipitous. Since 1968 — when, for instance, Elaine Tanner won three Olympic medals — competitive swimming had been one of Canada’s most successful summer sports. Expectations were high, and for good reason: in the years leading up to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, the federal government poured money into amateur sports, and swimming was among the best funded. In Montreal, Canadian swimmers won eight medals — out of eleven for the entire team — and would have won more had the East German women been caught using steroids and denied theirs. By the late 1970s, the Canadian Amateur Swimming Association (now Swimming Canada) had started its own grant program, awarding money to clubs based on individual and team performances. We were achieving and rewarding excellence.

The extra funding, early adoption of professional coaching standards, and intense competition among swim clubs continued to pay off. In 1982, Canada placed fourth at the World Swimming Championships, and in 1984 our swimmers won ten medals at the (albeit boycotted) Olympics in Los Angeles. For their world record performances, Alex Baumann and Victor Davis became heroes to young Canadians — as iconic to some of us as their professional counterparts in hockey, skiing, and baseball. When national swim coaches announced that their goal for the team was to be number one by the early 1990s, people took them seriously.

But as the rest of the world got better, our team started to slip. At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Canadian swimmers won just two relay medals. Even breaststroker Allison Higson, who had set a world record at Canada’s Olympic trials, was shut out in the individual events. Months later, head coach Dave Johnson, who was fired from Swimming Canada after the Athens Olympics, wrote an essay in Swim about what had happened. “We have a coping problem at international events,” he argued. “There were a lot of youngsters getting very nervous and who didn’t know how to deal with pressure.” That Canadian swimmers folded when away from home became a common criticism over the next fifteen years.

Athens didn’t present a new problem, then; it was just the latest and most publicly aired one. And it’s systemic. What has happened to the national swim team at international meets since the 1980s is a version of what happened with my Canada Games teammates in Saskatoon. Pitted against apparently stronger, richer rivals, do Canadian athletes shrink? Do we, as Johnson suggests, buckle under pressure? More problematic, do we suffer from some sort of national inferiority complex?

During the 2004 Olympics, Murray Stephens, an American coach who owns the club that reared six-time Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps, called Canada’s approach to swimming “socialist.” (It must be said that the East German swim program is one of history’s most successful, drug use notwithstanding.) What he meant, he later told me, was that when athletes and coaches depend on government handouts for survival (as they do in Canada), they won’t take risks or develop the necessary internal motivation and confidence to win. “The more you get from the outside, the less you work for it,” he said. “Mother bird can only help little bird so much.”

Stephens’ remarks allude to more than sport financing. As Canadians, we value participation, sharing, and welfare for all, but we seem conflicted about excellence, national pride — perhaps even winning itself. In elite competitive sport, there can be no such conflict, and even at the Olympics there is no “welfare for all.” The athletes must want to fight in order to win, and then they actually need to fight. To get to the podium, Canadian athletes might need to shake off their own culture. But if so, how?