RIO DE JANEIRO — When Penny Oleksiak was nine years old, which is not all that long ago, her parents took her to the Toronto Swim Club to enrol in a competitive program.
All that was asked of her was to complete two laps of the University of Toronto pool. She tried and didn’t make it.
The next stop was the Scarborough Swim Club. They wanted in. The criteria was the same. She had to be able to swim two laps of the pool to be accepted in their program. Again, she wasn’t able to get there.
Those were her Michael Jordan pre-superstar swimming moments, the failure that came before this suddenly emerging success. One year in a learn-to-swim program and a career of sorts was launched for a kid from an athletic family who first came to love the water in a neighbour’s pool and soon may become the greatest female swimmer in Canadian history.
It’s a title held basically by one, a title waiting to be grabbed and held by somebody else. Only one Canadian woman in history, Anne Ottenbrite, has won swimming gold. And her medal came at the boycotted Games of 1984 in Los Angeles.
Oleksiak has been involved in Canada’s first two medals of the Games, a silver Sunday night in the 100-metre butterfly and her share of the bronze-medal 4×100 freestyle relay a night earlier.
It is one step, two medals, one Olympics at a time. She turned 16 just two months ago.
This is more than remarkable. This is astounding for the young Canadian.
“I think the first time I really heard of her was when she was 12 years old,” said Byron MacDonald, the famed University of Toronto coach and longtime CBC broadcaster. “A coach I know, Bobby Hayes, told me: ‘Take a look at this girl. She’s going to be a good one.’ He might have said ‘great one.’
“And one day I was brainstorming with Ben Titley (the new national team sprint coach) and we were talking about, how do we get better as a country, the kind of thing coaches talk about all the time. And I said something about identifying young kids and bringing them along slowly. And he told us about this 12-year-old who was already a giant.”
Titley told MacDonald, “‘She’s a freak by nature (because of her size). And that’s the kind of athletic people we need in our program.’”
Oleksiak comes by her 6-foot-1 height and athleticism honestly. Her father, Richard, was a Hall of Fame athlete at the famed Nichols private school in Buffalo, playing football, basketball and running track. He was a writer on the hit Canadian television show Street Legal. Her older brother Jamie was a first-round pick of the Dallas Stars, a former world junior player for Canada and is expected to play full-time in the National Hockey League this coming season. Her sister Claire rows at Northeastern University in Boston. Penny is six inches shorter than her 6-foot-7 brother, but at Monarch Park Collegiate she stands out for more than just her flourishing athletic career.
What’s this phenom like?
“Penny is a bit of an oddball,” said Chantal Van Landeghem, her teammate on the relay team and one of her training partners in Toronto. “She doesn’t seem like a 16-year-old. She’s very mature for her age. She is glued to her phone, though. All the time. Different generation. (Van Landeghem is 22.)
“But if we have any questions about what’s hip or what’s happening, we’ll ask Penny. She teaches us what music to listen to, I don’t even know. Not top 40. She gets mad if I listen to anything top 40. Anything you can hear on the radio is not cool to listen to. And she’s always watching five different shows (sometimes all at once) on her computer.
“Then there’s the expressions. I didn’t know what they meant. ‘It’s lit.’ ‘Blessed.’ ‘Bless off.’ They (Oleksiak and fellow teenager Taylor Ruck) have reminded me to keep having fun this year and not put too much pressure on myself. They’ve been great. I think I was more nervous than Taylor or Penny were.”
But it was Oleksiak who was called upon to swim the anchor leg of the relay on Saturday, a huge honour for someone this young. And she was strong enough and composed enough and, most importantly, fast enough to do her part.
“She was awesome,” said Ruck, who considers Oleksiak her “partner in crime.”
Just how young are these women?
“When I was little, probably eight or 12, I saw (four-time American gold medallist) Missy Franklin on TV and knew that was what I wanted to do and here I am,” Ruck said. Missy Franklin, for the record, just turned 21 in May.
Oleksiak is days older than Ruck. They don’t so much talk to each other as much as they text, they Snapchat, they Instagram. They win medals.
“You’re going to see Penny four years from now in Tokyo and probably wherever, maybe Paris, eight years from now,” MacDonald said. “She comes from a family of people who compete. They’re an incredible family. She’s already an incredible swimmer.”