From Penny Oleksiak to Summer McIntosh: How Canada built its golden age of swimming

Summer McIntosh was expected to win her five events at the Canadian swimming trials but no 16-year-old is ever expected to set world records. But halfway through her race Saturday night, the crowd at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre started realizing it might be witnessing history for the second time in a week.

McIntosh was racing the clock, not the field, and winning. When she touched the wall, the Toronto teen had set a world record in the women’s 400-metre individual medley in a time of four minutes and 25.87 seconds, a bookend to her world-record swim Tuesday in the 400 freestyle. In between she delivered more edge-of-your-seat races — the fourth-best time ever in the 200 individual medley, world junior and national records in the 200 butterfly — and was the most electrifying swimmer of the trials. They end Sunday with the Canadian team for this summer’s world aquatics championships being named.

“She’s unbelievably believable,” Olympic champion Maggie Mac Neil said. “Hopefully we can carry this momentum into the summer.”

Canada’s momentum has been going for quite a few years. Canadian swimmers won more medals in the pool at the last two Summer Olympics (12) than they did in the previous seven Games combined (11). They’re winning more world championships medals, winning more golds, and making more finals than ever before.

This isn’t a random confluence of excellence. This golden age of Canadian swimming is the product of a data-driven system put in place a decade ago that identifies talented young swimmers with world-class potential and funds and nurtures them to success on the world stage. Swimming Canada will continue to fine-tune that system, embracing the different places Canadian swimmers choose to train and their individual paths to the podium for the 2024 Paris Olympics, the 2028 Los Angeles Games and beyond.

“We’re a small swimming nation,” said Ken McKinnon, Swimming Canada’s development coach. “We’ve made a pretty conscious effort to do better with what we have.”

Nothing happens without money and Swimming Canada is one of the sports that gets the most from Own the Podium, the national high-performance funding program. And with success the funding has grown: $11 million for the 2012 London quadrennial became $13 million for the ramp-up to Rio in 2016 and $22 million for the five years to the delayed Tokyo Games in 2021.

Swimming Canada has changed how it uses the funding. It used to be that once a swimmer got inside the top 150 in the world rankings, they could rely on support from the federal athlete assistance program. A swimmer who was 25 and not improving in an event where the average age was 23 would still be funded as long as he or she stayed in the top 150, said John Atkinson, Swimming Canada’s high-performance director. In 2014, the sport body changed that to take into account not just how good an athlete is but how good they might become.

The on-track times system uses decades of data from global competitions and the progression rates of the world’s best swimmers to predict the race times that a swimmer needs to hit, at a particular age, to be on the path for an Olympic medal.

That is how McIntosh was first identified and funded in 2019, when she was 13 years old and her top world ranking, 230th, was in the 800-metre freestyle. She was 448th in the 400 metres.

Penny Oleksiak, Canada’s most decorated Olympian, was identified when she was 14 and her top world ranking was 319th. Mac Neil was 14 and ranked 462nd in the 100-metre butterfly, the event in which she won Olympic gold.

“It’s crazy to think about,” Mac Neil said. “It makes you think that your hard work is paying off and that the people who are making these decisions are watching and taking notice, so it means a lot.

“Everyone’s dream is to make it to the top … And there are a lot of fast youngsters coming up now. So I’m excited to see what they do and use our momentum to bring us to ’28, ’32 and beyond that.”

The change in approach was controversial, even inside Swimming Canada, but Atkinson maintains it was necessary.

“They might be three, four, five seconds slower than the 25-year-old, but it’s relevant to (their age) to being on track,” he said. “We work with analytics to create pathways to determine which athletes would be a better investment. You can’t just say we’ll fund everybody, we’ll do absolutely everything and spread it so thin that it makes no difference.”

Atkinson spent a decade as the national youth coach for British Swimming before coming to Canada in 2013, and he knew the value of having a constant “production line” of next-generation athletes to avoid the “black hole” that can happen when the stars inevitably retire.

McKinnon, who has been in charge of developing the next crop of world-class swimmers since 2009, works on a personal level, getting to know athletes, their families and coaches. “There could be raw talent with the right coach or raw talent with a coach that’s maybe not prepared, or in a club that’s not prepared to support the coach to develop the kid.”

Swimming Canada steps in with advice and resources to guide athletes through those early years. “We’ve done a better job preparing the kids that we have with potential so when they get to the senior level they’re more prepared to perform there,” McKinnon said.

McKinnon is thrilled to see the likes of McIntosh and Joshua Liendo, who set a world-leading time in the men’s 50-metre freestyle, dazzle at the Canadian trials but his focus has already moved on. He’s looking at the athletes hoping to make the world junior team that competes in Israel in September, and the group below them who are starting to get picked up by the on-track times system.

“We’ve been pretty flexible in this strategy over the years, besides that common denominator that we have to do better with what we have,” he said.

That flexible but focused philosophy continues once swimmers are winning world and Olympic medals and setting world records.

Swimming Canada is quick to credit the 2015 Pan Am Games for its role in sparking Olympic success. The Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre, with its fast pool, was built for that event and has become the base for a high-performance swimming centre. It was particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic when swimmers were able to keep training during restrictions.

But few of Canada’s stars are based there. McIntosh moved to Florida to train with Brent Arckey at the Sarasota Sharks; Mac Neil trains in Louisiana with Rick Bishop (who used to be her coach at the University of Michigan) where she’s completing her master’s degree; and Liendo is in his freshman year at the University of Florida.

“I’m not worried by that at all,” Atkinson said. “They will all be unbelievably super talented athletes and represent Canada.”

Athletes once were pressured to stay in Canada or were cut off from support for leaving, he said.

“Because they’re in all these diverse programs, it makes it interesting,” Atkinson said, chuckling. “But if we don’t adapt and we don’t have flexibility, it just impacts relationships and it impacts athletes doing what they need to do.”

“It’s always a case of how does this fit in your plan to Paris? That will become how does this fit in your plans for L.A.”

Kerry Gillespie is a Toronto-based sports reporter for the Star. Reach her via email: kgillespie@thestar.ca