SINGAPORE—In Victoria last month, at the end of the national swimming trials, the entire Canadian world championship team was announced. Each swimmer was introduced, walked the length of the pool, shook hands with the coaches, and lined up for a team picture. There was only one exception. When they called Penny Oleksiak’s name, nobody came.
It was a preview, or perhaps a portent. The world swimming championships start here Sunday, and Oleksiak isn’t here. She had qualified for the 50-metre and 100-metre freestyle, and was slated to be a relay piece, and then came the news: Canada’s most decorated female Olympian had missed three whereabouts filings in the past year. Under anti-doping rules, athletes must notify testing authorities of their whereabouts. You can update your status up to one hour in advance, but you need to be available for testing.
It’s far from a perfect system, but it’s how it works. Oleksiak said in that she has always been clean, and that her case does not involve banned substances, and Swimming Canada said it believed that was the case, too. Basically, the explanation was that Oleksiak screwed up her paperwork, over and over.
But three missed whereabouts can result in a two-year ban from competition. Oleksiak wasn’t going to be a star in Singapore. She swam 54.03 seconds in the 100 freestyle to win the Canadian trials, almost a second and a half off her 2021 personal best. She won in 24.89 in the 50 freestyle, 0.42 seconds slower than her best, set when she was 17. When asked how she could record times that qualified as real elite performance, Oleksiak said, as she always does, that she just needed the adrenalin of a race on the world stage. She always believed she was a racer, above all.
The Canadian star faces the possibility of a two-year ban from the sport.
And in Victoria the 25-year-old talked about how grateful she was to have rediscovered her love of swimming after faltering after Rio and Tokyo, due to injury and rebellion against then-Canada coach Ben Titley and whatever else. She talked about wanting some of her legacy to be about longevity, about sticking with it.
“I try not to look back too much,†she said. “I’m just kind of trying to look forward. And I’ve been through a lot. I think there’s a lot of things people don’t even know that I’ve gone through. So just to be here and be able to still be winning our nationals, be able to go to meets across the world, I’m so lucky to love the life I live and pursue the sport that I love. And I’m not taking it for granted.”
Grateful, then.
“So grateful. Oh, my God, you can’t ask for a better life.â€
And now, in the best case, Oleksiak is the airy, distracted swimmer who was a half-hour late for her autograph session in Victoria and blew off the team announcement to fly to the F1 race in Montreal, the swimmer who inspired Summer McIntosh but never really shared that true love of the grind. For Oleksiak, disorganization instead of doping might be that rare most likely scenario.
“Penny may not be totally aware of her name and power and all that kind of stuff,†says Byron MacDonald, the longtime CBC swim analyst and head coach at the University of ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½. “But I think she’s gotta at least get to the level of understanding that if she ever got caught using drugs, everything goes out the window.â€
So is this the end? A two-year ban would take Oleksiak to 2027, one year out from the Los Angeles Olympics, at 27 years old. She would have to toil on her own, without the carrot of racing. Swimming national coach John Atkinson was asked what Oleksiak’s legacy would be, if we had to start writing it today, and he showed me the lockscreen of his phone. It was Oleksiak’s 100 freestyle gold from Rio. Atkinson talked about how before Rio, Canada never planned for the best-case scenario, only the worst-case.
“That changed things,†Atkinson said. “Penny’s legacy to be a four-time medallist, two individual events, in 2016, brought her into the living rooms and kitchens and TVs across the country, and showed many young athletes and people that we were serious, that we could compete against the best in the world.
Canadian Penny Oleksiak has qualified for the swim worlds, and the L.A. Olympics aren’t out of
“And the legacy from four medals, (then) three medals (in 2021), seven-time Olympic medallist, can’t be underestimated by any stretch of the imagination. So that, to me, is a hell of a legacy. And there’s no reason that she can’t come back from whatever happens. Others have.
“But the legacy there is that it started a movement. It started a generation that could compete at the highest level in world swimming.â€
 at the trials in Victoria after her third world record and told her she was proud, and now McIntosh will dominate these world championships and carry the banner of Canadian swimming across the world.
Oleksiak is a ghost in Singapore, a memory, maybe a tragedy. They won’t call her name here, because she’s gone.
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