Emma Finlin powers through the water as she wins the women's 1500m freestyle during the Canadian Olympic Swim Trials in Toronto on May 15. Finlin is scheduled to compete in the 10-kilometre Marathon swimming event on Thursday.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Emma Finlin, Canada’s only marathon swimmer in Paris, is used to the vagaries of her sport. If you’re going to compete in open-water races, you have to be able to roll with the odd punch, so to speak.
And we’re not just talking concerns over water quality, of which there have been many in the lead-up to Thursday’s scheduled 10-kilometre race. In an event where swimmers travel in a pack, there is no shortage of body contact, either incidental or otherwise.
Marathon swimmers tell stories about errant elbows, pokes from strokes, surreptitious ankle grabs and, sometimes, even actual punches.
But none of the aforementioned hazards would necessarily qualify as the strangest thing to happen to Finlin during a competition.
“I got stung by a jelly fish,” she says, recounting a particularly memorable event in Japan.
“There were four buoys we had to go around and I think there must have been a couple of jellyfish around the corner. I kind of got pushed under water, so I got it right to my face.”
Even so, Finlin wasn’t deterred.
“It stung for a couple hundred metres but I was okay.”
Anyone who finds pool swimming too placid, with its carefully measured lane markers, pay attention: the open-water portion of the Summer Olympics is about to begin.
The 10-kilometre event is a water-bound test of will. Swimmers will churn up and down the Seine, at times going with the current and against it. When Finlin needs nourishment mid-race, her coach will extend a long pole, from which she will grab a biodegradable bottle containing a mix of carbohydrates and electrolytes.
“I’d say the feeding stations are pretty difficult because there’s so many girls coming in and you’re trying to find your bottle to feed off of,” Finlin said. “That’s where it gets pretty aggressive.”
She acknowledges she was a little surprised by the physicality of the sport when she started out in 2022, making the jump from pool swimming.
“I didn’t know that going into my first race, so that was a bit shocking,” she said, noting that the nature of the race depends on its duration.
“With a 10K, it’s definitely more spread out. So you don’t get as many punches,” she said with a laugh. “Going around the buoys is where the cameras don’t really catch all of it. So you get a few hits. So you’ve just got to be prepared for that.”
A lot of the contact comes from people moving their arms and legs in a hurry while in close proximity. Technically, the rules prohibit anything intentional. But as her coach Mark Perry points out, there are grey areas.
“It’s non-contact, but one of the jokes within people that actually do it is, ‘it’s the only full-contact, non-contact sport there is,’” Perry said.
“Some of that comes from swimmers getting close because they want to draft off each other, which happens naturally,” he said.
“But then obviously the side of it that’s perhaps not very nice is some people use that kind of proximity to maybe gain advantages on the line of within the rules, I would say. But it’s all part of it.”
Swimmers who do distance swimming are comfortable with the contact.
“It’s one of the things that kind of draws some people to the sport. They actually enjoy that,” Perry said.
“It’s obviously very different than swimming in a pool where you get your own lane.”
The race in Paris is a bit unusual, too, because open-water events are typically held in lakes and oceans. The last time a major international competition was contested in a river was at the 2015 world championships in Russia.
“The thing to contend with really is the current,” Perry said of the Seine.
Open-water events are usually held in lakes and oceans, but the Seine River is the venue at the Paris Olypics. Competitors race in the Seine at the start the Women's Individual Triathlon in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris on July 31.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Another challenge swimmers face is what they call “sighting,” which involves using landmarks on shore to stay on course. At a meet in Doha, for example, Finlin relied on a large soccer stadium on the horizon to judge where she was.
“Sighting is pretty hard,” Finlin said. “You kind of look for landmarks or you work with your coaches.”
Then there are the Seine water-quality concerns, which have dogged these Games, forcing the cancellation of a training session this week because of elevated bacterial counts.
Perhaps surprisingly, Finlin and her coach are the most sanguine about that variable. Such concerns follow the sport around the world, and are not just an issue in Paris. She’s seen bad water before, at many meets.
“The water is often an unpredictable factor of open water, so we’ve become pretty adaptable and just kind of focus on what we can control,” Finlin said.
The doctor responsible for keeping Canada’s athletes healthy in France, Mike Wilkinson, said athletes will be deploying vaccines, such as those for hepatitis, and taking Dukoral for gastrointestinal problems, which are standard approaches.
Even with the heightened attention on the Seine, Wilkinson said he has fewer concerns about tracking water quality at the Paris Olympics than he did eight years ago at the Rio Summer Games, where there were similar concerns about bacterial counts.
“The data that we get for the water here certainly is better than what we were getting at Rio,” Wilkinson said, adding there is much more transparency from local officials in France.
“To be perfectly honest, we’ve got scientific data that we can rely on, rather than just rhetoric. We’re able to have very frank discussions about water quality, and the implications.”
The sport is relatively new at the Olympics; the 10-km event was introduced at the Beijing Games in 2008.
Canada’s lone medal in the sport is a bronze, from Richard Weinberger, at the 2012 London Games.
Finlin also tried to qualify for Paris in the pool, in the 1,500-metre event. Doing both at a future Summer Games is still a goal of hers, but she’s fallen for the hustle and jostle of marathon swimming.
“I love the challenge of it. It’s not just about how fit you are, speed-wise,” she said. “It’s more about tactics. And the more experience you get, it’s just kind of fascinating to see how it unfolds every race.”