Team Canada's Maggie Mac Neil swims her way to gold in the women's 100m butterfly at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile on Oct. 22, 2023.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
When Maggie Mac Neil was little, her parents put her in soccer and thought she might take to it. She didn’t.
“She followed the butterflies around on the soccer field,” says her mother, Susan McNair.
Turns out soccer was a bit too dry for Mac Neil. She liked the water.
From chasing butterflies back then to swimming them now Mac Neil has come to occupy a unique place in Canadian swimming.
Her victory in the 100-metre butterfly at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago produced one of the more iconic images in the Olympic pantheon: There was Mac Neil, nearsighted and not wearing contacts, gasping for air and squinting at the scoreboard, unable to see that she’d just defeated the world’s best swimmers and won gold.
Maggie Mac Neil reacts once she's realized she won gold in the women's 100m Butterfly at the Tokyo Olympics.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
As future Canadian Heritage Moments go, it’s up there with Sidney Crosby’s glove-tossing Golden Goal celebration in Vancouver, or Penny Oleksiak’s laugh of disbelief in Rio when she realized she’d come from near-last to tie for gold in the 100-metre freestyle as a 16-year-old.
But at the Paris Olympics, Mac Neil, 24, is attempting the hardest thing in Canadian swimming: to repeat as a gold medalist. No one’s ever done it.
She is one of only nine Canadian swimmers to win gold in the 112 years the sport has been contested at the Summer Games, and one of only three women to get there. Oleksiak in 2016 and Anne Ottenbrite, in the 200-metre breaststroke at the 1984 Olympics, are the others.
Mac Neil is aware of how monumental that challenge is; but she’s also not one to shy away from a challenge.
In Tokyo, training plans were torn asunder by the pandemic, which delayed those Games by a year. Her attitude back then was to simply press on, make the best of it.
Maggie Mac Neil replaces her face mask after a photo opportunity with her gold medal in the women's 100m Butterfly at the Tokyo Olympics.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
“I didn’t really have firm goals for myself for the Olympics last time because I was like, we’re just grateful that it’s happening,” Mac Neil said of the difference between then and now. But in Paris, she says, “I think I have a little bit more solid goals for myself.”
But Paris brings a new set of challenges, and the past year has been much different than what she’s used to. In 2022, after four years of swimming at the University of Michigan, she transferred to Louisiana State University, following her long-time coach Rick Bishop there for her fifth, and final, year of NCAA eligibility.
But when that year ended, Mac Neil still had one more year to go before Paris. Unable to suit up as an NCAA athlete, she remained at LSU, finished her master’s of science degree in sports management, a precursor to law school, and continued to train with Bishop – though competing far less than she ever has in a pre-Olympic year.
“I think it was a really hard year for me, just not being on the college team, I haven’t done as much racing as I normally would have,” she said.
She entered a meet in January, raced the Canadian Open in April, Olympic trials in May and – as a last minute tune-up – an international meet held in Vancouver in mid-June.
Maggie Mac Neil (second from right) was part of Canada's bronze-medal winning women's 4x100m medley relay team.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
It wasn’t ideal, but Mac Neil and her coach had a plan. She always has a plan, her parents say. She’s a planner by nature.
“She is so hyper-organized, she makes me feel completely deficient as a human being when I’m with her,” says McNair, a physician in London, Ont. “The speed she moves at and the energy she has, she comes home from the pool, she unpacks everything and repacks it. Everything has to move exactly on time, and she’s never late for anything. It’s a piece of her I really admire.”
Mac Neil put that clockwork precision into her training this past year. Without college meets to attend, and not looking to jump to the pro circuit while still in school, she and Bishop devised a race-simulation strategy, designed to turn practices into proxy competitions.
Swimmers say it takes about 10 or 15 minutes to get into a high-end compression suit for racing. And most don’t always don them for practices. But Mac Neil, wanting to mimic everything she could down to the last detail, undertook that ritual, climbing into the blocks at an empty practice pool and racing as though her Olympics depended on it.
“A motto for a lot of people is practising racing is training, and I think that’s just a little bit of what I’ve been missing this year,” Mac Neil said. “Just suiting up and getting off the blocks will definitely get my fast-twitch muscles working, and get me in that race mentality.”
In May, Mac Neil said she wasn’t fully aware where she stood in the world, but was growing confident in how she felt in the water.
Her fastest time over the past year (56.45) came last summer, and puts her outside the podium heading into Paris, back of her gold-medal time in Tokyo (55.59).
Maggie Mac Neil after winning gold in the women's 100m butterfly final during the 2022 world swimming short course championships in Melbourne.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/The Associated Press
Her times at Canadian trials in May (56.61) and in Vancouver a month later (56.83) are part of building toward the Olympics without going overboard.
Americans Gretchen Walsh (the world-record holder at 55.18), and Torri Huske (55.52), and China’s Yufei Zhang (55.86) are the top three heading into Paris.
There have been other challenges beyond her new approach to training. She broke her elbow two years ago after slipping on the pool deck, and she has been public about her battle with asthma, which she’s been managing successfully since 2017, while also becoming a spokesperson for the Lung Health Foundation.
In both cases, she chooses to look at the bright side. The elbow injury gave her a chance to rest. The asthma, which was aggravated by years of breathing chlorine at the pool, forced her to focus on the shorter sprinting events, which brought out her true talents. It was a blessing in disguise.
At 5 foot 5, Mac Neil is a unique swimmer, not only because competitors like Walsh tower over her, but because she does some of her best work underwater.
Of all the ingredients that make up a race, the few seconds of subsurface propulsion after a swimmer dives or launches off the wall in a turn are often overlooked.
But Mac Neil’s teammates marvel at this particular skill. She is renowned for her dolphin-like ability in those 15 metres that swimmers are allowed to be underwater at each end of the pool, and for her ability to kick.
“Her kick is what makes her so good and her underwaters are amazing,” said teammate Mary-Sophie Harvey. “Coming into and out of the wall, she’s basically like a ball, she just bounces back. That’s what makes her so great.”
Maggie Mac Neil swims to a bronze medal in the women's 4 x 100m medley relay final during the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, in Tokyo, Sunday, August 1, 2021.Adrian Wyld/THE CANADIAN PRESS
As early as nine-months-old, Mac Neil loved the water. When McNair took her to a pool for the first time, she was amazed at how much Maggie seemed to enjoy launching herself into the water, and being beneath the surface.
“Her infant response to the water was unusual,” her mom says. A few years later, McNair and Maggie’s dad, Edward Mac Neil, a teacher in London, put her in formal swimming lessons.
“She picked up the strokes almost immediately. And she was doing like a primitive butterfly stroke really early,” McNair said. Eventually, local coaches were advising them to enroll her in a club to see if she liked competing.
Her parents joke that they are the furthest thing from athletes. Watching the baby they adopted from China grow up into an Olympic champion has amazed them. Of all the hobbies they put Maggie in, from violin and clarinet to soccer, she chafed at practising. But not swimming.
After watching her daughter’s gold-medal race in 2021 from their cottage near Lake Huron during the pandemic, McNair admits she laid awake in bed that night marvelling at her daughter’s path, which they could have never predicted.
“I still kind of replay it in my mind,” McNair says. “Especially as these Olympics get closer. I still kind of have to pinch myself to imagine it happened.”
For her part, Mac Neil says she feels as if she’s “lived 100 years” since Tokyo and that she’s a completely different person; a bit older, a lot wiser in the pool, and ready to go. But there’s one thing that will stay unchanged.
For Canadians who loved the shot of an Olympic champion with subpar eyesight squinting at her times on the scoreboard – a wholesome moment suggesting that gold medalists are not so different than the rest of us – Mac Neil has good news.
If things go well, she’ll probably be doing the same this time.
She can’t wear contacts while racing and, even though Speedo sent her prescription goggles she says are “a life-changer,” during training, they’re not the kind she races in. So she’ll be going into Paris, once more, slightly blurry.
Again, she chooses to see the upside.
“Sometimes I like to think it helps because I can’t see where other people are and I’m able to focus on my own race,” she said from Caen, France, where the team was training before heading to Paris.
“So be ready for more wholesome moments like that.”