Penny Oleksiak’s hard road to the Paris Olympics

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The outdoor pool near Los Angeles where Penny Oleksiak now trains is as idyllic as it gets. Lined with palm trees and dappled by the Southern California sun, the Mission Viejo complex is where some of the world’s best swimmers have gone for decades to perfect their stroke.

And it was here, early this spring, that Oleksiak swam to the side of the pool and began to cry. Other swimmers looked on, not knowing what to say. But in that moment, Oleksiak privately wondered about her future.

With seven medals, she is Canada’s most-decorated Olympian. She won her first four in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, upending the swimming world and turning her into an overnight celebrity, all while she was still navigating high school as a 16-year-old. The next three, in Tokyo in 2021, wrote her name into the history books as Canada’s most successful Olympian.

Now it felt as though her body was betraying her. Seconds earlier, she pushed off the wall in a routine turn she’s executed probably tens of thousands of times in her life, and a bolt of pain shot through her leg.

Oleksiak had just spent much of the past two years injured and away from competition. She tore a knee, had it surgically repaired, then developed a rare neurological condition that caused the muscles in her shoulder to falter. Then she had the knee operated on, again, to remove the meniscus. Now the ankle – another setback threatening to drag her down.

“I remember thinking, if I get one more injury, I’m done. I can’t do this any more. I literally cannot keep swimming, because I can’t live like this,” she says.

It was a close call. She jammed the tendon, but the Achilles hadn’t ruptured. For a few months, she was unable to kick during workouts, but eventually Oleksiak returned to full training. However, the cumulative effect of those injuries has sapped much of the preparation time she’s typically had before an Olympics.

With Paris just weeks away, her timetable this year has been compressed into only a handful of months of truly healthy workouts. Having raced against a clock for most of her life, now she’s racing against the calendar. Oleksiak says she never thought about quitting, but she did wonder how much more she could endure.

“I tried not to let myself get to the point of being like, oh my gosh, I’m never going to be able to get back,” Oleksiak says. “For me it was always like, no, I’m always in this game.”

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Now 24, she knows her third Olympics will be like no other.

Oleksiak has always made winning medals look easy. In Paris, she’ll be trying to do it the hard way. Having fallen just short of qualifying for her signature individual events, including the 100-metre freestyle, Oleksiak will be leaned on heavily by Canada in the relays. It wasn’t the Paris she hoped for. But if she can help the team get on the podium, Oleksiak would not only add to that historic medal count, it could be her most emotional victory yet

“She’s gone through a lot this year, she’s tough,” said Jeff Julian, her coach in Mission Viejo. “I can’t tell you every swimmer goes through this.”

On a Tuesday morning several weeks before the Olympics are to begin, Oleksiak walks into a coffee shop in the Orange Country area south of Los Angeles. She’s just come from churning early morning laps at the pool and her hair is still slightly damp.

She grabs a table off to the side as customers bustle around her. Here she is completely anonymous, which she doesn’t quite mind. At home, she’s the woman in the Tim Hortons commercial, or the ads for RBC. But no one even glances in her direction as she talks about what it’s like to be Canada’s most-decorated Olympian.

“Sometimes I’ll be at home and I’m like, wait, I have the most medals in Canada? That is so funny to me, you know? Me, of all people,” she says. “I always say that to my friends if I do something stupid or I say something stupid, I’ll be like, that’s me – most-decorated.”

Oleksiak jokes about it now, but her rapid ascent at the 2016 Rio Games came with an unexpected side effect: at a young age, and without much say in the matter, she suddenly had a full-blown career as a swimmer, and a public persona to live up to, which made her teenage years that much more challenging.

Looking back now, it’s something she struggled with and wasn’t fully prepared for. The weight of being so visible, particularly at home in Toronto, was something she couldn’t escape.

“It was just a lot in the sense that I never felt I could totally relax. I would feel like I’d have to act a certain way. Or I would feel like if I was out one night in Toronto and people saw me, I would have to be like, okay, gather yourself. I could never just live life how I typically would, because I was always a little bit nervous,” she says.

She never minded people stopping to chat at the grocery store, or when little girls would ask for autographs or to see her hand tattoos, but she often worried about whether she was living up to the mantle of best-ever.

“People expect you to be a certain way, so you want to kind of live up to those expectations for people because, especially if someone’s meeting you for the first time, or they’re meeting you one time, you really want to be that person for them.”

Heading into the pandemic-delayed 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, Oleksiak put even more pressure on herself, knowing the attention her bid to eclipse the medal record was getting.

But if Rio 2016 was a whirlwind surprise, and Tokyo came laden with expectations, this summer’s Paris Olympics was perhaps the one she was most looking forward to. But soon after the 2022 world championships, her trouble began.

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After returning home from Budapest that summer, where she helped Canada win four relay medals, Oleksiak planned to take a few months off before embarking on her training for Paris in the fall. But when she got back in the pool, she tore the meniscus in her left knee. It was the first major injury she’d suffered, and it set her training back six months.

Then in early 2023, the shoulder problem hit. It’s a neurological scare she hasn’t talked much about publicly in detail.

“One day we were in training camp and I got this pain,” she recalls. “I thought I dislocated my shoulder. But it wasn’t that. I couldn’t really use my shoulder for a few days. And then after that my shoulder just started deteriorating. The muscles went to nothing. If you asked me to hand you a glass of water, I couldn’t even do that, because I didn’t have the muscle to hold anything.”

To put that in perspective, Oleksiak has always been known for her strength, particularly the power she can generate from her arms and shoulders late in races. The best swimmers will pull the water past them as they go, and Oleksiak’s stroke could intimidate the competition. In the 100-metre freestyle in Rio, a down-and-back sprint, she was near last at the turn. But by the time she touched the wall, she’d won gold through sheer force in the last 50 metres.

“I went to so many doctors and they were all like, we don’t know what this is. No one knows what this is,” she says. Eventually she was diagnosed with a neurological condition that had essentially shut down the nerves in her shoulder. For how long? Nobody knew.

“They were like, either you’re going to build the muscle back or the nerves are never going to turn back on and then you’re just not going to get muscle.”

She looks back on this prognosis with the kind of sarcasm that only hindsight can afford.

“So I was like, okay. Cool.”

Eventually, as mysteriously as it came, the condition receded, and her shoulder began to regain strength. But she had lost another several months of full-scale training. Then in November, she tore her left knee again. So in January – with Paris seven months away – she wasted no time, went into surgery once more and had the meniscus removed entirely. She was back training within the week.

“I went from being like, I have two years to get ready, I had this whole plan, everything. And then now the plan is dwindling.”

Frustrations over the injuries, and the added pressure of being at home in Toronto where there were always demands on her time outside the pool – such as events and dinners to attend – led her to look outside the city. That brought her to California. After a decade swimming at the Canadian High Performance Centre in Scarborough, Oleksiak wanted something different. She wanted to go somewhere where she could be under the radar, and just focus on getting healthy and returning to form.

Connections in the swimming world led her to Mission Viejo, a professional team that boasts a long list of champions as alumni, including American Dara Torres, a 12-time Olympic medalist.

Julian, who coaches alongside his wife Kristine, a relay gold medalist for the United States at the 1996 Summer Games, said there was not much debate when Oleksiak got in touch.

The program selects carefully to get the right athletes – not just those who want to go to California for the sun and surf.

“But as soon as you talk to her and you know what she’s doing and why she’s doing it, then it wasn’t really much of a decision,” he said.

Kristine Julian said the shift to a professional program involves Oleksiak taking more ownership over her training, rather than having others dictate her every move.

“I don’t know if handholding is the right word,” Kristine Julian says. “It’s less of me telling you what you have to do and let’s have discussions as adults because this is your career.”

They designed a training routine geared toward giving her body time to repair, adjusting the yardage and the intensity of workouts depending on the situation. When the ankle scare hit, they pivoted once more.

“Injuries, yeah they are hurdles, but sometimes they allow you to work on something else and improve something else at the same time,” Jeff Julian says.

After two very long years, Oleksiak finally feels healthy again. And she refuses to use the injuries as an excuse.

“Now my knee feels really good. There’s little moments where I compensate and I’m scared to use it because I’m a little nervous that it’s going to tear or something,” Oleksiak says. “But that’s something that’s a mental thing. We’ve trained it to be really strong, it has the same capacity as my other knee, and just really trusting it.”

She likes the new perspective the move has brought.

“I feel like for the first time, I’m able to take a breath, and take that step back and be like, what do I want? I’m really enjoying the process of figuring that out.”

If there’s one thing Oleksiak knows she wants, it’s for people to count her out. She’s sat out so many competitions over the past two years that she realizes she’s become a bit of an afterthought, which is fine by her.

“I definitely like pressure in the sense of people doubting me. I feel like it happens every Olympics. People are like, ‘Oh you don’t need to worry about Penny Oleksiak.’ And I’m like, that is exactly where I like to be.”

Or, as Julian puts it, “Penny’s strengths are her competitiveness and her confidence.”

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At Mission Viejo, Oleksiak has been working on starting her races faster, which is where Julian believes she can find the most gains in her performances.

But if there’s one area where the setbacks of the past two years have taken their toll, it may be the back half of her races. At Canadian Olympic trials in May, she missed qualifying for Paris in the 100-metre freestyle by a razor-thin 0.05 seconds.

In that race she went out fast, with a time in the first 50 metres that wasn’t far off her pace at the 2022 world championships, before she was upended by injury. But it was the second half where she lacked some of the finishing power she’s been known to unleash.

But Oleksiak still sees herself as a work in progress. In the months before Paris, she has been pushing forward, trying to make up for lost time.

“I think I’m in a really good spot right now. I’m progressing in a way I want to be progressing. And we’re not focused on injuries any more, we’re much more focused on just getting stronger and faster and better and more powerful.”

She’ll be relied upon in the relay events, where she remains a key ingredient in Canada’s medal hopes, and will likely be tapped to swim more heats than she has in past Olympics, ensuring the squad makes it into the finals.

In some aspects, these Olympics will see Oleksiak pass the torch to Summer McIntosh, the 17-year-old phenom who is projected to contend in as many as five individual races. In doing so, though, Oleksiak will also take on a bigger leadership role on the team, as someone who’s been there before in the relays.

“I’m just really excited to go, and I think we have such an incredible team right now. So to be part of that for me is really huge,” Oleksiak says. “But I also want to see what I can do. I want to see what I’m capable of right now.”

As she matures, Oleksiak has noticed a change in herself from that plucky 16-year-old who took Rio by storm. She didn’t always love the grind of training; she’s a big-moment swimmer. And her coaches always knew that at the major races, Oleksiak would rise to the occasion.

That’s still true, she says. She still loves the lure of the Olympics. And she’s already planning to swim the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games. But she’s found increasingly that she now likes the day-to-day of swimming. Now healthy again, she’s come to appreciate it.

“I think there was a really long time where I hated the process and it was known that, like, we’ve just got to get Penny to the next race. And when she races, she’s happy. And in between that, she hates it, but we’ve just got to get her through it,” Oleksiak says. “Now I love it.”

At one end of the pool at Mission Viejo is a large animated video screen that displays race times during meets. But during the week, as athletes such as Oleksiak count strokes up and down the pool, the screen displays inspirational quotes chosen by the coaches. On this day, its one from The Bard. And this line seems uniquely tailored to Oleksiak.

“Things won are done,” Shakespeare wrote. “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”