Canada's Josh Liendo reacts after competing in a semi-final heat of the men's 100m butterfly swimming event during the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka on July 28, 2023.FRANCOIS-XAVIER MARIT/AFP/Getty Images
On the eve of the Paris Olympics, Swimming Canada has created a problem for itself.
Over the past two Summer Games, the Canadians have racked up 12 medals in the pool, and with every new Olympics come heightened expectations. It’s the burden of recent success.
To put those numbers in perspective, since Canada started competing in Olympic swimming in 1908, more than one-fifth of the country’s medals have come in the past eight years.
Asked Wednesday how he expects the team to fare when the events kick off Saturday, Swimming Canada high-performance director John Atkinson used the six-medal performances of the past two Summer Games as a benchmark.
“I’ll phrase it this way: six in Rio, six in Tokyo, so it’s got to be six-plus,” Atkinson said in Paris.
“And where the ‘plus’ goes is always very difficult, because not only is our performance improved, but the rest of the world’s performance continues to improve.”
Each of the 12 medals were won by Canada’s women. While Summer McIntosh, Maggie Mac Neil and a handful of others still shoulder the bulk of Canada’s medal hopes in Paris, the most obvious area for untapped growth is on the men’s side of the equation.
The men haven’t won a medal since the 2012 London Summer Games, when Ryan Cochrane claimed silver in the 1,500-metre freestyle and Brent Hayden took bronze in the 100-metre freestyle.
“The guys always talk about it. Watching the success of the women, we want that,” said Josh Liendo, who heads to Paris the top-ranked swimmer in the 100-metre butterfly.
Finlay Knox celebrates winning the men's 200m IM at the Canadian Olympic Swim Trials in Toronto on May 18.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
His teammate Finlay Knox agrees.
“We’ve seen the women do it year in, year out. For us it’s really just like, they’re not doing anything different than what we’re doing – so why can’t we do it?” Knox said.
The dormancy that has cursed the men’s program started when Cochrane and Hayden began to age out of their primes and there wasn’t a generation of male swimmers immediately able to step up.
“The underbelly of the men’s program wasn’t actually that strong when you took Ryan and Brent away,” Atkinson said.
But it’s a problem Swimming Canada thinks it has started to rectify with the emergence of swimmers like Liendo, 21, and Knox, 23, who have been percolating in the system since they were teenagers and are now ready to contend.
Liendo, an NCAA Champion at the University of Florida last year, has a shot at the podium in several sprint races. Knox, who won a world championship in the 200-metre medley, has also given the men’s team a level of talent not seen in a while.
Part of the challenge is that top male swimmers take longer to develop. And several top female swimmers have exploded on the scene in their mid-teens – as seen in Penny Oleksiak’s four-medal outburst as a 16-year-old at the 2016 Rio Olympics, or McIntosh’s lofty ambitions at age 17 in Paris.
Most male swimmers develop Olympic-level power once they’re fully grown. As Atkinson points out, most of the men swimming finals in Paris will be 24 or 25, while women can reach top velocity a lot earlier.
“It takes longer to build the men’s program back because you can’t make boys men overnight,” Atkinson said.
After the success of the women’s program in 2016, Swimming Canada held a camp in Trinidad in 2018 to help plant the seeds of success in its men’s ranks.
Canadian Mark Tewksbury of Calgary rejoices after capturing the Olympic Gold in the Men's 100m Backstroke in Barcelona in the 1992 Summer Olympics.The Canadian Press
Mark Tewksbury, who won gold at the 1992 Olympics, spoke at that camp, talking about what it takes to win, from training better to knowing how to compete, and how to build team cohesion. In that audience were younger versions of Liendo and Knox.
Liendo never forgot the wisdom Tewksbury imparted. He and Knox have said the men’s team has grown tired of being left out of the medal count and is looking to fix that.
“Obviously we don’t have as much experience, so we’re kind of paving our way,” Knox said.
Tewksbury believes the program has a natural ebb and flow to it, and that recent years don’t necessarily suggest Canada is better at developing female swimmers than men.
“I think that the program, it evolves, and sometimes the women’s side goes and then the men’s follows. And sometimes the men’s side goes and the women’s follows. But it’s two parts of the same machine,” Tewksbury said.
Before the women began to win in 2016, it had been 20 years since Marianne Limpert took home the last medal by a female for Canada, at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games.
But medals have a way of feeding each other, Tewksbury said.
“It all needs the success, or the ability, to see somebody winning to really help you go, ‘Oh my gosh, like, I’m a Canadian, I could win,’” he said.
With athletes like Liendo in the pipeline, Atkinson said the program has been projecting for a while that if a men’s medal breakthrough came, it would be in 2024.
“We always said that at Paris we would have men able to compete. And they sure are able to compete,” he said. “We’ll see how far we get with them.”
He can already feel the heat being turned up in Paris. “The closer you get, the temperature rises.”