The medals still have their shine when they arrive back on Canadian soil and the swimmers who earned them will be glowing along with them.
“I think that there is no ceiling with us,” Penny Oleksiak said in a Zoom interview from Tokyo hours before the return journey began. “The sky is the limit with us.
Canada’s Maggie Mac Neil reacts after taking gold in the final of the women’s 100m butterfly swimming event.“And then we retain the Pennies and the Maggies and the Kylies on the podium for as long as we can so they can maximize their performance of being world-class athletes.” And all this was accomplished following trying conditions, exacerbated by the fact that Canadian swimmers were hit harder by quarantine restrictions than most of the top competitors around the world.
“They’re already talking about Paris without me saying ‘What about Paris?'” Atkinson said. “The reliability and sustained performance level is now something that is self-driven from within the athletes..Article contentBrent Hayden, the 37-year-old who came out of retirement to compete in a fourth Olympics, remembers Athens in 2004 when Canada was shut out at the pool. Beijing and London weren’t much better, with just three combined medals earned.
The transformation began when Atkinson was recruited following the London Games and was charged with taking a program in tatters and returning it to prominence on the international scene. Hayden was retiring, London had yielded just two medals and fewer than eight Canadian swimmers were ranked in the top eight in the world.
“I really hope the results here motivate the next generation of athletes when they get back in the pool when the pools of the country open.”
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