The question is: how to keep Penny Oleksiak happy, healthy and swimming fast?
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No, that’s not an exaggeration.
No Canadian had ever won four medals at a summer Olympics, until Penny Oleksiak.
It’s Champagne Papi, also known as Toronto rapper Drake, the millennial made clear she wanted to fête her wins with, specifically at his concert in their shared hometown in October. Still, he couldn’t help but exude optimism about where Canada appears headed in swimming.
The Canadian women’s 4×100-metre freestyle relay team celebrates their bronze medal finish, Saturday, Aug. 6, 2016. Can Oleksiak? Or will Rio be what London was to the American sensation Missy Franklin, who won five medals at age 17 and was a near nonentity at 21?
Still, it’s an understatement to say that Oleksiak is off to a good start.
Oleksiak, who is already being hailed as one of the most decorated athletes in Canadian history, has a long career ahead of her.
“The development of males can be later, very rarely do you see a 16-year-old male athlete in an Olympic games”, Atkinson said. I don’t want to say overwhelming but just out of the blue, I guess.
“Now, this is usually the time of year when we get that anyway, but I do notice a little more buzz”, he said.
Oleksiak and Manuel, both won the gold by setting a new Olympic record of 52.70 seconds for 100-meter freestyle after a tie.
Atkinson ran some numbers by us Sunday and they weren’t the kind of numbers administrators used to come up with in the bad old days while Canadian female swimmers were winning just two medals, total, in the seven Olympics from 1988 through 2012.
Maybe Titley. In 2013, after being hired by Swimming Canada, Titley walked off a plane and onto a pool deck, watched for a few minutes, and asked them to pull the long, lanky 12-year-old in the outside lane out of the water.
She is still a kid, if a mature one, and hey, the great Elaine Tanner was 17 when she had her matchless three-medal performance at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico.
Led by the breakout performance of 16-year-old phenom Penny Oleksiak, Canada came back with a vengeance in Rio.
“I think I would totally stick around if I was the flagbearer”.
I once again congratulate Penny and wish the rest of Team Canada all the best as competition continues in Rio until August 21.
“I love the fact that I’ve made my family super proud of me, and it’s always something that I want to do, and it just means a lot that my brother and sister were here, too”.
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Since her string of wins, Oleksiak’s Twitter following has swelled from about 700 to more than 40,000 thousand – including a famous fellow Torontonian, Drake.
