Seeing my children try to navigate their way through various pools across western Canada this summer has forced me to reconsider my distaste for swimming as a competitive sport, mode of transportation and method for taking my kids down a peg or two.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being in the water. As a child in Alberta, I went through the different levels of aquatic training, earning all the colourful swim badges along the way: Yellow, Orange, Stop Peeing In the Pool, Red, Maroon, Blue, Uncontrollable Boyhood Urges at the Worst Possible Moment, Green, Grey, No You’re Not Freaking Done Yet, Teal, White and, finally, Free Willy.
We learned a lot of useless crap like the butterfly stroke, treading water and CPR, but it was a good enough education to make me feel comfortable doing normal Prairie lake activities like water skiing, freezing, not catching fish and mispronouncing the word “buoy.” As an adult, however, I’ve come to realize that my swimming skills were never really that great, and they’re even worse now that I’m up to about 12% BMI (Bacon Mass Index).
A few years ago, some friends and I were doing sensible things at English Bay beach like ogling strangers and misreading the real estate market when someone suggested we have a swimming race. One friend, a former lifeguard, ripped off the 200 m distance in a flash. My other pals weren’t far behind. I finished last, having been passed by a pack of sporty looking sea cucumbers.
It’s not that I can’t swim to save my life, it’s just that I now feel much more comfortable in the water if I can always put one foot on the bottom and one hand on a beer.
Maybe it’s those personal shortcomings that have led to my distaste for swimming as a competitive sport. Or maybe it’s just Michael Phelps. Whatever the reason, I’m always bummed during the Olympics when the track and field competition — incredible athletes testing themselves in the purest forms of movement — ends and then the teenagers start preening around the pool in their swim parkas. I don’t trust a sport where 17-year-olds can routinely dive right in and smoke 27-year-olds, or someone can set world records out of nowhere just by using a new space-age fabric, or someone can be Ryan Lochte.
But watching my two boys in the pool has given me a new appreciation of swimming and its competitive spirit. My older son, about to turn seven, is a confident young fellow, fond of listing off all of the things that he is better at than everyone else in the world, particularly his four-year-old brother. That list includes, in his mind at least, important skills such as running faster, reading better, counting higher, dabbing more, getting to sleep faster and smelling worse.
The one place where he can’t claim supremacy is in the pool; his younger brother is, at the moment, a better swimmer than he is, and my older son knows it. There’s no wiggle room there. The young one is not a budding Penny Oleksiak but he is quite comfortable jumping off the diving board in the deep end and making his way to the wall. If the older one tried to do the same, I’d be fishing him off the bottom. Well, at least I’d send some sea cucumbers.
No other sport is so cut and dried about the consequences of failure. You could put a paralyzed possum into the 100 m sprint final in track and field and it wouldn’t win — it would place sixth once the drug suspensions are handed out — but it wouldn’t suffer mortal damage either. Put that same marsupial into the 100 m backstroke final and it is going to die.
There’s no hiding in the pool, and my older son knows it and happily admits to anyone who will listen that his younger brother is a better swimmer. I like the humility that swimming has given him.
It’s a sport with real stakes. Either you’re keeping your head above water or you’re just playing possum.
Andy Prest is the sports editor of the North Shore News.
[email protected] • @Sports_Andy
