How Penny Oleksiak started to the top of the Olympic podium, and Canadian sports

RIO DE JANEIRO - With a Maple Leaf flag on her shoulders and fresh gold draped around her neck, Penny Oleksiak clambered up from the pool deck to seek out the one person in the Olympic Aquatic Centre house who ignited her remarkable explosion as Canada’s greatest Summer Olympian: her big sister.

Penny was dazed, but definitely not confused, the glow on her 16-year-old face a nice match for the glint of the metal below. Hayley was bawling, overcome. They were finally together, after perhaps the most remarkable six nights of Olympic sport Canada has ever witnessed. Oleksiak came here as a relative unknown, an immensely promising swimmer getting her very first taste of full international racing, a place ruled by names like Phelps and Ledecky. She will leave as the greatest summer Olympian to ever suit up for Canada at a single Games.

“It’s been pretty crazy - nothing I’ve really experienced before,” she said later.

We now know what everyone in this Team Canada has known for some time: Penny Oleksiak, the one known as The Child around the Canadian swim locker room for her still-a-teenager ways, hates to lose.

And big sis Hayley started it all.

“I remember when I was younger I used to always want to go for bike rides with her and I’d want to beat her on the bike,” Oleksiak said early Friday morning. “We’d always work out together. And the trainer would always be like, ‘oh yeah, look at your sister’s weight, look at what she’s lifting.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m six years younger -- but when I’m her age I’m gonna try and lift that.’”

[ Photos: History of Team Canada at the Summer Olympics ]

Ask any of her teammates or coaches and they’ve seen that fire inside her every time they practice race. “She just loves to race. She’s always been a great racer,” says team leader John Atkinson.

Answers Oleksiak: “I’ve always wanted to win, I guess, which is kinda weird to say. It’s just, I get a little agitated when I don’t.”

Maybe that’s why she felt gathering nerves here as she came closer and closer, with a silver in the 100 fly and a couple of bronze relay medals. Finally the golden piece fell into place when she touched the wall in a rare dead-heat with American Simone Manuel, who carried a little history of her own as the first African-American female swimmer to hit such heights.

By now, we shouldn’t be surprised. Every night out here, Oleksiak has thrown down markers, raising her game as she adjusted and thrived amid the intense whirlwind that is the Olympics. (She’s not done yet, either, slated to swim the butterfly leg in Saturday’s IM relay.)

In this 100 freestyle competition, she was the model of progression, seeing nothing but the feet of her Australian rival, the defending Olympic medalist Cate Campbell, in their shared heat. The margin closed to a 1/100th of a second eyeblink in the semi. And then came this shared gold, in a race during which she made the single turn at 50 metres nearly a second off the pace and seventh in the field of eight.

She had them right where she wanted.

After touching the wall with a homeward 50 metres half a second faster than anyone else, she waited a full 25 seconds before turning around to face the scoreboard’s verdict. Her eyes widened, and her mouth formed in a perfect O for Olympic gold. O for Olympic record. O for OMG!

What followed was a moment as much about a family's journey as it was about up early mornings for hard training sessions with her teammates, with parents Alison and Richard alongside Hayley waiting their turn, and Jamie, the hard-nosed, gigantic NHLer, delivering an all-shoulders, big brother’s embrace that looked well rehearsed.

“We don’t hug a lot,” Oleksiak said with a laugh, “and whenever we do my mom is saying, ‘Penny, hug your brother! He’s leaving for a year, you’ve gotta give him a hug.’ And I’m like, ‘Ohhh, okay, fine’ … But my sister and I, we hug all the time.”

She smiled again, history hanging around her neck, this first O Canada of the Games fresh in everyone's mind, and who knows what’s to come - at 16, this Child shall lead, you’d think, for as many more years to come as she wants and is able.

That's for later. For now, she was just doing what she's done every time here: made the moment her own, driven by those bike rides and weights sessions with Hayley.

“I love the fact that I’ve made my family super proud of me," she said. "It’s always something that I wanted to do.”

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