Shades of Victor Davis in the long, strange Olympic journey of Santo Condorelli

RIO DE JANEIRO - A little bit of Victor Davis lurks inside the vagabond soul of Santo Condorelli.

Like the late Canadian swimming star of the 1980s, the 21-year-old Condorelli has a restless, even rebellious side, and knows how to make an entrance. And Wednesday night at the Olympic Aquatic Centre he faces the swim he’s waited for all his life in the 100-metre freestyle final.

Condorelli signalled his readiness Tuesday, touching in 47.93 seconds for the distance. But as much as that eye-catching time, it was his arrival poolside that stood out. The men’s 100-metre free at an Olympic Games oozes testosterone, and Condorelli, who boxed as a pre-teen in Portland, Oregon, brought it big: hooded and head down and pacing like a heavyweight before a championship bout. There was a quick, surreptitious middle-finger salute - to his father Joseph, actually, a ritual they’ve shared going back to adolescence and now as much a personal trademark as Davis’s legendary chair-kick in front of HRH Elizabeth - and after peeling the layers off he marked out his territory at the base of the No. 3 starting block with a gigantic hork on the pool deck.

A couple of palmed splashes of water and a quick pounding of the chest - yes, he looks ready. He looks as if made for it. And oh, how Canadian swimming could use a Victor Davis figure now to join the likes of Penny Oleksiak, Kylie Masse and the rest of the women of this young team who've in these last few days shown such promise and grit in the Olympic pool.

Condorelli is in position to become the first Canadian male swimmer to collect a medal at the Rio Games when he competes in the 100-metre freestyle final Wednesday night.

“He’s fearless,” Condorelli's longtime coach Coley Stickels says. “He doesn’t get involved with the head games other swimmers try.”  

It wasn’t always this way. Condorelli’s taken a less-travelled path getting here, full of stops and starts. Born in Japan, raised in the U.S., at age seven his parents divorced. He boxed for a while, bursting into tears in his first fight as a 12-year-old, he says. He wrestled, too, but his real aptitude was for water as he bounced from Oregon and on to Florida for boarding school and a swimming scholarship at USC. Through it all, Condorelli’s most steadfast companion was an Olympic dream.

The fork in the road came three years ago, when he turned down an invite to a U.S. junior national swim-team camp that would have sealed his eligibility to south of the border. Instead, bridling at an American team selection process that determined national-team spots two years out and carrying dual citizenship thanks to his mother Tonya in Kenora, Ont., he decided to put the Maple Leaf on his swimsuit -- while feeling beholden to none but himself and his ambition.

“I have to be careful what I say - I don’t want to seem non-patriotic to my mother’s country, or to the States, where I’ve lived all my life, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a real strong tie to each,” he said in April, after the Olympic trials. “I didn’t visit Canada a lot, only maybe twice to visit family here. In the States my father’s not really patriotic - my grandfather was in the navy, but that was the extent of it. He never ingrained in me the American patriot or anything.

“It was just me wanting to go to the Olympics.”

In May of last year, Condorelli began to prepare in earnest, deferring this school year from his scholarship at the University of Southern California. He moved in with his longtime coach Stickels and family in Santa Clarita, arriving “very out of shape,” in Stickels’ reckoning. He quickly got down to business, and that in itself was something different for Condorelli, who admits he frittered away his first year at USC, unready and overwhelmed by the demands and pressures of a full scholarship -- nothing new there, says Stickels, who first coached Condorelli in Portland long ago.

“As an age-grouper he was a hard kid to deal with - he was very talented at swimming but I couldn’t really tell if he cared for the work,” said Stickels. “When he finally came and lived with me, he finally put the work in - and he liked it.”

Come last August, Condorelli’s 47.9 relay leg at the Pan Ams last summer was the breakthrough that told him and everyone else in the Canadian camp that he belonged here. Tuesday here was the affirmation. Wednesday may well bring the exclamation point -- a chance to join Davis among the gallery of Canadian pool sharks who seized their Olympic moment.