Swimming | The joys of Mary-Sophie Harvey

(Paris) Mary-Sophie Harvey was more than just hot. She was scared. Leaning on the railing overlooking the La Défense Arena pool, she followed the second semi-final of the 200m freestyle with bouts of anxiety on Sunday evening.

Two minutes earlier, she had swum her own semifinal in the fourth lane, reserved for the second-fastest swimmer in the heats. Pumped up, she had imagined herself sailing toward “a good lane” for the final of the Paris Olympics, that is, somewhere in the center, right in the thick of the fight for the podium.

In the corridors, Harvey found the time long before her name was called by the announcer. As she walked toward Block 4, she gave the camera a few tense goodbyes and exhaled all her air in one breath. She tried to banish her nervousness by kneeling down to splash herself with water, her usual ritual. She then appeared to smile as she looked into the distance, but it may have been an illusion.

When silence fell just before the starting beep, a “Come on Mary!” rang out in the immense arena, which was still vibrating from the deafening triumph of King Léon Marchand. It was the voice of Greg Arkhurst, the Quebecer’s coach, posted at the opposite extreme.

Harvey did as usual, namely to start in full control, giving herself the mission of staying at the level of her neighbor, the Chinese Li Bingjie. She was blind to the appreciable priority that her three rivals had built up on the other side…

Seventh at the halfway point, she felt the urgency of the situation. Her acceleration allowed her to overtake several competitors. At the touchline, the red light on her cone came on, but the Quebecer was only third. Her time of 1 min 56.37 was a hair slower than the one from the morning and almost a second off her personal best.

That’s where her ordeal began: the swimmer was reduced to following the second wave, hoping that no more than five rivals would do better than her. That’s exactly what happened. A tenth less and the American Erin Gemmell relegated her to ninth place, out of the final. Phew!

Her sigh of relief said it all. Realizing that she had just avoided a major blow, she magically regained her good mood, giving her two thumbs up as she turned around.

Historical

The facts are indisputable: Mary-Sophie Harvey will become on Monday evening the first Quebec swimmer since Guylaine Cloutier, 6^e 100m breaststroke in Atlanta, to compete in an individual Olympic final.

“I don’t remember the last time that happened,” she responded before the old journalist from The Press do not inform him. ” In 1996 ? Let’s gooooo! »

More seriously, she said she was grateful to feel such support in Quebec. “I am proud, even to speak French here with the officials. I greet them in the morning and they immediately smile. I feel good here and I feel that I have Quebec behind me. It really warms my heart to represent it on the international stage, hoping to inspire young people a little.”

Harvey admitted that her race “wasn’t great.” “I tried to work on the first 100m and focus more on the right side, the one of the Chinese who had started well this morning. It caught me off guard. I kind of neglected the left side and she didn’t start. Then I was like: OK, I have to get into the final!”

The swimmer from the Montreal CAMO club will therefore inherit lane 8 for the race scheduled for 3:41 p.m. (EST). “I will only have one side to watch because I am in the culvert. That means I won’t make a mistake! Of course I would have liked to have a better lane, but we will take it.”

Australians Ariarne Titmus (1:54.64) and Mollie O’Callaghan (1:54.70), the reigning Olympic and world champions respectively, posted the two fastest times of the evening in the second heat.

Born into a family of swimmers in Trois-Rivières, Harvey counts on the presence of several relatives in the City of Lights.

Her German fiancé Jerome Heidrich, who trains in California at the same club as Penny Oleksiak, proposed to her during a short getaway to the south of France two weeks before the Games. Heidrich is accompanying his future mother-in-law, Stéphanie Matte, a former member of the Rouge et Or team at Université Laval.

The woman Mary-Sophie Harvey describes as her “rock” follows her daughter’s career closely. “There are positives and negatives to having a mother who is a swimmer!” she emphasized. “My mother will know if I have a bad race. She will tell me: yeah, you had a hard time in the last 50 [rires] ! It can be a little difficult sometimes.”

She put her foot down around 13 or 14 years old: “I’m very direct in life. I told her: I don’t need another coach, I need a mother. Since then, she has really taken that to heart. She is there in good times and bad. But that won’t stop her from telling me: yeah, you had a hard time in the last 50…”

Her father, André Harvey, a former Rouge et Or sprinter, is also a keen observer. He was therefore not at all worried when his daughter fell seriously behind in the first portion of her preliminary heat in the morning.

In the stands, about fifteen French supporters had lined up behind Mary-Sophie after fraternizing with André and his partner Sandra Bordeleau, easily identifiable by their tank tops bearing a maple leaf and the swimmer’s full name on the back. Suddenly, they fell silent.

“Don’t worry, it’s normal, she always does that,” André Harvey reassured them. His daughter gradually closed the gap on Titmus, in the next line, before beating her by two hundredths on the touchline, which brought the French back into line.

Coming out of the water, she stuck her tongue out at the camera. “That’s her clown side, it comes from me!” smiled the father with the imposing build.

For Monday night’s finale, André Harvey and Sandra Bordeleau will be bringing out the big guns: Superman’s straitjackets, Mary-Sophie Harvey’s favorite superhero… and especially her dad’s.

After the morning coffee and the evening energy drink that seem to have given her wings, will the swimmer be invested with superhuman strength that will make her fly to the podium?