Katerine Savard points it out with a smirk: she won’t be the oldest Canadian swimmer at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games next summer.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
“Beyond the age, I tell myself that I have the potential to rank [dans l’équipe], no matter what people say, Savard said Monday. I’ve been here for 13 years. I don’t think there are many people who can say the same. I have the right to be proud of it. »
At 28 – she will be 29 this spring – the Montreal swimmer has qualified for her fifth Long Course World Championships (Budapest, June 18 to 25) and her fourth Commonwealth Games (Birmingham, July 28 to August 8).
In 2018, she refused selection for Australia, missing out on the chance to defend her 100m butterfly title acquired four years earlier in Scotland. She was then in bad shape and in the grip of a great questioning. Last year, she bounced back strongly to compete in her third Olympic Games in Tokyo.
What might have seemed like his Olympic swan song seems less obvious today. For the moment, she refrains from projecting herself as far as Paris in 2024.
“The famous question! Honestly, I don’t ask myself that because setting expectations scares me. I feel like if I give a specific year [pour la retraite], it will hurt me more than anything else. »
In Victoria, Savard faced quite a challenge in the 100 butterfly. The hot favorite was reigning Olympic champion Maggie MacNeil, who effectively won despite a broken elbow suffered a few weeks earlier at the NCAA Championships.
PHOTO KAMRAN JEBREILI, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Maggie McNeil
The second contender was none other than 2016 Olympic silver medalist Penny Oleksiak, who withdrew last year. The 21-year-old Torontonian was finally content to swim a single length before getting out of the water and concentrating on the crawl events (second in the 100m and 200m).
Oleksiak had warned Savard during the warm-up, but the Quebecer still did not expect to see her come out of the water after 50 m.
In the preliminaries, Savard clocked her best time of the year (57.86 s), which boosted her confidence for the final and moved her to eighth place in the world. “It really reassured me. I said to myself: if I ever get beat with weather like this, it will simply be because they are better. »
Behind Mac Neil (57.13s), she recorded a time of 58.01s to keep her main rival, her Olympic teammate Rebecca Smith, at bay in third in 58.76s.
The next day, she realized she was exhausted. However, three weeks earlier in Quebec, she had set similar times without being rested and with a busier competition schedule.
The fact that these are tests, that there is an issue, I was so stressed in the previous days. I put a lot of pressure on myself. Unintentionally, it burned me.
Katerine Savard
With better management of her emotions, Savard believes she could get closer to her personal best of 57.27s, achieved in 2014.
“Between 2016 and 2021, my best time was 1 min 01, 1 min 02. I was really far. At the Olympics, I did 57.5. There, it’s been several times that I approach. I can afford to believe it. »
Fifth at the 2015 World Championships, the native of Pont-Rouge is aiming for the semi-final at the World Championships in Budapest. “That’s what’s realistic for me. For the rest, we’ll see. The absence of Mac Neil, Sweden’s Sarah Sjöstrom and Australia’s Emma McKeon will considerably change the portrait of this race in Hungary.
Despite her fatigue, Savard finished fourth in both the 100m and 200m freestyle, qualifying her for those events at the Worlds and the Commonwealth Games.
Savard will not be alone for these competitions: her CAMO teammate Mary-Sophie Harvey also earned her ticket by finishing second in the 200m individual medley. The athlete from Trois-Rivières improved by almost a second on his own provincial record set three weeks earlier in Quebec. She is ranked seventh in the world for the 2021-2022 season. Limited to the preliminaries of the 4 X 200 m relay at the Tokyo Games, she will finally have the opportunity to dive for an individual event in a major championship.
Another object of celebration for Savard: the selection of two other Quebecers in the Canadian teams. Patrick Hussey (Worlds and Commonwealth Games) and Eric Brown (Commonwealth), two representatives of the Pointe-Claire Club, will be there next summer. Brown improved her provincial records in the 400m, 800m and 1,500m, while Hussey won the 200m butterfly. James Dergousoff, a British Columbian who swims at Laval University, was also selected.
Swimming Canada has announced the nomination of 31 athletes for the World Para Swimming Championships scheduled in Portugal in June. Paralympic medalists Aurélie Rivard and Nicolas-Guy Turbide will lead a delegation, nearly a third of which comes from Quebec.