About Half of Canada’s Paris 2024 Olympic Swim Team Does Not Train in Canada

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Canada’s coaching staff selection procedures received full spotlight this week when the country’s only defending Olympic gold medalist in swimming Maggie MacNeil made a public stand in favor of adding her coach Rick Bishop to Swimming Canada’s coaching staff after she learned that he would not be on the coaching staff for any other Olympic teams this summer.

The issue is whether coaches who work outside of Canada should be eligible to be on the Canadian Olympic Team coaching staff.

Ultimately, Bishop was not announced as a member of that staff, though teenage superstar Summer McIntosh will have her American coach Brent Arckey there as a as a coach (last year he was invited as a “personal support professional,” a careful title that differentiates him from the standard “team coach”).

Her mom Jill was a 1984 Canadian Olympian and her dad Greg is an Executive Vice President at Iron Mountain, a document management company that does over $5 billion a year in revenue, so the McIntosh family has the opportunity for a lot of influence from more-than-one direction.

Most countries of the world do allow foreign coaches on their staffs. For many of the major swimming nations like the US, Great Britain, China, Japan, and Australia, it’s not an issue because the overwhelming majority of their teams are home-grown. Some, like the U.S., do have citizenship requirements – and U.S. coaches must be registered coaches of USA Swimming – but it hasn’t really come up in recent memory.

But many nations’ Olympic coaching staffs are littered with coaches from the above-mentioned countries, where most of their top swimmers train.

That is less-restrictive than Canada’s rules, which read in part:

Those rules prevent, for example, a coach from filling out the paperwork and paying the fee and being eligible because of resident and achievement requirements.

Canada occupies a unique position in swimming. They are considered a ‘major swimming nation,’ finishing 6th on the medals table at the World Championships; but the majority of their best swimmers train internationally.

Here’s the breakdown of the Olympic Team (as best as public information allows). In total, 14 members prepared for Trials training mostly in other countries, while four are heading to the US next year. Javier Acevedo went to college at Georgia but has been back in Canada for a while, while Angus was born and raised in the US, attended college there, but returned to Canada to train at the High Performance Centre in Ontario in 2022:

Angus is probably the best shining example for Canada to hold up of a swimmer who trained most of her life in the U.S., but didn’t break through until training in Canada.

This creates a difficult duality for Canada. On the one hand, the commitment to the Olympic Team is to put them in the best position to win medals in Paris this summer, which probably includes sending the top swimmers’ personal coaches. On the other hand, they have an obligation to the dues-paying (and tax-paying, remembering that the Olympic movement in Canada is funded by tax money) membership to encourage the development of the sport domestically.

This is a challenge that most large swimming nations face – and one I’ve pointed out as a huge paradoxical problem in a sport where the line between “age grouper” and “professional” is so blurred.

If Swimming Canada started to fill their roster with American coaches, a ‘problem’ (if you view it that way, which you don’t have to) could snowball. A problem of both experience, educational opportunities, resources, and perception of Canadian coaches leading to even more athletes going abroad.

Many of the swimmers on the team will have coaches at the meet. Josh Liendo, for example, trains under Anthony Nesty, who is the head coach of the men’s team for Team USA.

Canada has a good staff that should be able to execute the instructions of personal coaches in the run-up to the games, but that doesn’t answer the bigger existential question. Many of these coaches are Americans too. Both Darren Ward and Byron MacDonald were born in the US to Canadian parents, moved to Canada as young adults, and never left.

Ironically, American could wind up ‘solving this problem’ for Canada. If some of the worse potential outcomes of the NCAA’s current generational questions about paying athletes come true, NCAA Swimming & Diving might come out looking more like the Canadian U Sports system. With so much of the Canadian international training tied up in the opportunities and resources available via the NCAA system, that might make staying home in the U Sports system more attractive to more athletes.

Where is Canada’s Olympic Team Training?