Penny Oleksiak of Canada has been making her rounds since winning four medals at the Rio Olympics. In the past three days she has thrown out the first pitch for the MLB’s Blue Jays and tossed the coin for a Canadian Football League (CFL) game between the Toronto Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger-Cats. The six-foot-one 16-year-old—who won’t turn 17 until June 13th—won gold in the 100m Free in Olympic record time (in a tie with USA’s Simone Manuel), silver in the 100m Fly (ahead of USA’s Dana Vollmer), and two bronze medals in the 400 and 800 Free Relays. On account of her stellar swims, Oleksiak was honored as her nation’s flag bearer for the closing ceremonies. She is now Canada’s youngest Olympic champion, not to mention Canada’s only athlete to ever win four medals in the same Summer Olympics.
This past Friday, September 9th, Oleksiak threw out the ceremonial first pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays. Although the Blue Jay’s Twitter account called her pitch “great,” there is no news for how it stacked up to Ledecky’s heater.
4-time Olympic medalist in Rio, @SwimmingCanada's @OleksiakPenny threw out a great ceremonial first pitch today! pic.twitter.com/8bdICIG0eL
— Blue Jays (@BlueJays) September 9, 2016
On Sunday, September 11th, Oleksiak changed professional sporting venues and opted for the football field. She flipped the coin before a CFL game between the Toronto Argonauts and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Oleksiak’s home team, the Argos, got the win 33-21.
.@OleksiakPenny out here for the coin toss today! #CFLGameDay pic.twitter.com/dUPgM0jjA6
— CFL (@CFL) September 11, 2016
@OleksiakPenny with the coin toss at tonight's game! ????????????#Argos #CFLGameDay pic.twitter.com/5Rm518hr9u
— Toronto Argonauts (@TorontoArgos) September 11, 2016
After making these appearances, Oleksiak returned to high school at Monarch Park Collegiate Institute where she has just started Grade 11. She recently commented that she looks forward to getting back to her normal life.
I was in Edmonton during the Olympics and all the locals were smitten with her. I heard several refer to her as “our sweet Penny”. Made me smile because they adopted her in the true spirit of patriotism.
She is a great ambassador for Canada
The best thing:
She won’t have to choose between staying “amateur” or “professional”!!
She may change her heart and will do same thing that Missy Franklin has done at her age: to choose swimming for United States. She has a duel citizenship that allows her doing that.
I don’t believe Missy ever swam for Canada, and then switched to the USA. She was solely a USA swimmer.
I honestly don’t think there is even a remote chance that Penny would switch countries to swim for the USA.
That is correct, Franklin had the CAN option due to her parents but she has always been domiciled in the USA and never at any point represented CAN.
Whilst Oleksiak’s father is American born giving her that option, she has always been domiciled in CAN. IF she were to make such as switch, it would involve a 2 year “time out” from international competition. At this point, IS there really a catalyst for her making such a switch ….. please elucidate if you can provide one ?
Initially my comment was a teasing in response to the Zika Ziki’s “amateur-professional” post. But after reading your comments I started to think that if to forget for a moment about bureaucratic obstacles she could make more earnings when being the great star of American swimming. For sure more than Franklin did. The media likes her personality and nice looking and her swimming achievements are already comparable to Franklin’s ones.
But she is the Canadian patriot who beared Canadian Flag at Olympic Games. There is no other way.
She’s awesome
Well-earned accolades. Breakout swimmer of the year for sure. And such a confident racer, seemingly unflappable. She was probably my favorite performer in Rio. I wish her a long, healthy and happy career.
After five impressive world records the performance of Penny Oleksiak at this Olympics was the most amazing thing to watch in women’s swimming:
the second to Sarah Sjostrom at fly, two back to back 52.7 at 100 free (Sarah’s pb is 52.67), 1:54.9 split at 200 free. And all these highest level unexpected performances were done with the smile and confidence. There were no Simone Manuel’s tears about being that fast, just a surprise that that is the gold medal winning time.
How nice it is to be sixteen years old. Look at this happy, nice looking, smiling, successful girl.
But there is plenty of intImidation with what she is doing. Look at her splits and styles… Read more »
Why the dislikes about this post when he is just praising her like the other posts are to?!?!
Don’t worry, BEACHBUMJ343. Those are my friends who got disappointed of me being too shy with praising of Penny Oleksiak 🙂 But my post was already too long to provide not emotional but quantitative analysis of this phenomenon. One will be really surprised when making good look at details of her progress. I will do it if it is more appropriate thread.
She seems to be enjoying all the new celebrity-life fun stuff, but still seems very-well grounded by her family and friends and comes across a typical (and cool) teenager still doing normal teen stuff. No need to burn her out now with swimming/training too much and robbing her of her teenage years, especially if she is expecting to swim through the next 2 Olympics. The good thing for her that she has got her Olympic medals early in her career, so she doesn’t have to feel any more pressure about winning her first Olympic medals. And I think her head is on so straight, so I don’t she won’t feel much pressure in having to defend.
Expect her to… Read more »
At the Australian Age Group 14-year-old championship, she won gold in the 100m and 200m freestyle, 100m and 200m butterfly, and the 200m individual medley, plus three silvers and two bronzes in individual events (at least one of those other medals was in backstroke). With her rate of improvement (more than 2 seconds faster in both the 100m free and 100m butterfly since the World Juniors in February, 2016), it’ll be exciting to see where she can go from here.
Great sports family. Brother plays for Dallas Stars in NHL
Maybe she’ll be asked to drop the puck!