In a Q-and-A with the National Post, one of Canada’s young rising talents Emily Overholt spoke about her swims at the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto and the Rio Olympics.
Overholt talked about what drives her, and offers some words about pushing through when the going gets tough. “As an athlete, there are definitely times when it’s hard to stay motivated, but thinking about your end goal, and for swimmers that’s definitely the Olympics, that’s the biggest meet there is,” she said in her Q-and-A. “Thinking about that, instead of thinking about how much you don’t want to go to practice or whatever it is, that really helps to motivate you and makes all the little decisions along the way really easy.”
She also talked about her training, and what she’s working on as Rio is just two months away. “We swim about 24, 25 hours a week, so we spend a lot of time in the water, obviously. As an individual medley swimmer, you have to get a little bit of everything in, so I’ve a specific breaststroke coach, Joseph Nagy, I swim with him twice a week. And then a lot of longer distance freestyle sets to get the endurance. I work a lot on backstroke and breaststroke, because those are my weakest strokes …”
Overholt is part of a young and incredibly talented group of swimmers who are making a name for Canada in the sport. “I think Canadian swimming is doing really well and everyone is stepping up their game, as well. We’ll be in the mix and we’ll see what happens.” With the rise of Santo Condorelli and several other NCAA stars, along with the staggering improvement of youngsters like Javier Acevedo, Taylor Ruck, Penny Oleksiak, and Markus Thormeyer, Canada certainly has a bright future. Not usually seen as a big medal threat come Olympic time, the Canadians could find themselves in hot pursuit of hardware in a couple relays and certainly individual events in August.