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Kelowna’s Kierra Smith is inching closer to cracking Canada’s Olympic swim team roster.
After propelling herself to victory in the 200-metre breaststroke at the Western Canadian Open in Winnipeg on the weekend with a Rio-worthy time of 2:26.15, Smith knows she’s headed in the right direction.
She’s also acutely aware she isn’t there quite yet.
Smith, 22, has proven on more than one occasion that she can race at the speed worthy of a 2016 Olympic berth, but Smith knows those performances don’t mean anything until they show up on the scoreboard at the Olympic trials in Toronto April 5-10.
She’ll have to not only win the 200 breaststroke event at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Complex, but once again swim faster than the Olympic qualifying standard in order to officially make the Canadian Olympic squad.
“I’m really happy with where I’m at, but it really means nothing right now, except to me,” said Smith who also swam to first place in the 200 and 400 individual medley events in Winnipeg on the weekend. “Going into Toronto, it just gives me peace of mind that I can swim below the Olympic qualifying time. I should be there in the summer. I’ll be really disappointed if I’m not.”
The magic number for Smith and all Olympic hopefuls to beat is 2:26.9 – a time she has bettered by two full seconds at meets in Japan, the United States and Canada.
While she’s currently ranked seventh in the world and coming of a gold-medal performance in the 200 breaststroke at the 2015 Pan-Am Games in Toronto, the NCAA Div. 1 champion at the University of Minnesota knows the Olympics are a whole new ballgame.
“I’ve been on the national team and been the top breaststroker in Canada for the past two years, so I just have to hope that I can keep my nerves in check through Olympic trials and make the Olympic team,” said Smith.
“In 2012 I finished fourth and didn’t make it. This year I feel a lot more confident and lot more like I deserve to be there. I’m really looking forward to going there, getting it done, and hopefully qualifying.”
She took a first-hand lesson in keeping calm this past fall in Japan, where she trained for three weeks alongside Kanako Watanabe – a Japanese swimmer who competed at the London Olympics at age 15. She won gold in the 200 breaststroke at the 2015 Worlds, and is currently ranked second in the world in Smith’s specialty.
“I was so scared at first because I don’t usually train with girls that I’m competing with,” Smith recalled. “I was so surprised at how normal she is. I thought she was going to be a supersonic trainer and really intense. She was just a normal 19-year-old girl who was just swimming like I was. It was the most interesting and fun thing in the whole world.”
To get her further prepared to contend for a spot on Canada’s roster in Rio this summer, Smith will migrate back to Kelowna in April from Minneapolis to train with her club coach, Emil Dimitrov. Even though she gets world- class coaching from Kelly Kremer at the University of Minnesota, there’s still something about her hometown Liquid Lightning coach that keeps her coming back.
“For this last bit I want to go back to Emil because he knows me so well and can sharpen up my breaststroke,” Smith said. “He’ll get me fine-tuned and ready to be the most confident I can be going into Olympic trials. I’m so lucky to have Emil as a coach. I switched clubs (from the Kelowna Aqua-Jets) to train with him when I was 14, even though he was on the other side of the lake.
“I knew that he was a really good coach — just from his record. I was afraid at first because I was young and shy, and he was crazy; had a thick Bulgarian accent; and was so eccentric. He’s so funny. He’s in love with swimming and he wants everyone else to love the sport.
“I think what made me enjoy swimming so much while I was going through high school (Immaculata) was that his first goal was to make sure that it was fun and that we weren’t overwhelmed. I never had a day with him during high school that I didn’t want to swim. I was always excited to go to the pool and work hard.”
Dimitrov’s approach to coaching is unlike anything Smith has seen before or since, and that’s a large part of what she likes about it.
“His mind is always working,” said Smith. “You could call him a mad scientist if you wanted to. He sometimes comes to the pool and says he dreamed about a drill or something. And then we’ll try it. It’s unreal the way he can think about swimming and how creative he can be.
“With Emil, you’ll never really know what’s going to happen in practice. We might be diving off the blocks with weight belts on our waist, or jumping over pool noodles. Or he’ll have hoops in the water we’ll have to dive through. We'll have to do a whole practice underwater, or we’ll have to put fins on our hands – he’s just a really wild thinker when it comes to swimming and that makes it exciting and fun.
“Sometimes it gets really outrageous, and I have to say, ‘Emil, I’m not doing that.’ But then he’ll say, ‘just try it!’ and I will. He loves experimenting."
It’s not all the same in Minnesota.
“At the U of M, everyone’s more in line and we’re all doing the same thing. We come to the pool, we put our bags down and we swim – we’re treated more like adults. We’ll get handed a sheet of paper, look at the workout, get it done and get out in two hours.
“I don’t get asked by my coaches how I'm doing when I get to the pool, but I still have that love of being there just out of habit. I haven’t gotten tired of it because I loved it so much through high school with Emil.”
With Smith recording a string of 2:24 times recently and a personal best of 2:22, it’s hard to believe she would be able to get any faster, but that’s exactly what she hopes to do with Dimitrov at the reins prior to the Toronto trials. In fact, she knows it’s what she needs to do.
“With Emil, I feel so confident altering my stroke knowing I can always get faster with him,” said Smith. “There’s a lot of room to improve because the world record is 2:19. There’s still full seconds in there for me to take off if I want to be up there with those top girls. I think that I can be, and he thinks that I can too.
“It’s important that we both have the same goal and we both trust that we’re both doing our best to get me there. He knows that I’m eating the right things and recovering between practices.
“I know that he wants me to do my best and I fully trust his training and the workouts he’s given me. With he and I trusting each other it’s helped out so much in knowing that I’m going to get faster if I just keep at it.”
While her immediate focus is getting herself on the team for Rio 2016, Smith is also having visions of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, where she aims to do much more than just qualify.
“For now, I’d like to make it to the Olympics, make the final, and race for a medal,” Smith reasoned. “But in 2020 I want to be a serious medal threat going into the Olympics. This year, those girls aren’t scared of me, but I want them to be. I want to come back in 2020 and be a really strong competitor. This year though, I’m still trying to prove myself on the Olympic level.”
Also looking ahead, Smith will return to the University of Minnesota next year to complete her double major in psychology and communications, and complete her collegiate swimming career. She will be finished her four-year degree in five years, as she’s currently on an educational hiatus to focus on her Olympic dream.
“I love all my teammates here,” Smith said. “We have such a nice training facility, we have doctors and massage therapists available, just the amenities they have here are so plentiful. My coach (Kramer) and I get along really well. I was confident training with him through the year. They’re doing me a really big favor by letting me stick around this year but not compete for them.
Between races in Canada, the United States, Asia, and potentially South America next, Smith’s passport is filling up with international stamps quickly. Her travels are even starting to cause her some grief when she crosses the border to her home country for meets.
“I really have been all over the place this year,” reflected Smith. “When I was crossing the border to go to Winnipeg for Westerns I filled out the Canadian side with my home address, and the border patrol officer had a really difficult time understanding my situation. He asked me where my stuff is, I told him I consider Kelowna my home and that I’m Canadian. He said because I wake up in the States every morning and I don’t have a student visa, my home is in the States. So I had to fill out the visitor card for Canada. That felt wrong. It’s a super confusing situation.”
Smith is training in Minneapolis until March 8, after which she’ll be back to Kelowna to train with Dimitrov.
She’ll swim in a long course race March 12 and 13 in Vancouver as a final tune-up, then return to Kelowna until April 3
After that, she’ll be in Toronto for Olympic trials, racing on April 8 in the 200 breaststroke, and hopefully qualifying for the Olympic team.
If all goes according to plan, Smith will then go back to Kelowna for a break, then return to Minneapolis to train for the Rio Games in August.
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