WEYBURN – Good mental health is important for athletes, swimmers attending the provincial swimming championships heard from Olympic bronze medalist Chantal van Landeghem at the event’s banquet.
Over 500 swimmers, parents and coaches were in attendance for the two-day swimming meet in Weyburn, and the banquet was held on Saturday evening at the Weyburn Curling Rink.
Van Landeghem was the keynote speaker, and she also put on a swim clinic for the members of the Weyburn Silver Seals on Friday. Prior to the banquet, she had her bronze medal out and numerous young swimmers met her and had photos taken with her.
A native of Winnipeg, she won a bronze medal as part of Canada’s team for the 4X100 freestyle relay at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. It was the first time Canada won a medal in this event in 40 years.
Retired from competitive swimming since 2017, Chantal noted she is working towards her Ph.D in clinical psychology, “so I’m a big believer in mental health, especially in athletes.”
She said there’s a misconception that athletes don’t struggle with mental health, but she knows first-hand that athletes are not immune to mental health issues.
She first learned how to swim at the age of four, and had a dream since at least kindergarten of being in the Olympics, representing Canada.
Chantal’s first shot at making her dream come true was in 2012, when as a 17-year-old she attended the Olympic trials in Montreal.
She was seeded as first in the country for swimmers of her age, and she felt a lot of pressure and expectations from people, especially in Winnipeg, to make the Olympic team.
“Coming from Winnipeg, one of the smaller swimming communities in Canada, we certainly didn’t have a lot of summer Olympians. We had a lot of winter Olympians, but there weren’t a lot of Olympians in swimming,” she said. “It was hard to be in that position. A lot of people were counting on me to make the team.”
What she remembers most about attending the trials and getting ready to swim was how very anxious and scared she was, afraid that she would make a mistake.
“It felt paralyzing. I was so anxious, I was sweating and shaking,” she said.
She swam her heart out, and after touching the end of the lane, she looked up at the clock and saw she had missed making the cut by .01 of a second, the smallest possible margin.
Chantal said she found an out-of-the-way corner to cry, and her coach came and found her. “I could see how disappointed she was. That was hard,” she said, adding on the drive home with her parents, “That was the first time I saw my dad cry.”
A lot of people asked her what she was going to do now, and she took a couple days off to reflect about whether she should continue in swimming or not.
She thought about why she swam, and decided to continue because she loved to compete, loved swimming with her friends, and it was fun.
As a Grade 12 student, she noted she missed out on a lot of things, swimming nine times a week and spending 20 to 24 hours a week just in training in and out of the pool.
When the time came for the Olympic trials for the 2016 Games, held in Toronto, she tried again to make Canada’s national swim team, but noted she had a very different mindset that made a huge difference for her.
“One of the differences was in how I responded to those feelings of being nervous and anxious,” said Chantal, describing her mindset in 2012 as being “in an anxiety tornado”, adding, “I was actually nervous about how nervous I was.”
In 2016, she had a little mantra that she told herself: “‘It was okay to be nervous.’ It made a huge difference. To this day, the most nervous I have ever been was in 2016.”
What she learned in those four years was that it took away some of the pressure on her mind to accept being nervous about a competition. She admitted it was a little bit counter-intuitive, but she just accepted the feelings and emotions, and allowed them to happen.
The result, said Chantal, “I was able to swim a really great race that day and I made the team.”
Another difference in her mindset, she explained, was to have fun and enjoy the moment, as she pointed out in 2012, “I was not having fun. In fact, I wanted to bolt of the pool, I was so afraid of failing. I had to remind myself why I swim, because I enjoy it.”
Chantal also had a shift in her goals, changing them from making the Olympic team to goals she could control, namely that she would have a good start, and to do three dolphin kicks off the wall. She called these “process goals”, because these were in her control.
She made the team, and took a year off her studies at the University of Georgia to train with the three other women on her relay team, and they went in believing they had a shot at a medal. Canada was not expected to win any medal in this event, as it had been four decades since they were able to win one.
“We had this trust and belief in each other that we were all going to put our best foot forward and to swim fast,” said Chantal, adding, “That was one of the coolest moments in my life to stand on the podium to get our medals.”
She took some questions from the audience, and was given a standing ovation by the full rink for her talk.
