Article content Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through our links on this page. Over the next two weeks, the best in the world will be putting their athleticism on display as they compete at the 33rd Summer Olympic Games in Paris. Power, speed, strength, agility, flexibility and endurance are the hallmarks of athletic performance, but not all sports have the same physiological requirements.
And not all Olympians possess the same set of athletic tools. Here’s the inside scoop on what it takes to excel in three Olympic sports where Canadians are favoured for a podium finish. An underwater view shows Canada’s Penny Oleksiak competing in a heat for the women’s 100m freestyle swimming event during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre in Tokyo on July 28, 2021.
Photo by FRANCOIS-XAVIER MARIT / AFP via Getty Images All eyes will be on the pool as Canadians Summer MacIntosh , Maggie Mac Neil , Penny Oleksiak , Kyle Masse and Josh Liendo vie for swimming medals. A technical sport with four different strokes to master, most elite swimmers start training by their 10th birthday and specialize in their early to mid-teens. MacIntosh’s mother swam in the 1984 Olympics.
Oleksiak’s siblings are also elite athletes, which according to Greg Wells, exercise physiologist, senior scientist in exercise medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children and former director for sports science at the Canadian Sport Institute Ontario, makes them ver.