Lucas Punkari
It was a whirlwind tour that would make any rock group envious. But despite suffering the effects of a cold following its completion, it was well worth it for local swimmer Donovan Taylor.
The 16-year-old member of the Fort Frances Aquanauts finished up a four-meet span over two-and-a-half weeks with eight medals hanging around his neck—and three times in the 200m I.M. that qualified him for the senior nationals in that event.
“The travelling was the major thing I had to deal with,” Taylor admitted. “It basically killed me just being on the road for so long.
“But I was able to work my way through it and in the end it all worked out,” he added.
“Would we do that again? Probably not,” remarked Aquanauts’ coach Dawnn Taylor, who also is Donovan’s mother.
“The surprising thing was that despite all of the travel, Donovan was able to knock it right out of the ballpark and that’s the main reason I think as to why everyone is looking at him,” she noted.
Following a gold-medal showing in the 15-and-over division at the Boston Pizza Winter Chill Invitational on Feb. 11-13 at the Memorial Sports Centre here, Taylor headed to London, Ont. the following weekend for the Speedo Eastern National Championships.
In his first night of competition, Taylor captured silver in the 400m I.M.—the first local swimmer to ever medal at a national event.
“I was in Lane 1 for that race, and not a lot is usually expected from those outside lanes because the faster swimmers are usually in the middle lanes,” he explained.
“Sometimes, though, you’re able to use that to your advantage,” he added. “And in that case, I was able to just push from the outside and get a silver a result.”
“It was a very dramatic race, and for someone to do that well in an outside lane is something that you don’t normally see at nationals,” Dawnn Taylor stressed.
“The centre lane swimmers are usually the ones that end up winning, and I had a lot of fellow coaches come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Wow, he that from Lane 1?’”
Taylor then followed up his silver-medal performance with a golden one in the 200m I.M. event on the Sunday, with his time of 2:05.87 also qualifying him for the senior nationals in that event.
“I was pretty ecstatic about getting a national time, especially because I didn’t think I was going to win that race going into it,” Taylor admitted.
“Once I got lined up next to Jeffrey Swanston [from Newmarket] in the blocks, who’s a really great swimmer, that compete level starts to build inside you and you begin to get that fighting spirit that gets you going,” he reasoned.
The next stop for Taylor was in Nepean (outside Ottawa) on Feb. 25-27 for the Short Course Provincial Championships, where he was joined by fellow Aquanaut Adam Stromberg, who ended up with a silver and a bronze medal from the meet.
However, once they arrived at the meet, the pair found themselves in the middle of a madhouse with swimmers trying to get into their warm-up lanes for the weekend’s events.
“It was a gong show, for sure,” Taylor chuckled.
“On the first night, we had pretty much everybody trying to get warmed up in a 25m pool, and they even had start turning people away.”
After the chaos was sorted out, Taylor finished the weekend with a trifecta of medals—striking gold in the 200m I.M., earning silver in the 200m butterfly, and adding a bronze in the 200m backstroke.
“Those swims in the 200 fly and the 200 backstroke both surprised me,” said Taylor, who again set a national qualifying time in his 200m I.M. victory.
“In the past I would struggle a little bit in the longer races. Once I would get past the 100-metre mark, I would start to get a little bit tense in the shoulders and burn a lot more oxygen,” he explained.
“So I made sure not to go completely balls to the wall and just pace myself, and as a result I was able to swim a much stronger back half in both races,” he noted.
But Taylor didn’t have long to reflect on his results in Nepean as he was on the road again last Monday to Etobicoke, where he represented Fort High at the OFSAA swimming championships held March 1-2.
After being edged out by Edward Liu of Toronto in the 100m butterfly event last Tuesday, Taylor improved on that silver-medal showing by capturing gold in the 200m I.M. the following day in yet another national qualifying time of 2:06.08.
“There had been a lot of trash talk with everybody going into that race because we were all dead tired from competing in the last three events,” Taylor joked.
“Sean Francis Domingo [from Toronto] was lined up right next to me for the finals, and my coach told me before the finals that ‘Either he walks away with two silver or you do’ and that just pushed me right over the edge in order to get things done,” he remarked.
Besides setting a third national qualifying time in the 200m I.M., Taylor also became the first-ever Muskie swimmer to capture a gold medal at the all-Ontarios.
“I think for Donovan that was the crowning glory of the whole experience, and I think to bring two medals back from that [OFSAA] meant as much to him as the Eastern medal did,” Dawnn Taylor said.
“You have a lot of the same guys [from] those provincial swim meets at the OFSAA event, so it’s not a giveaway by any means,” she stressed.
With March being set as a rest-and-recovery month by Swim Ontario, Taylor’s next competitive meet isn’t scheduled until April 15-17 when he and some fellow Aquanauts will be at the Division III provincial championships in Thunder Bay.
Before that, though, Taylor has been invited to a developmental camp at the University of Western Ontario in London from April 8-10, which will be used to help swimmers get ready for future events such as the Olympic time trials.
“My teachers are not going to like me because I’ve been away from school too much already,” Taylor joked.
“It’s going to be a lot of hard work there and I’ll probably be really tried afterwards,” he admitted.
“But I do know most of the guys that will be out there, so I’m sure it’s going be a blast.”
