Lucas Punkari
After coming off two successful swim meets in Thunder Bay and Winnipeg, Donovan Taylor now is heading east for his next competition.
The 16-year old will be a member of Team Ontario at the 2011 Eastern Canadian Tri-Meet this Saturday, where he’ll be lining up against swimmers from Quebec and Nova Scotia.
“It’s going to be a whole new experience for me out there,” Taylor noted.
“The events will all be back-to-back, as opposed to the regular meets where you have more of a time frame in between those races, and there will be a lot of intensity to those events,” he explained.
“I think it’ll be more of a challenge for everyone also as this is right at the start of the long-course season, and everyone is just starting to train for that again and starting to get into that rhythm,” Taylor added.
After winning five gold medals at the Division III provincial championships in Thunder Bay last month, in which the finals were held in the long-course pool (i.e., 50 metres in length) after preliminary events took place in the short-course one (25 metres), Taylor’s long-course campaign officially began at the Golden Plains Invitational in Winnipeg on May 6-8, where he picked up seven more golds.
“It was a good meet with some really good competition, and the guys were really pushing me to get some work done,” Taylor said.
“It was also good to get that feeling of swimming in the long-course pool again- because we don’t have that luxury here in Fort Frances of swimming in one on a regular basis like the guys do in Winnipeg.
“To be able to compete out there at the Golden Plains should really help out a lot going into Halifax,” he stressed.
Taylor and his mom, Dawnn, who will be part of Team Ontario’s coaching staff at the meet, flew from Thunder Bay yesterday morning.
They will be meeting up with the rest of the provincial team at noon today before getting underway with practice sessions.
After two full days of practices tomorrow and Friday, the competition will get underway Saturday with Taylor taking part in six events.
“I have no clue yet as to what events I’ll be swimming in, but I figure I’ll probably be doing the individual medleys and the butterflys, for sure,” he noted.
While Taylor did experience a whirlwind adventure in February and March, where he competed in four meets in a two-and-a-half week span and returned to Fort Frances with eight medals around his neck, this event will be an entirely different level of competition stuffed into a short time frame.
“The main thing, I think, that the organizers want to see is how much success the swimmers can accomplish under the stress of the six events,” Dawnn Taylor explained.
“Simply put, they’re looking for how much stress the competitors can take and how successfully they can deal with it.
“But I’m sure Donovan will be okay with it,” she added.
Taylor cited a very recent example from the Golden Plains meet about how her son was able to come through under pressure.
“When he went into the last two events knowing that he was up for the high-point trophy, he was experiencing a little bit more stress than I thought he would put on himself because he wanted to win that so badly,” she recalled.
“One of the things that I said to him was, ‘Okay, we need to go in, shut the coffin and put the nail in it, and get this done with,’ and he went out there and won the 200m I.M. and the 100m fly to win the trophy.
“Once he got out of the pool after the 100 fly, he was indicating the hammer with his hand,” she joked.
While the main goal is to go out and win, both as an individual and for Team Ontario, Donovan Taylor is keeping his expectations in check for Halifax event, which also will be used to help build momentum for the May Invitational in Thunder Bay and a meet next month in Baltimore.
“I really don’t know quite what to expect because this is my first time competing at something like this,” he conceded.
“This will be a totally different experience for me, but I’m still hoping to go out there and do pretty good,” he added.
