SURREY, B.C. – Some Canadian Para swimmers will have Paris on their minds when they climb on the starting blocks this weekend at the Ken Demchuk International Invitational meet.
Many of the swimmers will be looking to record Minimum Qualifying Standard (MQS) times which will help determine the size of the team Swimming Canada will send to compete at next summer’s Paralympic Games in Paris.
“This is a starting point on the serious road to Paris, which makes this meet particularly important,” said Wayne Lomas, Swimming Canada’s associate director of high performance and Para swimming national coach. “Canadian swimmers are rapidly running out of time to lodge Paris MQS. That allocation time is so crucial.”
The qualifying window for the Paris Paralympics opened Oct. 1 last year and closes Jan. 31.
The Ken Demchuk International Invitational, being held Friday to Sunday at the Guildford Recreation Centre in Surrey, B.C., is expected to draw 74 swimmers from seven countries and 20 clubs across Canada.
Among the 53 Canadian swimmers will be Paralympic and world championship medallists like Aurelie Rivard of the C. N. Région de Québec, Tess Routliffe of the High Performance Centre – Quebec, and Shelby Newkirk of the Saskatoon Lasers Swim Club.
Also competing will swimmers like Fernando Lu of the Langley Olympians Swim Club, and Tyson MacDonald of the High Performance Centre – Quebec, medal winners at the recent Parapan American Games in Santiago, Chile. Lu has recorded the Paris standard but MacDonald, Caleb Arndt of the Newmarket Stingrays Swim Club and Felix Cowan of the Club de Natation Samak de Brossard are stilling looking to reach the time.
Canadian swimmers must have secured a MQS to be invited to the 2024 Olympic & Paralympic Trials, Presented by Bell, to be held in Montreal in May.
“These kids, they want to get an MQS, that’s what driving a lot of them,” said Lomas.
The Paralympics will be held Aug. 28 to Sept. 8. Lomas hopes to send a team of 20 to 24 athletes.
For veterans like Rivard and Niki Ens of the Saskatoon Lasers, the Demchuk Invitational is part of their training regime.
“It’s important they keep practising their racing skills,” said Lomas.
The meet replaced the former Can Am Para-swimming Championships, named in honour of Ken Demchuk, a Canadian swim official from Regina who developed a points system that allowed swimmers from different classifications to compete in the same race.
Prior to Demchuk, Para swimmers competing in multi-class races sometimes had to wait until the next day to know their final results. His system enabled scoring, ranking and awards to be determined in a timely and equitable manner.
“The importance of this meet can’t be understated,” said Lomas. “The beauty of this meet is it’s the only Para swimming meet in Canada that has heats and finals for our Para athletes in their sport class, which is what international racing is all about.
For 11 Canadian Para swimmers, plus athletes from countries like Australia, Ghana, Ireland and Mexico, the Demchuk Invitational will serve as an international classification process.
Including the international athletes also provides more competition for Canadian swimmers.
“It’s always great to have other people to race against,” said Lomas. “There’s such a small population of Para athletes in Canada, there’s a certain degree of familiarity among our group. To introduce new faces is good to challenge themselves against unknown athletes and see how they go.”