Kylie Masse blasts out of the start blocks on her way to winning the women's 200-metre backstroke at the Canadian Olympic Swim Trials in Toronto on May 16.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
There was a time when making the Olympics seemed like a far-off dream for Kylie Masse. At the Canadian trials for the 2012 Summer Games, where only the top two swimmers made the cut in the backstroke, she finished 99th.
It’s strange to consider, given that the 28-year-old swimmer from LaSalle, Ont. has gone on to become one of the most important Canadian swimmers of her generation.
The backstroke specialist who is known by her teammates as ‘The Queen of Consistency’ is also considered to be the backbone of the program, and one of the key reasons behind Canada’s resurgence at the pool in the past eight years.
Behind the record-setting performances of Penny Oleksiak and the emergence of 17-year-old Summer McIntosh as one of the world’s best swimmers, Masse has quietly gone about her business, picking up four medals over the past two Summer Games and serving as a key cog on Canada’s relay teams.
When Team Canada takes to the pool this week, the country’s fortunes in the medley relay will hinge, in part, on Masse’s prowess.
Mark Tewksbury wastes no time in marvelling at the swimmer who may be Canada’s most underappreciated.
“Just the consistency,” said Tewksbury, who won three Olympic medals, including gold in the backstroke at the 1992 Summer Games.
“She’s always been there, and always on that podium. I think she’s a large part of the women’s success,” Tewksbury said.
Before Canada seemingly started churning out swimming prodigies, “it was Kylie doing some of that heavier lifting,” he said.
“She pulled it along with her perseverance and solid racing performances.”
Masse contributed to the normalization of success in Canadian women’s swimming over much of the past decade. Though it’s not something she’s looking to take credit for.
“I feel privileged to have been around during this period of historic success,” Masse said. “It’s been cool to watch the sport within Canada grow. It’s always been quite big in America or Australia, but to be Canada and to be competing against the best swimming countries in the world, and to be one of the best swimming countries in the world, I think is an incredible feat.”
It wasn’t always that way.
In 2016, the Canadian women exploded with six medals in Rio, including a bronze from Masse in the 100-metre backstroke.
In 2021, the women won six more in Tokyo. Three involved Masse, with silver-medal performances in the 100-metre and 200-metre backstroke, and a bronze in the 4x100 relay.
Masse holds up her silver medal from the women’s 200-metre backstroke, one of the three medals she won during the 2021 games.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Prior to that, the last time a Canadian woman won an Olympic swimming medal was Marianne Limpert’s silver in the 200-metre individual medley at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
After the 2012 Canadian trials, Masse began to improve dramatically, but still missed the cut for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto, placing just out of contention for the team and letting nerves get the best of her. She attended the Pan Am Games, but sat reluctantly in the bleachers, stewing that she wasn’t in the pool. “We were in the stands, we bought tickets,” her father Louie Masse recalls. “Maybe it was even more motivation for her.
By then Masse, who was 19 and a student at the University of Toronto, had started working with swimming coaches Linda Keifer and Byron MacDonald. A late bloomer in the sport, she stepped up her training, went to a high-altitude camp, and brought more structure to her workouts. She won gold that year in the 100-metre backstroke at the World University Games in South Korea. It was a sign of things to come.
By the time she arrived in Rio a year later, she had emerged as one of the world’s best backstrokers. A year later, she confirmed as much, winning the 100-metre race at the 2017 world championships, becoming the first Canadian woman to win a world title in swimming.
Now a captain of the team in Paris, Masse is credited with being a catalyst for the program’s culture shift, which has helped bring younger talent like McIntosh seamlessly into the fold.
“It’s how you treat your teammates and how you interact with the people that you’re working with and the people that are helping you,” Masse said. “And I think that’s something that I hope to have helped built as well, as much as the success in the pool.”
Masse arrives in Paris with the fourth-fastest qualifying time in the 100-metre backstroke and the third-fastest time in the 200-metre backstroke. In each case, she is chasing Australia’s Kaylee McKeown and American Regan Smith. No strangers to each other, the three have shared podiums several times throughout their careers.
“They’ve pushed me over the last number of years and to be up there with them is an honour,” Masse said. “So I’m looking forward to getting in the pool with them and just giving it my best shot.”
Tewksbury believes Masse became one of Canada’s best swimmers when she realized she could keep pace with the best in Rio.
“Sometimes when you get to a certain point, you really do never look back. You just have a certain knowing that, hey, I’m capable of top three any time I swim. And that’s just what I love about Kylie. She’s just owned that space.”
Her mom, Cindy, says the family doesn’t discuss the sport much when they are together. It’s how Masse prefers it when she’s away from the pool.
“We don’t talk about swimming. It’s her world, and if she brings us into it, then we’ll listen,” Cindy says. “We’re kind of the balance. We’re the non-swimming part of her life.”
With Masse now at her third Olympics, watching her races hasn’t gotten any easier on her mother. Cindy says she still gets jittery before every major competition.
“Because every meet is a different set of circumstances. No two meets are ever the same,” she says. “Nothing is ever taken for granted. So you get nervous.”