Canadian Olympic Swim Team Slated for Staging Camp in Caen, France

Leading up to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games will be training at the Eugène Maës Nautical Stadium, located in Caen, a port city in France’s Normandy region. The Canadian swimmers will camp there from July 13-22 before heading to Paris for the start of the Olympics on July 27.

Staging camps serve the purpose of not only giving qualified athletes time to fine-tune their strokes leading into major international competition but also allowing them to adjust to the time zone of the meet. Since Canada and France are separated by six hours, the Canadians would want to spend a few weeks in France before the start of the Games.

With Summer McIntosh’s astronomic rise as a dominating force in the women’s middle-distance freestyle, butterfly, and IM events, along with Josh Liendo’s emergence as a legitimate threat to the best sprinters and butterfliers in the world, Canada has a number of major medal threats for the Paris games. 

The Canadian team is also likely to return 2020 Olympic Champion Maggie MacNeil, who will look to defend Gold in the 100m butterfly. Taylor Ruck, and Kylie Masse – long time Canadian swimming stars – will also look to make an impact at the individual and relay level.

At the Tokyo Games, the Canadian women won one gold, three silver, and two bronze medals, whereas the men didn’t win any. This ranked Canada at 7th in terms of number of gold medals, and tied for fourth with China and Italy for total swimming medals. The US had the highest medal count at the 2020 Games with 11 golds, and 30 total medals.

Canada is one of the multiple major nations that has announced their pre-Olympic staging camps. The U.S. Olympic team has announced their camp as well, and will be training a little closer to Paris at the Val d’Oise High Performance Sports Center, however the training site for the swimming team has not been announced. Commonwealth rival Australia has not announced where their team will be training leading up to the games. At this stage in the pre-Olympics wind up, many nations have yet to announce the dates or locations of their staging camps.

Additionally, neither the USA or Australia swimming have released their Olympic selection procedures for 2024, though Canada has.

To represent Canada at the Paris Games, Canadian athletes will have to place either first or second at the trials, while also achieving an Olympic qualifying standard. This is expanded to the top four athletes for the freestyle relays (400 and 800). The top four athletes in the 100 and 200 freestyles will be selected for the Games as relay swimmers, but only the top two athletes will be selected to swim the event individually. An expanded list of the selection criteria can be found here.

The open water selection process differs from the pool selection, where any open water swimmer who receives a qualifying invite after this summers World Championships will be priority level one, and any swimmer who receives an invite after the 2024 World Championships will be priority level two.