By Matthew Barnard, Swimming World College Intern
After an Olympic redshirt season resulting in a 200 breaststroke final in Rio, Kierra Smith is returning to the University of Minnesota for her senior year. The Kelowna BC native and former NCAA champion is set to be a key point scorer and leader for the Gophers in the 2016-17 season. Swimming World sat down with Smith to discuss her Olympic experience and the upcoming year.
Kierra Smith: I took the year off school which made the year a lot easier mentally because I could just focus on swimming and I didn’t have a lot of other things to stress about, so that made it a lot more fun just getting to swim for the whole year. Physically, it was easier as well as I had a lot of time to recover– so my whole year was just swimming and I really really enjoyed that, as the Olympic hype got more exciting as the year went on. Being in Minnesota and seeing the team get ready for NCAAs made me miss being a Gopher a little bit, but it being an Olympic year was really exciting for me knowing that I was trying to make the team for the first time.
KS: I thought that once I made the Olympic team that that would be it and I would be really happy about it, but once I made it I wasn’t done. I didn’t really take much time to celebrate. The mindset switched to trying to get on the podium in Rio, and my coaches’ mindset switched too, so no one really celebrated yet. Then the nerves sort of piled on and there was a little more pressure because the Olympics weren’t that far away. The experience went by so fast. I wanted to take it all in. I was lucky that Canada qualified us in April though so there was a lot of time to prepare mentally. Then it became a lot of fun because you could get excited about the Olympics.
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