Player's Own Voice podcast: Josh Liendo ready to rule the pool
Catching up with Canada's male swimmer of the year
Swimming is notoriously practise-heavy. The daily accumulation of laps and dry-land workouts can nudge elite swimmers toward becoming mono-focus athletes.
So it's delightful to meet Canada's male swimmer of the year, Josh Liendo, and find a well-rounded young man tearing up the record books.
He is now a world and NCAA champion, but the move from metres and long courses to yards and shorter laps can throw young swimmers off. Talking with Anastasia Bucsis, host of Player's Own Voice podcast, Liendo credits his own low expectations for a very successful transition to the NCAA and beyond.
The Toronto native believes he helped himself by keeping big personal goals in check. He says he just looked at what the existing best times were, and began to chip away at the new (to him) distances. Butterfly and freestyle wins came quickly, and Liendo's name started appearing in the record books.
And while swimming takes up a huge chunk of his time, Liendo still keeps his head in school work and pursuing health education behaviour. The studies create a few professional options for Liendo, and he's considering those, thinking a bit further down the road. And then he's got some musical irons in the fire too, with a background in several string instruments and a new interest in making beats.
Roommates in Gainesville, Fla., pull Liendo's creative urges in one direction, and teammates pull his competitive instincts into sharper focus. Training partners like American star Caeleb Dressel keep him charged and hungry to win everything, every day, from Mario Kart to a session in the weight room. Liendo is too balanced a guy to say winning is everything, but he admits that he really hates to lose.
A genuine love of competition stokes all of it. Liendo is at his absolute happiest when the adrenaline kicks in on the starting blocks, no matter how high stakes the race. And he's also developing a more subtle enjoyment, settling in to a representative role he didn't really seek for himself. He is the first Black Canadian swimmer to win a number of international distinctions, and in that, as in his general approach to life, he doesn't seem overburdened by expectation.
And on that note, there wasn't too much pressure in Tokyo 2020, when many Canadians first noticed their fast teen. He is an even fast swimmer now, and Paris 2024 is shaping up to be a good time for Liendo.
There are transcripts of our podcasts for a hard-of-hearing audience. To listen to Josh Liendo, John Herdman, NIck Wammes & Sarah Orban, Luke Prokop, Laurence St-Germain, Hilary Knight or any of the guests from earlier seasons, go to CBC Listen or wherever else you get your podcasts.
