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Pratt a promising middle-distance man entering world juniors

6th FINA World Junior Swimming Championships –

By Nathan Sager

Alex Pratt lets out a drawn-out “yesssss” when the conversation swings around to the men’s 800-metre freestyle becoming an Olympic event in 2020.

In the here and now, Pratt, a 17-year-old from Calgary’s Cascade Swim Club, is part of Canada’s team for the FINA World Junior Swimming Championships (Aug. 23-28, Indianapolis) by virtue of hitting qualifying marks in the 200 and 400 freestyle at the 2017 Canadian Swimming Trials in April. But the teenager who delivered dramatic drops in his best times over the last year is thinking about the long term.

“When my coach (Dave Johnson at Cascade) told me about it, I just went ‘whaaaaaat?’ ” says the 6-foot-4 Pratt, one of the four male swimmers on the Indianapolis 2017 roster along with Ruslan Gaziev, Jaren Lefranc and Gabe Mastromatteo. “The 800 free is one of my favourite swims. The 1,500, personally, it just feels too long. And, of course, because I’m a 200 and 400 swimmer, it (1,500) doesn’t fit with me too well. But the 800 is at the perfect spot in between where it’s like you can kind of sprint it, but you don’t have to go slow. I just love that event and was so happy that it was put it to the Olympics.

“I am definitely excited for the worlds,” Pratt adds. “I’ve never gone to such a high-end meet with Swimming Canada.”

For many elite swimmers, the world juniors is the first exposure to the environment faced at the world championships or Olympics, should they attain such heights.

“When you’re looking at the world championships and the Olympics, each is an eight-day competition,” national development coach Ken McKinnon says. “So you can imagine a young kid coming in on Day 1 and being excited but having to sit there on their hands till Day 7, for example, for their event. And go through the event and go every day to every session and continue their training until they get on the blocks. If they haven’t done anything like that before, you can’t really say whether they’re going to be reliable, especially when we’re making decisions on relay. Knowing a lot about the athletes and how they perform through the challenges is great for us. For them, it hones their craft. They still have to stand up and race whether they feel good, bad or medium.”

At the Trials, Pratt was the only under-18 swimmer in both the men’s 200 and 400 freestyle finals. On the first night, he survived a swim-off to make the 200 final, lowering his best time by 3.5 seconds. Two nights later, in the 400, he clocked 3:55.16, lowering his personal best by almost seven seconds.

“I think for the national coaches that was the seminal moment where they went ‘wow, this guy’s got a competitive spirit,’ ” Cascade coach Dave Johnson says of Pratt’s breakthrough in the 200.

McKinnon notes that Pratt, relative to most young male swimmers, is “really diligent” having the economy of motion essential for a freestyler. That, along with his size, are among the reasons coaches are high on his potential.

“He is a big strong kid with nice technique,” McKinnon said. “He’s focused. We have him high on our list in terms of capability. He was at our relay initiative camp at UBC in May and we threw the boys in with the senior relay camp a couple times and he held his own.”

This breakout is the payoff from a well-considered decision Johnson and Pratt made in mid-2015 to have him take a summer off to get over some growing pains.

“I was always standing with my knees hyper-extended as a child and, as a result, my ACLs got really stretched,” Pratt explains. “I had to be really careful and do a lot of physiotherapy, which was annoying but it paid off in the end.”

It proved to be a classic case of where putting the long-term health of a young athlete first paid off hugely.

“It was a bit of a risk — in many coaches’ eyes they would say, ‘oh I wouldn’t do that,’ ” Johnson says. “He came back in September 2015 and just took off. In December of that year we had a big meet in Edmonton and he improved his 1,500 time by a minute, down to 16 minutes in a 25-metre pool. Then we went to Westerns in February 2016. He didn’t even have a long-course qualifying time … he went in as an unseeded entry and he won the race. Then he went to the Olympic trials as a 15-year-old and made the A final in the 1,500. He’d gone from 17 minutes to 15:49 from September through to April of the following year so we knew we had an interesting prospect.

“He’s one of these kids who is very coachable, listens extremely well to the details and can apply those small object lessons in training to his swims,” Johnson adds.

Pratt’s growth also shows the value a smaller club has during a swimmer’s formative years. He credits his first coach, Lynne Driessen of Calgary Badlands Aquatic Club, for making workouts always seem engaging.

“It’s not one practice that makes the difference — it’s every single practice,” Pratt says.