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By Jim Morris

Canada’s female swimmers made a big splash in 2016, earning accolades and awards for their medal haul at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and the FINA World Swimming Championships (25m) in Windsor, Ont.

The women’s team hopes to ride that same wave of success at the upcoming FINA World Championships in Budapest, Hungary, but know heading into the meet other countries have put a target on the Canadian backs.

There are 13 women on this year’s national team that competed at either the Olympics or world short-course championships in 2016.

Hilary Caldwell, a bronze medallist in the 200-metre backstroke in Rio, said the women see last year’s results as a stepping stone, not a destination.

“We want to double back on what we did last summer and hopefully replicate some performances, win a lot of medals and show it wasn’t a one-off thing,” said Caldwell, who trains at the High Performance Centre – Victoria. “This is how good our team is and how good our team is going to stay.

“There is always more focus on swimming during an Olympic year unfortunately. People don’t seem to realize the worlds is just as good, all the same people are there. We will hopefully cause enough ripples there that people will still be talking about us.”

Canadian women swimmers won six medals in Rio. Penny Oleksiak of the High Performance Centre – Ontario led the charge with a gold in the 100-m freestyle and silver in the 100-m butterfly, plus swam on the bronze-medal winning 4×100-m and 4×200-m freestyle relays.

Kylie Masse of Windsor, Ont., showed the strength in Canadian backstroke by finishing third in the 100-m back.

A few months later in Windsor, Canadian women won eight medals, including a pair of gold, plus participated in the bronze-medal winning 4×50-m mixed freestyle relay team.

These performances resulted in the national women’s team receiving The Canadian Press Team of the Year Award. It was only the third female team in a half-century to earn the award, joining the 2012 national women’s soccer team and Sandra Schmirler’s 1998 curling rink.

Oleksiak was named winner of the 2016 Lou Marsh Award, presented to Canada’s top athlete of the year, and The Canadian Press Female Athlete of the Year.

Receiving team of the year recognition was particularly significant considering the Toronto Blue Jays’ playoff run in baseball and the Ottawa Redblacks’ upset victory in the Grey Cup.

“It (swimming) is a sport that doesn’t necessarily always have the same eyes on it as some of those big professional sports,” said Caldwell. “It was really cool.

“We wouldn’t necessarily have expected that . . . but it was so well deserved. I’m going to say we definitely deserved it. It was cool to have that affirmation and acknowledgement how amazing our Olympics were.”

Erika Seltenreich-Hodgson said last year’s success raised the bar for the entire team. The Ottawa native, who trains at the High Performance Centre – Vancouver, said it was a battle to qualify for the world championship team.

“I had to prove that I deserved to be on the team again,” said Seltenreich-Hodgson. “The fire that we lit in women’s swimming has greatly changed what I think we were before the past year.

“Just the intensity at Trials and the amount of different people that could have made any event, it was scary. It was the first time I realized my place was being jeopardized. I really had to step up, not only to do what I had done before, but to do better.”

Seltenreich-Hodgson said it took her a while to fully comprehend what the women had accomplished.

“Just to be part of something that created that much history in Canadian sport, I’m truly honoured to be part of that,” she said.

Rachel Nicol, a breaststroke specialist from Lethbridge, Alta., said preparing for the world championships has helped recharge her batteries.

“Coming off Rio it was a bit of a slump, I’m not going to lie,” she said. “It’s a hard to get back into it and feel motivated. That sounds kind of counterintuitive. Coming off such a big meet you’d think you’d have all these things to work on.

“It was a bit of a downer coming back home and getting back into the thick of things. Now I’m feeling a lot better. Since January I think the training has been going really well. Since April I have been feeling really good.”

As good as 2016 was, Nicol believes the women’s team has the potential to improve even more this summer and heading into the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

“I don’t know if we have something to prove,” she said. “That’s not really the way I look at it.

“We’ve really set ourselves up well and we’ve really shown what we can do. We’ve done some really great things. We’ve proven ourselves to be fierce competitors. We’ll just try to keep that up and keep moving forward.”