By Jim Morris

Sometimes Kate Sanderson questions her decision to be an open water swimmer.

Take for example the time in 2019 when she was stung eight times by jellyfish while training for the World Beach Games in Doha, Qatar.

“That was pretty traumatizing,” said Sanderson. “In the moment I said to myself ‘I’m never doing this again.’

“The pain was there for quite some time, there was a couple weeks of scars. But I let the dramatics kind of flitter away and realized it was just what happens in the ocean. But at the time it was not fun.”

Sanderson, 21, and Hau-Li Fan, 23, will compete in the open water events at the Tokyo Olympics on August 3 and 4. They earned spots Swimming Canada’s team during a FINA qualifying event in Portugal in June.

Sanderson finished third in the women’s race. Fan was 18^th in the men’s event and punched his ticket to Tokyo by finishing as the top Americas swimmer outside of the top 10.

It will be the first Olympics for both swimmers, who train at the High Performance Centre – Vancouver with coach Brad Dingey.

Mark Perry, Swimming Canada’s distance/open water coach, said adaptability is as important as strength and stamina when swimming 10 kilometres in an outdoor body of water.

“It’s a very experiential sport,” said Petty. “The more you do it, the more you learn and the better you get.

“The further along you go in your career, you probably develop a slightly different mindset. The races are often challenging. You have to be able to think on lots of different levels during the race. The race is so long things change. You need to be someone who can change your mindset and adapt as the race goes on.”

Perry praised Dingey for the job he’s done preparing Sanderson and Fan.

“Both of them have done amazingly and their coach has done an amazing job,” he said.

Open water swimming presents challenges. Perry said race officials never hold events in areas with dangerous sea life, but things like encounters with jellyfish still happen.

“They are swimming in nature and things like that are sometimes in the water,” he said.

The sport can also get brutal with 25 or more swimmers in the water sometimes crashing into each other.

“Everyone wants to win,” said the six-foot-two Fan. “There’s no lane ropes to separate people from getting all up in each other. It can definitely get violent at times.

“You’ve got to keep a cool, level head through the race because you don’t want to be expending too much energy getting angry or annoyed.”

The five-foot-six Sanderson admitted she’s “not much of a fighter.”

“I like to steer clear of that part of the sport,” she said. “It’s sometimes unavoidable, you just have to deal with it and fight your way through.

“If you are strategic enough you can try and get away from it. That’s usually what I like to do.”

Sanderson and Fan train in the same pool as the rest of the swimmers at the Vancouver centre. Major events like the Olympics and world championships include open water races. Other times the open water swimmers compete separately from the rest of the team.

After their qualifying races, Sanderson and Fan remained in Portugal to train before travelling to Tokyo.

Being separated doesn’t stop the open waters swimmers from feeling they are still part of the team.

“I’ve always felt like, even in the centre, there’s people who specialize in different strokes,” said Fan. “Overall, as a team, we meld together quite well.

“There’s a sense of camaraderie. Even though we don’t always do to the same competitions, it still feels like we are part of the high performance centre.”

Perry said Swimming Canada does its best to integrate the open water swimmers with pool swimmers.

“They train with the pool swimmers all the time,” he said. “But inevitably they are going to swim at a different time and in a different venue. That part of it is out of our control.”

Sanderson’s father worked for a French water company and the family moved around the world. Growing up she lived in Indiana, Abu Dhabi and Qatar before moving back to the United States.

She “kind of fell into” open water swimming.

“I don’t think I ever really was drawn to it,” Sanderson said. “I made an open water team and kind of just stayed the course.”

Fan, who was born in Burnaby, B.C., began swimming when he was 12. He attended university and swam with the UBC swim team where he met Richard Weinberger, an open water bronze medallist at the 2012 London Olympics.

A distance swimmer in the pool, Fan decided to try open water. His first race was at the 2017 FINA World Series event in Roberval, Que.

“I was just told go out there and finish the race,” he said. “I came in third, which was very impressive.

“At that point I thought yes, I’m going to do open water.”

Fan said he would consider finishing in the top 10 in Tokyo a success. Sanderson just wants to swim her best.

Tokyo will be a learning experience for both swimmers.

“They’re both fairly inexperienced and fairly new to the sport,” Perry said. “Four years ago, neither of them were doing the sport.

“Whatever they can do this time is going to be amazing, but I feel they’re at the beginning. We think they’ve got potential certainly for Paris (in 2024) and maybe beyond.”