THE CANADIAN PRESS
VANCOUVER — Swimmer Brent Hayden knows what he will do differently at this summer’s Olympics compared to four years ago in Athens.
He will pack a battery-powered alarm clock and hopes to avoid getting beaten up by the police. He also plans to bring home an Olympic medal.
Hayden heads to Beijing as Canada’s top medal hope in the pool. He won the 100-metre freestyle at the 2007 world championships in a tie with Italy’s Filippo Magnini. The 24-year-old from Mission, B.C., is also part of the 4×100 and 4×200 relay teams which have podium potential.
"My goal is at least two medals," Hayden said after a recent workout. "I like to say that I’m only accepting gold but that’s just not really me.
"I just want to get a medal. If someone else had a better swim than me, then that’s what they did. I can only control what I do in my own lane."
Hayden’s golden dreams have been tarnished by a sore back. He has a bulge on one of his lower discs that sometimes presses on a nerve, causing spasms. The pain became so bad at the Olympic swim trials in April that he spent a night in hospital..
The back has improved but remains a question mark heading into the Games.
"I don’t think, or at least I’m kind of hoping, the back won’t be a problem," Hayden said. "If it holds out I guarantee I am going to be swimming really fast.
"I’m going into these Games hungry for some medals. I’m not going to let a silly back keep me down."
If the back does flair up again, and Hayden has to scrub an event, he would skip the 100 metres to concentrate on the relays.
Trying to keep his back healthy has slowed Hayden in the pool. His fastest time this year doesn’t put him in the top 25 this year.
"My coach just keeps reassuring me that I have been training much harder than I ever trained my whole life," he said. "One of the things I like doing before a competition is not worrying about what everybody else in the world is doing.
"At the Games, nobody cares what you were swimming a month ago or six month ago. Everything matters on the day."
Coach Tom Johnson said swimming can be like a poker game, and Hayden hasn’t shown his cards yet.
"We’ve just had to be a lot more selective in the types of sets we have done," said Johnson. "He’s done some good work.
"The whole world is swimming pretty fast. He still has those cards close to his chest in terms of what he is really, fully prepared to do."
Johnson has seen a transformation from the wide-eyed teenager who went to his first Olympics in Athens to the poised, confident swimmer getting ready for Beijing.
"He is a lot more disciplined around the details that are involved in the training process," said Johnson. "I think he understands the end-game a way more. He’s been through trial by fire."
Hayden’s first Olympics started with a wonky alarm clock and ended with him being pummelled by police. In between he was part of a Canadian swim team savaged by critics.
"I had one of the more colourful experiences for someone who didn’t get a medal," he chuckled.
On the night before Hayden’s first race, the power converter for his electric alarm clock got switched to high. That resulted in the clock running fast, meaning it went off at 3 a.m. instead of 7 a.m.
Nervous and anxious, and totally unaware of the mistake, Hayden scrambled out of bed.
"I got up, got ready and walked across the street and waited for the bus," he said.
It wasn’t until he found the Olympic village cafeteria empty that Hayden guessed something was wrong. He phoned a team official who told him to go back to bed.
By then, any chance of sleep was impossible.
"My mind was racing," he said. "I paid for it."
Near the end of the Games, with the swim meet over, Hayden and a group of athletes were in downtown Athens "in a part of town where we shouldn’t have been" and got caught up in a riot.
Hayden says baton swinging police waded into the crowd and he was thrown to the ground, clubbed and beaten.
He was left with cuts and severe bruises. The police later denied the incident ever happened.
The physical injuries healed but the mental scars took their toll. Hayden said he had some "mental breakdowns" in practice and went to a psychologist to get over the incident.
"I learned to put it behind me and kind of built off it," he said.
.The first signs of Hayden’s emergence were at the 2005 world swim championships in Montreal where he helped the relay teams win a pair of silver medals. He won the 100 metres and was third in the 50 metres in the 2006 Pan Pacific Swim Championships in Victoria, then won gold at the world championships.
Hayden will carry a lot of expectations on his sore back into Beijing.
The swim team desperately wants to win a medal to prove the program is heading in the right direction. The Canadian public wants its athletes to come home from the Games carrying hardware.
Hayden might have folded under that pressure four years go. Now it’s just part of the game.
"I’m not feeling too much pressure right now," he said. "I just want to show up and do my job.
"I am a lot more confident than I was four years ago. That is something you can only get with years of success which I’ve had since then. Also I’ve matured. I think that is something that is going to happen naturally."
