Tom had a history-making career, three Olympics, to date still the only swimmer to medal in 3 consecutive Olympics.  He shared the pool with legends like Victor Davis, Alex Baumann  Anne Ottenbrite, Pablo Morales, Matt Biondi Alex Popov and so many more.  

Tom talks about how operating within the framework of a growth mindset, sticking to process, and working towards lofty goals worked for him and how he brings those lessons to the kids he works with today.

You're born in Montreal. Did you swim to Montreal at all? Or did you move to Calgary early enough to begin your swimming career?

I did swim in Montreal with Rio, at the Olympic Stadium, the pool was under the stands, not the big pool. We used to get in through the velodrome back in those days. I moved when I was young, and most of my swimming was in Calgary from the time I was ten years old until I was 28.

At the Calgary North YMCA? Yes

Was that the majority of your age group swimming career there?

Strangely, no, I got into that because we had moved just after the Olympics and the coach there had just gone to the Olympics; I was there for a year, maybe a year and a half, we were part of the YMCAs program but quickly grew out of four lanes (twenty-five yards). Not because I was any good, but it just got crowded. So then I moved to a small team in Thornhill, which was by my house. From Thornhill, I went to UCSC when it developed in 1980. I would have been 14 turning 15. 

And UCSC was that right away with Derek Snelling?

No, I wasn't very good. I hope to be a good example of someone who had just to be patient and wait. I used to get kicked out of workouts. I couldn't do them; I was blind, I would swim diagonally across the pool, smash my face into the wall. My strokes weren't perfect. They never were very good. I just got better with poor stroke technique. When Derek came, and UCSC was established, I was swimming under Jim Fowley, who you would know. Jim had me at 14, 15, 16. 

At 16, There were five of us in the lane; everybody else in my lane made nationals(the fab four). Jim went with the good swimmers; Derek was with the best national summers. I went on swimming my own; my dad took me to a meet in Edmonton.  

The next year I got into Derek's group and won my first nationals. So that ten month period was a real wake-up call for me when everyone had moved on, and the fab four were making it, and I wasn't. It lit a big fire under me, and Derek saw that; he believed in me long before I did.

He trained me for a year as if I made nationals. So when I finally got there, I had trained like them. I didn't train pre nationals. I trained with the best of the best.

On one of your pages, you have a saying, and you seem to embody it with what you just said. There a "Better is always better. No matter the amount, fail forwards, be brave, stay in the fight."

What does that mean for you? 

I always think back to when I made the pledge that I would go to the Olympics. I mean, I wanted that t-shirt; I had no clue what it meant, but I wanted the shirt. I watched Graham Smith when he won his silver, when the relay won the silver, and I knew I wanted to do that. That was the coolest thing. I had no idea that it was four people out of 30 million who got to do that. If you had a look that the group that I was in and asked, who's going to go to the Olympics and lined us all up, certainly as the short blind kid with asthma and one lung, I wouldn't have been the kid you picked. But I really wanted it, and that dream of going allowed me to go to meets and fail and lose, lose and lose; up till I was 16 years old, I was able to commit myself, I wanted to go to, I would say "I don't care if I lose now, I want to go."

So to me, it's, I've never been afraid of bad mistakes and failing miserably; because I knew it was part of me getting to where I want it to go. The culmination of the Olympics in 1984 was the result of some nightmares the year before. In 1983, I drowned in a race at the Pan-American Swimming Championships against some good competition; when you're racing against the world record holder, and then you drowned, that is not a good sign; when they fish you out, take it to the hospital. 

A year later, I got in with Mike West, a bronze medalist, and Victor Davis, a gold and bronze medalist, and Sandy Goss, a finalist. We just put it together and we won our silver metal by one, 100th. Four years later, we got back together, we took Mark in place of Mike West, and won a silver again in 1988.

Replacing Victor with John Cleveland, we won a bronze in 1992. I never got a gold medal, but I don't know that that was ever my dream. My dream was a t-shirt and going to the Olympics, representing Canada, and racing hard. Perfection has never been the goal for me.

The thing is just to keep falling forward; get a little bit better. Better is always better. Never measure yourself up against anybody else and be standing when the smoke clears. 

My first national medal was won because the top two guys in Canada got sick and didn't compete. That meant that it was wide open for the rest of us to win; they were so much better, three seconds faster than us. On that day I happened to be the best of the rest and won my medal.

A lot of that comes from your natural personality. How does that form around your swim coaching philosophy nowadays, what, and how you bring that message to kids?

Well, I try to protect my guys from becoming perfectionists. I try to protect them from putting too much into the results. It's the process, process, process, and team because it will support and help the individual.  

I think I was able to accomplish what I did because I had coaches who believed in me before I believed in myself. I remember looking in the mirror and saw the short blind kid with one lung; I didn't see someone going to the Olympics. 

Often when I talk to people about what I did, they see me as the short blind kid with one lung, not the swimmer who went to three Olympics and won a medal in each one. That's what it ended up as; that's not how it started. It started with me getting kicked out of workout, it started with me being one of five guys in the lane, and the other four were in the newspaper; I was cropped out with my hand on a shoulder. My message is to embody excellence and embody their pursuit of that dream in a flexible, balanced life because it needs to be healthy and is not everything. The goal is to keep the dream alive while allowing them to fail, learn the lesson and move on; we need to stay focused on the process.  

My last guest, Alex Sereno from Montreal had a similar message and phrased it as "We're a school for life." I wanted to ask one question because you keep referring to yourself as a short line kid with one lung.

The moment of standing on the edge of the abyss was when I was in the ready room in '84, coming out behind Michael, looking in between his shoulder blades and looking up like he was a giant; he was 6"8, I'm 5'10. You start thinking thoughts like, why am I here? I don't belong with these guys; I'm not good enough to race them, I can't possibly beat them; they have everything going for them. Probably the biggest eye-opener was after I wallowed in pitty just long enough for the five-foot-seven kid, John Seiben from Australia, to win the race and break the world record right beside me.

That was also a huge learning experience. While I sat there, moping, someone smaller than me beat the giant and broke the world record. There are life lessons in every loss and in every catastrophe.  

I want to talk about races—one pattern from all the archive races that I watched from 84, 88 & 92. I'm sure the pattern exists before that as well; is how you finished races. Not just yourself, but whole the Canadian team; If you watch those relays, in every leg, Canada is behind at the start.

Now in 1984, that 4x100 medley relay was indeed a race of finishes; all you guys were behind, and you all had a great last 50s. On your leg specifically, you dove in, you had taken the touch from Victor, on your right Michael Gross, he's coming after you on that first 50; on that second 50 you put the hammer down. That is more than just training, that is personal toughness.

That was a philosophy that we had that to go fast, the idea that your time had to degrade the slowest out of everybody else. You were going to die, but you wanted to die later and to a lesser degree than everyone else. And that worked very well for me. And for years, there was a couple of races where other guys did a better job; a perfect example is Joh Sieben, the first guy to come back 29 seconds on the last 50 of a 200 fly, that was the philosophy even split by not dying as much as the rest of field. It looks like toughness, but we had done it in work out so often that it kicks in automatically in the race it kicks in.

How much of that was from Derek. You and Mark both in Calgary, that would have been a shared trait from training. Victor was at the Region of Waterloo(ROW). I guess, between a guy like Derek and a guy like Cliff Barry, Victor's coach, there must have been many shared philosophies.

I think one of the things that was the beauty of the eighties, the 76 Olympics got everybody ready and primed to go 78 when we kicked butt the Commonwealth games. 1980 would have been an incredible Olympics for us, 1984, we won 23 medals. That eight-year period, all the coaches were rivals, but super supportive of each other; there was a trend that Canada was slow on the first 50, but came back. 

We went on several teams together because of the relays with Victor and Mike and because ROW, with their five swimmers, was as good as UCSC with our 25 swimmers, you get to talk to them, get to have lunch with them. He was more strict with his guys. His guidelines were a bit tighter than ours, but I really enjoyed the time with them; he was a master at handling his team, especially Victor, just a great personality. He built such a tight, caring and focused relationship; he was probably the only guy who could handle Vic. It's amazing to see when you have a coach and a swimmer that are clicking.