HIGH ACHIEVERS: Ottawa’s youngest Canada Summer Games competitor is 13-year-old swimmer Jordyn Richardson

A huge team of 46 Ottawa athletes are set to compete at the St. John’s 2025 Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland. The Ottawa Sports Pages will be sending out a free daily email newsletter with recaps, previews and profiles throughout the Aug. 9-24 national youth multi-sport event.

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By Martin Cleary

Full credit to Jordyn Richardson for trying swimming, stepping away for an extended period and returning to the pool to make it her primary sport.

If Richardson didn’t reconsider swimming about four years ago, she would have missed a number of exciting opportunities, including the Canada Summer Games, which start Saturday and run through Aug. 24 in St. John’s, NL.

She could easily have passed on the water sport, when she was only six or seven years old. At that point, she was taking swim lessons, but when it came time for her first test, she didn’t make the necessary grade to move ahead.

“In my first year, I refused to duck my head in the water and I didn’t pass the test. That was my style,” recalled Richardson in a phone interview this week before heading to Toronto for Team Ontario commitments.

Richardson wasn’t totally heartbroken at not passing her first swim test because she already was immersed in competitive artistic gymnastics at the Nepean Corona School of Gymnastics.

But then she reached a point in her gymnastics career where she had to reconsider her future. Suddenly, swimming was back on the starting blocks for her.

“I was a competitive gymnast up to two years ago. My schedule was full (and couldn’t accommodate swimming),” Richardson added. “I did gymnastics for a very, very long time.

“Swimming was new to me at the same time and gymnastics was getting a little bit harder. I progressed to a higher level, but it was more dangerous and I had a mental block. It was hard to continue.”

Richardson found Level 7 on the Ontario gymnastics competitive scale too challenging, a year after winning the Level 6 gold medal in vault at the Ontario age-group championships.

When Richardson started training at the Ottawa Youth Olympians Club with coach Norma Perez, she saw a return to a positive frame of mind for sports.

Richardson considers herself a sprinter with a focus on the 50- and 100-metre races in freestyle, backstroke and butterfly. She practises eight times a week at a variety of pools in Ottawa, since OYO lost its home pool about 12 years ago with the closure of the Carlingwood YM-YWCA’s Lockhart Ave. facility. She also has three dryland sessions each week.

In June, she qualified to compete at her first Canadian swimming trials in Victoria. At only 13 years old, she was one of the youngest swimmers competing at the trials against the best junior and senior athletes in the country for berths on teams to various international and domestic competitions.

As the third youngest in the field of 74 swimmers in the women’s 50-metre freestyle, Richardson tied for 27th place, after the preliminary heats with a time of 26.78 seconds. In a three-swimmer time trial to break the tie and secure the reserve junior final berth, Richardson went even faster with a clocking of 26.38 seconds, which equalled the Ontario girls’ 13-year-old record for the 50-metre freestyle. It was originally set in 2007.

In the women’s 100-metre backstroke, she was 24th overall after the heats and 11th among juniors in 1:04.57, which qualified her for the B final. She was seventh in the secondary final and 15th overall in 1:05.40.

The trials and several other swim meets between April and June allowed Swim Ontario to determine its 34-swimmer team for the Canada Summer Games.

In June, Richardson was in a Quebec swim meet at the Jean-Drapeau aquatic complex, when Perez gave her unexpected good news. Richardson had already won six races at the meet and Perez put the cherry on top by telling she had been selected to Team Ontario for the Canada Summer Games.

“I was very, very excited. I was very happy,” exclaimed Richardson, who broke her wrist in a fall in January, while trying to catch a city bus and needed two months of recovery and rehabilitation.

“I was thrilled – the happiest I have been as a swimmer,” she told David Grossman in a story for Swim Ontario.

“As far as I am concerned, the only way to improve is to work harder, stay focused and be dedicated to what you want to achieve.”

At the Games, Richardson expects to swim in at least five individual girls’ races – the 50-, 100- and 200-metre backstroke and the 50- and 100-metre freestyle.

“I hope to make it to a few finals,” Richardson said, revealing her best chances would be in the 50- and 100-metre freestyle and 100-metre backstroke races.

Richardson put herself in the spotlight at the 2024 Ontario swimming championships, when she won gold medals in the 50-metre freestyle in 27.50 seconds and the 100-metre butterfly in 1:07. They were both personal-best times.

She also was a four-time winner in the girls’ 13-year-old class at the Ontario youth short-course championships – 50- and 100-metre backstroke, 100-metre butterfly and the 50-metre freestyle.

“I love the 50 free. I’m not a long-distance swimmer. I like to go as fast as I can. I go as fast as I can,” Richardson confidently pointed out.

There will be four other local aquatics athletes competing in the pool in St. John’s.

Nepean-Kanata Barracudas long-distance swimmer Deniz Capraz, 17, has personal-best times of 8:35.49 for the 800 metres, which he achieved at the Canadian swimming trials in Victoria in June, and 16:24 for the 1,500 metres. Earlier this year, he placed third in the boys’ 1,500 metres at the Ontario age-group championships. Capraz has been swimming for 10 years and is coached by Scott Faithfull.

Madison Murphy of the GO Capital Artistic Swimming Club enters the Canada Games fresh off a third-place national performance for her acrobatic routine at the 2025 Canadian Championships. The 17-year-old also owns a pair of international medals from the Pan Am Championships – a junior tech duet silver in 2024 and a youth duet gold in 2023.

Rafael Serey-Cormier impressed with four medals at May’s Dive Ontario Spring Provincials in his hometown. The 17-year-old recent Louis-Riel high school grad spent most of his career with the Nepean-Ottawa Diving Club before recently switching to Gatineau, which offered training times that better suited his schedule.

NODC’s Ella Lindsay comes in hot off winning a medal of each colour at the July 17-20 Speedo Junior Elite National Diving Championships in Edmonton. The 16-year-old has won multiple medals while representing Canada at the Dresden International Youth Diving Meet, and she also debuted for Canada at the senior international level at June’s Canada Cup of Diving in Gatineau.

Ottawa at the Canada Games Daily Newsletter

A huge team of 46 Ottawa athletes are set to compete at the St. John’s 2025 Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland. The Ottawa Sports Pages will be sending out a free daily email newsletter with recaps, previews and profiles throughout the Aug. 9-24 national youth multi-sport event.

_{By clicking on the submit button, you consent to receive the above newsletter from the Ottawa Sports Pages. You may unsubscribe by clicking on the link at the bottom of our emails. Ottawa Sports Pages | 21 Kolo Dr., Ashton, Ont., K0A 1B0 | 613-261-5838}