How do you create the perfect swimmer?
What is the perfect environment?
Every coach thinks they know. I’ve heard it a hundred times—standing at the edge of a pool, stopwatch in hand, watching a young prodigy slice through the water like it’s silk. Someone, another coach most likely, always says, “If I had that swimmer, I could make them swim like that too.”
And every time, I mutter under my breath: rubbish.
You can’t recreate the chemistry between a swimmer and a coach. You can’t duplicate every morning’s fatigue, every breakthrough, every mistake. You certainly can’t replicate the place.
Talent might be born, but greatness—true, hard, stubborn greatness—is grown in the space between two people who learn how to see each other clearly. And maybe, it might be the geographical place too.
Randy Bennett, for instance. He coached out of Victoria, British Columbia, and turned a 1500-meter distance swimmer named Ryan Cochrane into an Olympic medalist. I still remember Ryan as a pesky ten-year-old, always getting underfoot, he probably would have been tossed out of my own practices. Randy actually did throw him out once—he recalled the story at a coaching conference, but called him back, gave him an impossible set, something no kid should have been able to finish. Ryan did it anyway.
Randy saw something that day—something I probably would’ve missed. That’s the magic of coaching. The alchemy of timing, temperament, and sheer accident.
Even legends like Mark Spitz weren’t the kind of swimmer you’d want to coach. No work ethic. Cocky. Slacking through practices, alienating teammates. But Dr. James E. Counsilman, his college coach, saw through all that. He made the team accept him, quirks and all. That uncomfortable union birthed seven gold medals. Another impossible equation that worked with an oddball kid.
So no—the perfect swimmer doesn’t exist. Nor does the perfect coach. And don’t get me started on the facilities. People love to say, “If I had that pool, that program, those resources…” Rubbish again. Champions have been born in irrigation ditches. Some of the finest pools in the world have never seen a single fast swim. However…something happens in these strange situations, odd people, odd places, creating amazing results.
Once—there was something close to perfect. It was a tiny place: Ocean Falls, British Columbia and an unknown coach called George Gates.
A town of 3,200 people tucked between the sea and the mountains, a west coast of British Columbia fiord with no roads leading in or out. You could only reach it by boat or floatplane.
The town was created and built for one purpose: to turn logs into paper. The one-company town was owned—the homes, the schools, the stores, the bowling alley, even the theater. A kind of planned paradise in the rain-soaked wilderness.
The geography was unique at that spot. Above the town was a large freshwater lake that spilled into the ocean in a waterfall. Using the natural contours of the escarpment, the paper mill created a hydroelectric dam for powering the mill. And millions of trees.
In that isolation, something strange happened. A boating accident prompted the company to build a pool and hire a coach. In short order, Coach George Gates of the tiny town of Ocean Falls, produced more international swimming medals than the rest of Canada combined.
Fifty-seven international medals. From a 20-yard pool.
Maybe it was the rain that kept everyone indoors. Maybe it was the sense of belonging, of every kid in town being funnelled through the same pool, coached by the same hands. Maybe it was the rhythm of mill life—work, eat, swim, sleep. Or maybe the town itself, built on routine and industry, was the perfect petri dish for discipline.
Whatever the chemistry that was there, a case can not be made that another coach could say; I could have done that. Who would in their right mind take that job?
Imagine it: no roads, no cars, but also no excuses. Everyone walked, everyone worked, everyone swam. A self-contained utopia of sweat and chlorine. Like an Orwellian experiment—but one that went right instead of wrong.
Today, Ocean Falls is nearly a ghost town. The mill is gone, the pool abandoned, the boats no longer stop there. But once upon a time, it was the best swimming town in the world, per capita. From that tiny place came not just Olympic swimmers, but the future President of the World Anti-Doping Agency and one step away from IOC President.
So maybe the perfect swimmer can be made but it won’t be a formula you’d expect.
Perhaps, once, the perfect world for swimming existed, and it was hidden in a tiny fiord, in the rain and cedar shadows of Ocean Falls, far up the coast of British Columbia, half way between the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the southern tip of Haida Gwaii islands. A young man called George Gates found it and created a swimmer’s haven.
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