Penny Oleksiak needs a better media strategist
And a personal assistant
Last month, Olympic swimming sensation Penny Oleksiak was issued a two-year suspension from World Aquatics after she ran afoul of the organization’s anti-doping policy by failing to be where she was supposed to be for three whereabouts tests. The monitoring system requires athletes to provide their location for one hour a day, 365 days a year, in an effort to keep sports clean.
Related: Olympian Penny Oleksiak has been banned from competing because she didn’t share her location
The news was shocking, but more than that, it was puzzling. Oleksiak maintains that she has always been a clean athlete, but three missed tests seems like a lot, especially for someone carrying so many hopes, dreams and sponsorship deals on her shoulders. Wouldn’t two strikes warrant hiring a personal assistant to manage the World Anti-Doping Agency’s stringent standards? Or at least a backup alarm clock?
There were a lot of questions left dangling. Cut to Oleksiak’s recent interview on The National—her first media appearance since the scandal. Surely an exclusive sit-down would provide Canadians with the answers we’ve been waiting for. Viewers couldn’t possibly spend over 11 minutes listening to the woman at the centre of the scandal speak and still have no idea what happened.
Oh, wait, never mind.
Sitting down with CBC sports journalist Devin Heroux, Oleksiak was adamant that she has not been doping and bolstered the claim with some additional context. She emphasized that, between her three missed whereabouts tests, she passed plenty of drug tests both inside and outside of competition.
Still, you’d think that the second part of her reputation offensive would be a full and clear accounting for how and why she missed three tests. Perhaps a flight delay? Extreme jet lag? A super-last-minute itinerary change?
Oleksiak offered an explanation for failed test number one, claiming she’d decided to do her training in the morning instead of the afternoon but hadn’t updated her location. She went to the pool and a testing agent, presumably, showed up at her home. But the details she provided for the second and third infractions were vague, gesturing toward work obligations outside of swimming that caused her to forget about the possibility of a whereabouts test.
“I woke up one morning a few days after my birthday. I had missed calls, and I knew right away what it was,” she told Heroux. Presumably, Oleksiak didn’t intend to imply she’d been on a three-day birthday bender, but, well—that’s why we’re calling out whoever was in charge of prepping her for this interview.
Related: Penny Oleksiak became an Olympic superstar at 16. Now for her next trick
An investigation of Oleksiak’s Instagram suggests that she spent her birthday in Montreal, attending F1 race festivities while doing some brand work promoting Peroni’s non-alcoholic beer. This lines up with reporting by the Toronto Star that claims her third strike occurred when her whereabouts form had her location listed in Los Angeles yet she was posting from Quebec on her social media.
It’s hard to accept this level of oversight from an elite athlete. But, hey, who among us hasn’t had a few too many zero-ABV beers and thrown caution to the wind?
Courtney Shea is a freelance journalist in Toronto. She started her career as an intern at Toronto Life and continues to contribute frequently to the publication, including her 2022 National Magazine Award–winning feature, “The Death Cheaters,” her regular Q&As and her recent investigation into whether Taylor Swift hung out at a Toronto dive bar (she did not). Courtney was a producer and writer on the 2022 documentary The Talented Mr. Rosenberg, based on her 2014 Toronto Life magazine feature “The Yorkville Swindler.”
