Visually impaired swimmer to enter Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame

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This article was published 28/09/2022 (1122 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tim McIsaac paid a king’s ransom emotionally, but he wouldn’t change a thing.

McIsaac, 63, was born completely blind.

At the time, the public school system in Manitoba’s capital wasn’t equipped to support children with visual impairments, relegating the Winnipeg native to classrooms in Brantford, Ont..

McIsaac attended the Ontario School for the Blind — now known as W. Ross Macdonald School — from Grade 1-11, a time in which he describes as a “love-hate relationship” with the “institutional” school because he was constantly homesick and hated going back after holidays, but understood it was the only place available to him during those years.

“It was traumatic,” McIsaac told the Free Press on Wednesday.

“Years later, actually not that long ago, I ended up in therapy because I was just irritable and I couldn’t figure out why. After I went for a few sessions, I started to realize I probably was having abandonment issues because of being left at that place when I was six years old by my parents.

Life wasn’t all bad for McIsaac, however. A multi-sport athlete with a knack for submitting his opponents on the wrestling mat, turns out the Manitoba product knew his way around a pool, too, leading him to take up swimming competitively on the side.

“I always kind of felt that I was better at swimming than I was at anything else. And I felt like I was better at swimming than a lot of other kids, that were better than me at everything else. I think that’s what drew me to it,” he said.

In 1975, McIsaac competed at the Ontario Games, where he was a standout in the water. With his mind set on the Paralympics, he joined the St. James Seals Swim Club when he returned home that summer to increase his training.

“I was doing both sports and I figured if I wanted to go to the Paralympics, swimming was gonna have to be it because it wasn’t gonna happen in wrestling,” McIsaac said.

In an encore the following year, he stood out again at the provincial event, leading him to be selected for the Canada Summer Games and, eventually, the 1976 Paralympics in Toronto. It was the first Paralympic Games to include amputees and the visually impaired in many sports.

McIsaac captured five medals in his Games debut, including gold in the 4×100 meter medley.

His appearance in Arnhem, Netherlands for the 1980 Paralympics would be his breakout. The Canadian competed in seven events, capturing four gold medals to add to what was a now stacked trophy case.

McIsaac would continue to dominate at the Games in 1984 and 1988, cementing an illustrious career that totalled 28 medals and a slew of other awards by its completion.

It’s an inspirational career that will take centre stage on Oct. 6, when McIsaac is inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame as a member of its 66th induction class. McIsaac is still taken aback by the thought of resting among the country’s other all-time greats.

“I just sat there. And I think I didn’t breathe for maybe like five or 10 seconds,” McIsaac said of finding out about his selection. “I didn’t know whether I should say, ‘Who is this, really?’ or, ‘Could you say that again?’ It was pretty shocking.

“I’ve gotten other calls about things like this, and they were exciting, but this one was different. This is sort of the ultimate one, right?”

McIsaac won’t only be honoured for his dominance in the pool, but him being a pioneer for swimmers with visual impairments.

Ahead of McIsaac’s second Paralympics, in 1979, Canadian national swimming coaches, Wilf and Audrey Strom, began to worry the speedy swimmer would hurt himself by crashing into the wall of the pool. Swimmers needed to touch the wall before turning to swim another length of the pool.

An innovative mind, Wilf trained McIsaac to tumble turn, a now compulsory move in many swimming events that ask a swimmer to do a summersault underwater before pushing off the wall with their feet.

McIsaac estimates the move saves anywhere around a half-second rather than touching with your hands.

Performing the move proved difficult, however, because of McIsaac’s impairment and his not knowing when he would be close to the wall.

So Wilf began tapping the swimmer’s back with a kickboard every time he neared the wall, in what was a signal to flip. It worked so well in practice, they implemented it at the Stoke-Mandeville Games in England.

“Of course we get out there and we’re the only people doing this and the people are running for the rule book like, ‘Is this really allowed?’”

The next year, at the 1980 Paralympics, McIsaac watched the idea catch fire, as teams from around the world had invented their own form of a tapping device for their respective Paralympians.

“There was somebody even that had a broomstick with a nerf ball on the end of it,” he said.

A warning device is now common practice at the Paralympic Games.

“His attitude was one that he didn’t want to lose ever,” said Audrey Strom of McIsaac. “He was going to be first or else. And he worked very hard to make sure he was capable, and that was important to Tim. He was never a second person. He only liked to be first.”

“My husband often told Tim, ‘If it was worth doing at all, it was worth doing right,’ and Tim trusted us.”

Audrey, 91, survived Wilf, who died in 2007 from cancer. McIsaac called the couple a second set of parents, and ones he often spent more time with than his own parents.

“I’m thrilled for him and I know my husband would be very proud of him that he is given this honour, because it is an honour, and Tim worked hard for it,” Audrey said.

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“He was looked up to by the rest of the world. Nobody wanted to be in a race with McIsaac.”

McIsaac finished a Master’s degree in education with a specialization in counselling last year at the University of Manitoba, his second degree. After his induction, he said he hopes to work with athletes to help them avoid the same issues he had while competing.

“If I’m telling my story, it’s to inspire kids of today to dream big and if they had the chance to go for it, like I had, to do that,” he said. “But also for the sports community, that when a kid reaches out and says, ‘I want this for myself,’ that somebody’s there for them.”

jfreysam@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @jfreysam

Joshua Frey-Sam
Reporter

Joshua Frey-Sam happily welcomes a spirited sports debate any day of the week.

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