Nicol (right) with Petro-Canada's Stephen Kiss at The Children of St. Martha Elementary School on Sept. 25, 2019 (Lethbridge News Now)

By Justin Goulet

Lethbridge Olympian honoured at Children of St. Martha Elementary

Sep 25, 2019 | 12:35 PM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – Rachel Nicol says anyone can achieve great things.

The Olympic swimmer from Lethbridge was at The Children of St. Martha Elementary Wednesday morning, speaking with students about her journey to the world stage.

Nicol, who attended the school as a child, said it was quite the surreal experience being back.

“Just looking around this gym – lots of the signs in the gym were here when I was here and it’s pretty wild, it’s very nostalgic. It’s a really interesting experience. I really appreciate all the effort that goes in to setting these kinds of things up and all the kids being here, it’s awesome,” she said.

A sign made by students ahead of Nicol’s visit (Lethbridge News Now)

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The 26-year-old exemplified being humble, saying that although she’s grateful for the adoration shown by the children, she sometimes doesn’t feel like she “100 percent deserves it.”

“Anybody can kind of do what I did. It [definitely] takes certain skills and formulas and people involved to get to that place, but I started out here and so are these kids and anybody can kind of get to that stage,” she told LNN.

Nicol was honoured with a special framed photo and plaque to be put on display at the school on behalf of the Petro-Canada FACE program.

The framed photo to be put on display at the school (Lethbridge News Now)

FACE, which stands for Fuelling Athlete and Coaching Excellence, sees Petro-Canada, the Canadian Paralympic Committee and Canadian Olympic Committee award grants to inspirational athletes deemed to “have great potential to represent Canada at Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

Nicol said this was just another example of how strong the community support has been over the course of her career.

“I can’t stress enough how awesome Lethbridge is. Lots of people will say at sort of bigger events, ‘oh Lethbridge, where is that in Canada?’ and I’m like how don’t you know where Lethbridge is, it’s the best city ever,” she said with a grin.

She added that she had previously moved to Calgary to train in the city, but didn’t adjust to the bigger team and more serious setting as well as she thought she would.

So, she moved back to her hometown for training.

“It’s just more a grassroots feel, it’s less stressful, less pressure and I get to do really awesome events like this [speaking at the school], whereas if I was in a bigger city, living in Toronto or something, I probably wouldn’t be able to do [this], so it’s wonderful to get these opportunities to do that and having all these people set this kind of awesome event up, it really means a lot to me.”

As of now, Nicol doesn’t have any other speaking engagements lined up, but helps mentor up-and-coming swimmers in Lethbridge while pursuing her own goals.

She said she’s helping out with classroom sessions with the Lethbridge Amateur Swim Club.

“Just talking about things like women in sport, finding role models and even little things like time management. Just sharing some of the lessons it took me a long time to learn with them that might be able to help them cope a little better because it can be really hard when you’re doing sports and school and balancing social life and family and things like that. I really, as much as I can, like to share those experiences with other people and younger kids.”

One of the challenges she said she faced when preparing her speech was how to relate to the young students, noting that potential Olympic pursuits are years away from where the students are now.

“That’s one of the things that when I was first asked to come here, I was thinking ‘how am I going to make a speech that will relate to these kids, some of them are in kindergarten?’ so dreams like that are really far [far] away but that’s how I was thinking when I was young – I didn’t think that I’d be going to the Olympics when I was at this age,” she explained.

“So, I just kind of worked day by day to get myself better, setting small goals to reach big goals, so I’m going to really try to relate it to that, like you can have these big dreams in the future if you want, or you don’t – going to the Olympics was never this huge end goal for me and so, I’m going to try to relate it as much as I can to just working hard, looking at failures as opportunities to get better, asking for help, making sure you get help from your parents and your teachers.”

She said that people can’t do great things alone, and it’s okay to ask for help and making friends, noting she was “a bit of an outsider” growing up.

“It’s good to find your group of people like I did with swimming and anybody can do it. I started here and so are they and they can get there too.”

Nicol is currently training in Lethbridge to qualify for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.