Nancy Garapick of Halifax competes in the women's 200-metre backstroke swimming event at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.Doug Ball/The Canadian Press
Nancy Garapick, an unknown schoolgirl from Halifax, swam into the record books and won two Olympic medals before deliberately returning to anonymity.
Ms. Garapick set a world record in the 200-metre backstroke a year before claiming a pair of bronze medals at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Decades would pass before the world would learn what many suspected at the time – the two East German swimmers who finished ahead of her had cheated, depriving her of a gold medal.
A world record holder at age 13 and an Olympic medalist at 14, she prepared for another chance at Olympic gold only to have Canada boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
Ms. Garapick, who has died at 64, completed her university education before embarking on a teaching career in British Columbia and the Yukon, about as far from the spotlight as she could find. After the announcement of her death by Swimming Canada, some former pupils acknowledged on social media they had no idea “Miss Garapick” had once been a celebrated athlete.
Sportswriters and broadcasters voted her Canada’s female athlete of the year in 1975, making “the mermaid of Halifax,” as one newspaper described her, the youngest recipient of the award.
Standing just 5-foot-3, with a slim, boyish build, she was a technically brilliant swimmer whose stroke so exemplified perfection that other coaches used it as a guide for their own athletes.
Coach Nigel Kemp of the Halifax Trojan Aquatic Club guided her toward greatness, acknowledging her inner desire for perfection.
“She was determined,” he said recently. “She wasn’t frightened of circumstances. She took it all in stride. She was quietly confident.”
While she won countless medals and meets, she was denied gold at the Olympics and world championships by muscular East German swimmers who were themselves victims of a coercive program of doping. When Ms. Garapick stood between a pair of them on the pool deck at the world championships in 1975, the sportswriter Jim Taylor memorably described the slight, 113-pound Canadian as looking like “a dinghy between two destroyers.”
Ms. Garapick, right, celebrates her bronze medal win in the women's swimming event at the 1976 Olympic games in Montreal.Canadian Olympic Committee/The Canadian Press
Nancy Ellen Garapick was born on Sept. 24, 1961, in Halifax. She was the second of three children born to the former Ruth Constance Darrach and Nicholas (Nick) Garapick, a Royal Canadian Navy officer who became an insurance salesman. Her maternal grandfather, Claude Kenneth Darrach, had been a crew member on the original Bluenose in its racing years before being made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his wartime service in Halifax Harbour.
Her mother took her to the YMCA to learn how to swim at age 6, though Nancy floundered so badly in the pool that she was given lessons with infants in a smaller, shallower warm pool. Desperate to be with her peers, she quickly learned to swim.
At age 11, she competed for Team Nova Scotia at the 1973 Canada Summer Games in New Westminster, B.C. By age 12, she had set a dozen national age-group records. Some of her standards would last for decades.
At Queen Elizabeth High, administrators allowed for her to miss two months of classroom work each winter for training and competition, and she relied on “good friends who take notes for me” to keep up with her studies.
The Brant Aquatic Centre (now the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre) in Brantford, Ont., was the site for her debut on the world stage. At the Eastern Canadian championships on April 27, 1975, she narrowly missed the world record in the 200-metre backstroke in an afternoon qualification swim, which attracted a large, excited crowd of 1,500 spectators for the final. The crowd had stood and cheered her every stroke, as the Grade 8 student put more than 10 metres between herself and the pack by the midway point.
Ms. Garapick did not disappoint, completing the race in 2 minutes, 16.33 seconds, shaving more than a second off the world record set the previous summer at the European championships by Ulrike Richter of East Germany.
Just 40 days later, East Germany’s Birgit Treiber shaved 23-hundredths of a second off Ms. Garapick’s time.
The trio of world record holders met in a showdown at the world aquatic championships in July at Cali, Colombia. Ms. Garapick swam the fastest 200m backstroke of her career, completing the four lengths of the pool in 2:16.09 only to narrowly lose to Ms. Treiber.
After the race, Toronto Star sports editor Jim Proudfoot witnessed a scene between the swimmer and the coach. “You did a heck of a job, Sunshine,” Mr. Kemp told her. She then leaned into him and cried.
Two days earlier, Ms. Garapick had finished third behind her two muscular East German rivals in the 100-metre backstroke.
In the poll conducted by the Canadian Press earning her female athlete of the year honours, Ms. Garapick got 42 first-place votes, 10 seconds and eight thirds for 154 points. She became the youngest person to win the award, as the Vancouver swimmer Elaine Tanner had been a year older, at 15, when she won it in 1966. Ms. Garapick was only the second Maritimer to capture the honour since it was inaugurated in 1933. Halifax sprinter Aileen Meagher was the 1935 winner.
The swimmer was followed in the voting by figure skater Lynn Nightingale (92 points), pentathlete Diane Jones (later Jones-Konihowski) (89 points), runner Joyce Yakubowich and trapshooter Susan Nattrass.
At the Olympics in Montreal the following summer, Ms. Garapick finished third in both the 100m and 200m backstrokes behind double gold medalist Ms. Richter and double silver medalist Ms. Treiber.
Ms. Garapick was the only Canadian to win two individual medals at the Montreal Olympics.
East Germany’s women swimmers won 11 gold medals in 13 events, a shocking outcome considering they had barely made a ripple four years earlier at the Munich Games. A series of trials in Germany following reunification and the dissolution of the former Communist satellite revealed a state-sponsored regimen of performance-enhancing drugs was responsible for the swimmers’ speed and strength.
“If those medals were falsely won,” the Globe editorialized in 1998, following yet another doping scandal, “they should be taken away and the record books amended. … Anything less turns Olympic ideals into fool’s gold.”
Ms. Garapick, centre, wearing a striped shirt, surrounded by Olympic athletes at Royal York.BARRIE DAVIS/The Globe and Mail
If the East Germans’ results had been expunged at any time by the International Olympic Committee, Ms. Garapick would have won two gold medals, becoming the first Canadian athlete to take an Olympic gold on Canadian soil. As well, Canada would have swept the podium in the 100m backstroke with Wendy Cook (now Cook-Hogg) and Cheryl Gibson taking silver and bronze respectively after finishing fourth and fifth in 1976.
After the Olympics, Ms. Garapick struggled in the pool, as some training friends had left the sport. Only after she abandoned backstroke as a speciality and worked on all strokes did she regain the comfort and joy she once knew in the pool. Newspaper coverage described her as being on the comeback trail at age 17 and then, again, at age 19, and possibly “over the hill” at age 21.
At the 1979 Pan American Games in San Jose, Puerto Rico, Ms. Garapick picked up two silver and three bronze medals, a statement after a poor performance at the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton the previous year.
“The challenge of improving my times is stimulating,” she told Pat Connolly for the inaugural edition of Atlantic Insight magazine in 1979, “and so’s competing against the world’s best. And it’s still fun.”
She broke an ankle while skiing in 1978 and an arm while roller-skating two years later. In between, she made a rare television appearance on singer John Allan Cameron’s eponymous summer variety television show.
Ms. Garapick was named to Canada’s honorary Olympic swim team in 1980, which qualified her to compete in several international meets in lieu of the Moscow Games.
“It’s sad for those athletes who were not on the 1976 team,” she told The Globe in 1980. “We were lucky to make that team. The Olympics are never going to be the same again because of the boycott. The level of athletics will be so low because so many countries are not taking part that for those finishing first, it will not mean winning a real gold medal.”
An athletic scholarship had her swimming for the University of Southern California, though she soon moved to Edmonton before settling again in Nova Scotia, where she remained active as a competitor in university meets. She earned an arts degree from Dalhousie University and an education degree from Mount Saint Vincent University.
While training for the 1984 Olympics, Ms. Garapick was struck by a car while cycling in Halifax. She needed a two-hour operation to repair damage to her right side, including a fractured elbow, torn ligaments and a bone chip. Her recuperation lasted three years.
After teaching in Halifax and Vancouver, she moved to Whitehorse to teach at F.H. Collins high school, including directing a program that encouraged teenaged dropouts to return to complete their education. She also lived in Kitimat, an isolated town on the remote British Columbia coast known for its aluminum smelter.
In her swimming career, Ms. Garapick accumulated 17 Canadian titles and an astounding 38 championship medals, according to Swimming Canada. She has been inducted into the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame (1986), the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame (1993) and Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame (2008).
Ms. Garapick died at home in the Vancouver suburb of Langley on April 6. She leaves her parents; sister, Janet Papirmeister; and brother, Peter Garapick. She never married. A private person, she left instructions for there to be no paid death notice.
Though denied gold at the Olympics and world championships, she found the classroom a more equitable place than the pool, earning a Governor-General’s gold medal for academic excellence in 1996.
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