The Aquatic Adventures of Maggie Mac Neil
In 2000, Susan McNair and Ed Mac Neil adopted a nine-month-old baby from Jiujiang, China. They named her Hannah Margaret, or Maggie. Susan was a family physician in London, Ontario, and Ed was a high school drama teacher. Neither ever expected to become parents of an Olympian. “I can assure you: I would not have given birth to an elite athlete,” Susan says.
Maggie took her first dip in a pool roughly a week after her arrival in Canada; Susan was extra-keen on water safety and signed them up for a moms-and-tots class. Like most of the other babies, Maggie could not yet walk. But she could climb onto Susan’s forearm with an age- and situationally inappropriate confidence, straighten her legs and catapult herself into the water, surfacing with a satisfied, daredevilish smile—a baby with a plan. Greatness, winking. She did this for most of the lesson. “I remember coming home to Ed and saying, ‘Well, that was interesting,’ ” Susan recalls.
Roughly 23 years of lessons, races and preposterously rigorous training later, Mac Neil is now known worldwide for her electrifying debuts, none more so than her gold-clinching Olympic performance in Tokyo for the 100-metre butterfly. To date, she’s pulled off practically everything there is to achieve in elite swimming. She holds world records in the 50-metre backstroke and 100-metre fly; two World Championship titles; five medals from the Commonwealth Games; and seven medals, five of them gold, from a single Pan Am Games, also a Canadian record.
For her entire life, Mac Neil, a lover of routine and a memorizer of stats, has found success by refining her body and mind with machine-like consistency. But her path up Mount Olympus was interrupted, over and over again, by variables both rogue and ridiculous: a freak elbow injury, a late-onset asthma diagnosis and maddeningly heavy outside expectations. All were reminders of her vulnerability, despite her convincing performances to the contrary. This summer, millions of eyes will be on Mac Neil as she heads to Paris, hoping to hang a second 100-metre fly gold around her neck, a feat no woman has ever achieved. She’ll have to drown out the noise and slip into the speed she does best: swim, win, repeat.
As aquatic events go, the butterfly is one of the most challenging, hinging on a swimmer’s ability to maintain an even, rhythmic windmill with their arms and propulsive up-and-down dolphin kicks with the legs. It rewards symmetry, reliability and control. With her hyper-extendable knees, flexible ankles and flat feet, Mac Neil was built to fly. At six, she enrolled at London’s Excel Swim School, a semi-competitive program for kid swimmers with a certain sparkle. Within two years, she’d graduated and moved on to the London Aquatic Club’s development program. When Mac Neil joined his group, Andrew Craven, then an assistant coach with the teen cohort, spotted what he calls her “swimming IQ” right away. “She was meticulous about doing things the right way, outlier-smart. The kind that makes you go, ‘Whoa,’ ” he says. Initially, Mac Neil was resistant to her now-preferred stroke, crying the night before she raced her first 200-metre fly. She explains its unavoidable pull using an analogy from another of her passions, Harry Potter. “It’s like the wand: it picks you,” she says. By 12, the event was her first provincial record.
That same year, Missy Franklin, a 17-year-old American backstroker, secured four golds and a bronze at the 2012 Games in London, England, a performance Mac Neil caught on a family trip to the Rockies. Franklin’s sweep planted a seed in her—a cute, kid-ish dream of Olympic gold, one she’d soon learn would require a hell of a commitment to achieve. By her teens, Mac Neil was swimming five mornings and four nights a week, in addition to dry land gym sessions. Ed and Susan happily shuttled around their daughter, who often woke them up pre-dawn for practice.
For Mac Neil, competitive swimming was always a joyful pursuit—but being a natural is hard work, regardless. Her violin lessons, Mac Neil’s extracurricular extracurriculars, stopped. She lugged what felt like “600 bags” of books, equipment and Costco-sized boxes of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers uphill to school every day. She left sleepovers at 11 p.m. to make early-morning practices and missed her own Grade 8 grad trip to Quebec (for Easterns) and her cousin’s wedding (for training camp in Thailand).
By 2015, Mac Neil’s doggedness was producing results. She made her first international appearances: one at the Arena Pro Swim Series in Orlando, where she won two butterfly finals, and another at the FINA World Junior Swimming Championships in Singapore. Within a year, Mac Neil was in Toronto at her first Olympic trials ahead of Rio. When she didn’t make the cut, Craven, then her primary coach, says her temper emerged from its usual place below the surface. After a long day at nationals in Edmonton that summer, he asked Mac Neil if she wanted to watch racing footage of Penny Oleksiak, the Canadian swimming wunderkind then having the summer of her life. Mac Neil’s response: I am not interested.
That sour-grape sting gave way to a more literal pain. Maggie couldn’t breathe—easily an athlete’s worst nightmare. The realization emerged slowly, like a noxious gas, during her practices at the Aquatic Club in London. Then came a mystifying sluggishness during once-easy exercises. Mac Neil just kept swimming. She jokes that, as a doctor’s kid, she’d normalized the art of minimizing her symptoms.
Things came to a crisis point during a 2017 World Cup meet in Singapore, where the suffocatingly humid air seeped into the venue through vents and an open wall. “I was doing the simplest sets to get ready for the meet, to go fast—nothing outrageous,” Mac Neil remembers. “I was like, Why is this the hardest thing ever?” The problem’s severity sank in soon after, at a winter competition at the University of Toronto. “I wasn’t moving,” Mac Neil says. “I couldn’t pull in enough air to do anything.”
Mac Neil developed sport-induced asthma, likely exacerbated by chlorine, a substance she had been marinating in since moms-and-tots
What followed was a months-long stretch of frustration. Mac Neil left competitions early. She lost to people she’d swum circles around as a child. She thought, for the first time ever, Maybe I can’t do this. Not just long-course races. Not just the Olympics. Maybe she couldn’t swim at all. Clarity soon came with a diagnosis from a respirologist: sport-induced asthma, likely exacerbated by chlorine, a substance Mac Neil had been marinating in since moms-and-tots.
Studies show that the incidence of asthma among high-level swimmers is considerably higher than in the general rec population; Mac Neil had watched fellow athletes inhaling from puffers on the pool deck many times. Even so, there’s an unavoidably heavy, star-crossed feeling that washes over you when the stuff of your dreams turns suddenly and traitorously poisonous—like a Michelin chef becoming allergic to flour, or a nurse to latex gloves.
It took roughly six months, and a couple of failed prescription cocktails, for Mac Neil to sort out her optimal treatment regimen: montelukast, an oral medication that calms her airway, and three inhalers, two used daily, once for emergencies. Under the World Anti-Doping Agency’s regulations, two of her medications are considered threshold drugs, which means that, so long as Mac Neil stays within her prescribed daily dosage, she won’t fail any doping tests. (Not that she’d let that ever happen—Mac Neil is too paranoid to even take approved vitamins.) She did, however, have to secure a therapeutic-use exemption when she was prescribed prednisone, a powerful corticosteroid, during a severe bout of airway inflammation.
Swimmers don’t typically specialize in any particular event, if they ever do, until early adulthood. Mac Neil’s asthma made the decision for her. She had been making a name for herself in the 400-metre individual medley and the 200-metre fly, both longer-distance races. But her lungs were screaming sprints. Once a newly medicated Mac Neil started focusing her energy on the 100-metre fly, her race times dropped.
Mac Neil arrived in Ann Arbor midway through 2018 to start her psychology degree at the University of Michigan. She was competing respectably, but Rick Bishop, then an associate head coach with the school’s swimming program, didn’t give her a free ride. “I’d seen a video of her swimming in Canada—she was good, but not great,” says Bishop. Within months, Mac Neil had set a new school record for the 100-metre fly, earning a full scholarship and upending Bishop’s first impression. He was awestruck during their first few months of practice. He raised the bar for Mac Neil over and over again—faster, harder—and watched her deliver each time. It wasn’t just that she breathed efficiently, or that her frame, more cigarette boat than tugboat, was naturally hydrodynamic. “There’s talent and good technique, which she has,” Bishop says. “But people who can combine that with an unparalleled work ethic? That’s when things really get crazy. Those are your best-in-the-worlds.”
Suddenly, these were the people Mac Neil was competing against. At the 2019 World Aquatics Championships in South Korea, she went toe-to-toe against Olympian Sarah Sjöström, a six-foot Swede known in the swimming world as “Gold Bae,” who’d won the 100-metre fly at the previous three Worlds. (Bishop tried to quell Mac Neil’s nerves with some levity, comparing Sjöström to a “Viking who could drop-kick you over a fence.”) Mac Neil, who’d been content to simply make the finals, came out of nowhere to win the 100-metre fly, blowing both Sjöström—and her own expectations—right out of the water. “I felt like I’d earned my spot up there, that it wasn’t just some random thing that happened,” Mac Neil says. That Worlds win crystallized her path to Tokyo, but Bishop again kept it real. “If you’re an Olympian, you’re basically a god of your sport,” Bishop says. “You can sit at a dinner table with the people who are just as good or better than you.”
Leading up to Tokyo, Mac Neil adopted an against-type philosophy of “we’re just gonna see what happens.” It turned out to be the ideal flexibility for 2020. The pandemic pushed the Games to 2021, and strict COVID lockdowns in Michigan initially forced Mac Neil to train in smaller pools and stay in a bubble with her 4 x 100-metre relay teammates. (Over in Sweden, which never locked down, Sjöström had unlimited access to standard-sized facilities.)
Mac Neil also clocked countless hours butterflying back and forth in her family’s 15-metre in-ground pool, strapped to a power tower for resistance. (Picture a guillotine with a heavy bucket in place of a blade that raises higher the farther an athlete swims away from it.) “I’d look out there in the morning and the whole backyard would be steam,” Susan says. “It cost us a fortune to heat the pool in March.” When the local paper publicized Mac Neil’s need for a 25-metre pool, some Londoners generously offered their own.
Once she arrived in Tokyo, Mac Neil found herself facing down her most formidable opponent: randomness. The short swims, usually scheduled for nights, were shifted to the morning to align with Western media coverage, meaning she didn’t have her usual hours beforehand to plan. She won silver with her relay crew, but her oldest teammates—her parents and sister, Clara—were 10,000 kilometres away at their cottage just south of Kincardine, Ontario, barred from Tokyo due to COVID restrictions. Bishop, meanwhile, was on-site at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre, but not in an official capacity. “That’s a whole set of politics,” he says. “Canadian swimming was a bit territorial. Maggie was my athlete, but they didn’t often give credentials to coaches from outside of Canada.” Instead, he attended another of his protegés and watched Mac Neil from the nosebleeds.
Slipping into the Olympic-sized pool on July 26, 2021, the morning of her fabled 100-metre fly, Mac Neil imposed order of her own. She began her time-tested pre-race ritual. She mounted the diving block, giving three commanding kicks to the footplate to make sure it wouldn’t give way when she pushed off. She splashed herself exactly 15 times to ensure her bathing suit was vacuum-sealed to her body, completely free of errant air bubbles. She’s done this step since her youth, when a retail worker at a swimming supply store sold her the wrong size, which she never forgot. Mac Neil is seemingly the sort of person who doesn’t forget anything, ever—not the entire periodic table, not the first 100 digits of pi, and certainly not the personal bests of her opponents, who were boarding the blocks beside her.
Mac Neil describes her now-iconic race as a blur—“no pun intended.” Wordlessly and automatically, her body acted out Bishop’s time-honoured advice: have the confidence to let them be ahead at the 50, and know that you can run them down. Just before the halfway point, Maggie was still in seventh. Susan was almost fully dissociated when her brother, John, said, “Just watch her.” Then, that trademark kick. When she emerged at the end, a waterlogged Mac Neil, near-sighted and without her contacts, had gifted Canada an iconic Games finish, on par with Donovan Bailey’s exuberant open-mouthed jog and Virtue and Moir’s are-they-or-aren’t-they on-ice embrace. It was the squint seen round the world, followed by an uncharacteristically delayed “Oh my god” when the scoreboard came into focus: 55.59 seconds. A new Canadian, Commonwealth and Americas record. Gold.
The scoreboard came into focus: 55.59 seconds. A new Canada, Commonwealth and Americas record. Gold.
Ed and Susan didn’t hear from their daughter until 3 a.m. EST, save for a five-second FaceTime from the pool deck after her big finish. One of Susan’s first texts in the deluge of congratulations was from David Lawrence, the family’s optometrist in London. (“How wonderful. Our WhatsApp group for the office is lighting up. P.S.: The glasses look great.”) When she did get in touch hours later, a beaming Maggie appeared on screen with a champion-sized bowl of vanilla ice cream.
In the days following the race, Mac Neil’s incredulous reaction to her own awesomeness was memed a million times over. When she pulled onto her street in London, about 100 friends, relatives and neighbours—dressed in their red-and-white Canadian best—were waiting with signs and flowers. For Mac Neil, this newly blinding spotlight was disconcerting: she’d gotten more than everything she’d ever wanted, but she was suddenly without a dangling carrot or, as she calls it, her “why.”
The win drove home a humbling realization, one most Olympians only encounter once they’ve won big: the chasmic difference between what’s expected of champion athletes and what can reasonably be expected of human beings. Transcend the normal limits of genetics for so long, and you’ll almost forget you’re one of us: flesh and blood, and fragile. But what unmoored Mac Neil was circumstantial rather than purely internal—destabilizing outside factors that chipped away at the painstakingly built scaffolding of her swimming life. She could fix her stroke rate, but not the fact that Bishop, her sherpa up Mount Olympus, had left UMich for a head coaching position at Louisiana State University.
She faced another blow in March of 2022. After an NCAA race, she rushed to fetch a teammate’s shirt that was drying in the bleachers; they were already late for a team dinner. She wiped out on the pool deck. “My elbow got all of it,” she says. It bruised almost immediately. She consulted a team medic, who admitted the injury didn’t look great. Mac Neil cried all the way through the meal, unable to move her golden limb. The restaurant gave her ice.
Mac Neil trained for another week with her bruised elbow, then headed to the Commonwealth trials in Victoria, B.C. She was still keen on qualifying for the upcoming Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, U.K., so she blasted her way through another butterfly race before receiving an MRI and X-ray. It was a fracture; the scan revealed a chunk of loose bone, floating aimlessly. On the plane ride home to London, she contracted COVID for the first time. She’d never felt less invincible. “It was the worst week of my life,” she says.
Mac Neil’s prognosis wasn’t destiny-ruining: no surgery required. Her Toronto coach prescribed four-ish weeks of kicking in the pool while holding a board. Mac Neil calls the program “the most boring thing ever,” but for once she welcomed the slower pace. She’d already had a sit-down with John Atkinson, Swimming Canada’s high-performance director, and laid it all on the line: she needed to have, as she put it, “a chill summer.”
For Mac Neil, that still involved competing at that summer’s Worlds in Budapest—but only in relay events, so as not to let the team down—and butterflying at Commonwealths, partly because Susan was a fan of the royals. “Ten years ago, maybe expectations were different among athletic institutions, that athletes would break themselves no matter what,” says her former coach Andrew Craven, who remembers once sitting down with a younger Mac Neil and explaining the perils of perfectionism. “But I have to give Swimming Canada credit for putting Maggie’s well-being first. And her, too, because she sees herself having a life past swimming.”
Mac Neil also realized she needed a change of scenery and planned to transfer somewhere new for her last year of NCAA eligibility. By the time Rick Bishop called to suggest they get the band back together at LSU, Susan had already been looking at online listings for apartments in Baton Rouge. Mac Neil appreciated the serendipity.
Soon, everything was in place. By late August of 2022, Mac Neil was beginning her master’s of science in sports management at LSU. Even the breathtakingly muggy Louisiana weather—and lack of AC at the LSU pool—couldn’t slow her down. Happier than ever, she made her comeback the following year at the Pan Am Games in Santiago, Chile, winning five gold medals, a feat no Canadian had ever accomplished at a single edition of the tournament.
Mac Neil also seemed to be relaxing into her fame a bit more. As one of the Games’ athlete ambassadors, her bespectacled face was plastered all over Santiago—on buildings, guidebooks and transit. When she caught a father and son mimicking her pose in front of a Pan Ams poster in an underground subway station, she posted the adorable exchange to her Instagram, soundtracking it with the song “On Top of the World” by Imagine Dragons.
I met Mac Neil this past April, three months out from the Paris Games. She’d stopped by the Pan Am Sports Centre in Toronto for the Canadian Swimming Open, a pre-Paris amuse-bouche. Mac Neil looked exactly how I pictured her: a modest five foot six, but every bit the Olympian. She traipsed comfortably around the pool deck dripping wet, her impressive She-Hulk shoulders cloaked in a red-and-white towel. She insisted she wasn’t cold and didn’t need a snack. When Mac Neil emerged from the change room in a hoodie a few minutes later, she cut a more casual figure. She sank comfortably into a chair, phone in hand. “I’ll miss my master’s grad because it’s during Olympic trials in May—of course!” Mac Neil says. “Home stretch.”
From here on out, Mac Neil has a lot to look forward to. A month after our chat, she returned to that same pool for those same trials, qualifying for the 100-metre fly on day one, first in her heat—as if there was ever any doubt. (A 13-foot plywood replica of the Eiffel Tower, originally on display at a local mall, added a sense of occasion.) She’s super-excited for the unbridled Games experience that awaits her in Paris—the in-person audience and, especially, the closing ceremonies. True to form, she’s in full-on planning mode, using an old school notebook to “religiously” build her packing list. So far, it includes her toothbrush, her asthma meds (which she’s practised scheduling according to Paris time), and possibly cinnamon-bun popcorn from Trader Joe’s, if it’s ever back in stock. She hasn’t decided whether to devote half a suitcase to her pillow to avoid the “weird beads and feathers” that are sometimes found in foreign models.
Her pre-Paris training will also be low on surprises. Their strategy avoids anything out of the ordinary that would risk injury. “Maggie has to do work, then take breaks,” Bishop says. “She’s an older athlete now—there are more miles on her body, some bumps and bruises.” In fact, in late April, Mac Neil says she heard a concerning pop followed by some stiffness and clicking in the vicinity of her Achilles elbow—a scare that dissipated after an all-clear from an MRI. Bishop is repeating the exercises and aphorisms that helped Mac Neil get to the top in the first place. This is just another swimming pool: 50 metres down and 50 back. Don’t fatigue the arms too early. Occasionally, he’ll throw in a firestarter: no woman has ever won back-to-back 100-metre flies. “He says that to me all the time,” Maggie says. “It’s not like it’s not on my mind. I just don’t need to add the pressure of ‘cementing my legacy.’ I don’t need to prove myself to anyone anymore.”
Mac Neil initially planned on making Tokyo her first (and last) Olympic appearance, but when COVID cost her precious racing opportunities, she decided to ride out one more cycle. After this summer’s games, she’ll still compete, without a firm end date, but don’t look for her in Los Angeles in 2028. Gifted as she is, at 24, Mac Neil is now considered—bafflingly to regular, non-athletic folks—an elder stateswoman in swimming, one who has other dreams. She never envisioned herself racing Sarah Sjöström to the grave, nor has she ever had the urge to coach. (“I don’t have the patience for that,” she says. “I feel like, if I told someone to do something and they didn’t do it right the first time, I’d be like, ‘Come on, it’s not that hard.’ ”)
Gifted as she is, at 24, Mac Neil is now considered—bafflingly to regular, non-athletic folks—an elderly stateswoman in swimming, one who has other dreams
Post-master’s, Mac Neil hopes to go to law school and, one day, scratch her competitive itch as a litigator somewhere in the sports world. She’s already socking away savings for that future, thanks to a whack of sponsorship opportunities. Speedo. Sport Chek. Cheerios. As of last year, there’s also her ambassadorship with Ontario’s Lung Health Foundation, the role that she seems most proud of. It dovetails nicely with her hard-won epiphany: that there’s an awful lot of good to be gleaned from making peace with one’s vulnerabilities. The uncontrollables. “I don’t know whether it’s a great thing to win,” says Susan. “The important thing is to be able to say, ‘Even if I don’t win again, I’ll still be okay in the world.’ ”
After Mac Neil formally retires, she plans to set another countdown clock: five years, during which she’ll only allow herself to do sports that aren’t swimming. Biking and tennis are early contenders, as is skiing, which she hasn’t been able to do since she was eight. Lately, much to her excitement—and Bishop’s chagrin—Mac Neil has locked onto another injury-laden sport: rock climbing. One of her high school friends has a bouldering wall in her backyard in London, and Mac Neil often swings by for visits when she’s home. Best of all, she’s actually kind of bad at it. “I only use my arms!” she says, seemingly getting a kick out of her terrible form. The delight of a beginner.
This story appears in the August issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue here or subscribe to the magazine here.