Nathan Clement wasn’t supposed to be there, soaking up the thunderous chants of the crowd before the final of the Paralympic S6 men’s 50-metre butterfly at the Olympics Aquatic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.
Given the personal best times posted before the Paralympics, he wasn’t supposed to be in the final. Given his results coming into this season, he wasn’t supposed to be on the Paralympic team at all. Given the stroke he suffered when he was just two and a half years old, he wasn’t supposed to ever walk, let alone swim in a Paralympic final.
An yet there he was – standing on the starting blocks, seconds away from diving in and swimming the race of his life.
“The words are hard to describe what it’s like where it’s just complete and utter tunnel vision focus, where it feels like time slows down and you’re just doing everything you can to do the best you can,” the West Vancouver native told the North Shore News Thursday, two days after returning from Rio.
Clement, no doubt, did his best. In fact he shaved nearly one second off his personal best time in the final, placing seventh and clocking a time of 33.13 seconds. It was a new Canadian record.
Clement’s parents, Janet and Dave, were there in the stands watching their son swim faster than he ever had before. Recalling the moment, Janet’s voice softens as tears come to her eyes.
“He came off the blocks fast. He was good. He just had so much joy – you could feel that when he finished. And he looked at the clock and it was just like, ‘wow.’ I was so happy I was there to see it.”
When Nathan suffered his stroke – nearly 20 years ago now – this kind of moment was nearly unimaginable for Janet and Dave. As a toddler Nathan loved to run and talk, but after the stroke doctors listed the actions he would likely never complete again. There was a four-pack of ‘nevers’ that Janet rattles off like a mantra burned in her brain. Walk. Talk. Read. Write.
The family refused to believe it. They hooked up with the BC Centre for Ability, and when Nathan was released from hospital he came home to twice weekly visits from a small army of therapists – speech, physio, occupational. To this day Nathan is essentially hemiplegic – he has very limited use of the limbs on the left side of his body – but with therapy, there was progress.
“It took what was just darkness, and you kind of see the sunshine again,” said Janet. When Nathan was around eight years old – already able to walk, talk, read and write – he looked for a new challenge: soccer. His parents, supportive as they were of all his goals, reluctantly agreed to sign him up for a team in the West Vancouver Soccer Club, but they were expecting him to be placed in a younger age group. When they got to the field, however, the kids were all able-bodied players the same age as Nathan.
“They were all kind of looking at Nathan hobbling down the hill, and I was like ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t know if this is good,’” said Janet. It was, in fact, very good. The club, team and coach accepted Nathan right away. He played a lot, and the team won a lot too. At the end of the season, coach John Lecky named Nathan the team MVP. Nathan argued that he didn’t deserve it, that he wasn’t the best player, but his coach wouldn’t hear of it.
Nobody tries harder, or is more of a team supporter, or yells more, the coach said. You absolutely do deserve that.
Janet, recalling the moment, once again tears up. “John was one of our heroes.”
And it turns out, the coach was right. Nathan worked his way onto the cerebral palsy national soccer team before making the radical switch to swimming in high school, joining the West Vancouver Otters Swim Club. With the full support of the club, Nathan eventually earned the attention of the national Paralympic team. Coming into the Canadian trials earlier this year he was no lock to make the team, but he swam well enough to jump into the top-10 in the world and secure a spot in Rio.
“It was pretty crazy for me,” Clement said, of what it felt like to stand on the blocks for a Paralympic final after all he’d been through. The crowd was so loud – the partisan Brazilian faithful were going wild for one of their own who was also in the final – that the starter had to go through the process twice before the racers could hear his commands.
“The ground was shaking, ears were ringing as they started cheering, ‘Brazil! Brazil! Brazil!’” he said. “It was definitely the craziest I had to race in. I’ve been to Canucks playoff games, I’ve been to Seattle Seahawks games, and that was the loudest venue I’ve ever been in.”
Nathan ended up nipping the Brazilian racer for seventh place, beating him by one-hundredth of a second.
“I had no real expectations other than just go out there and have fun and enjoy it,” he said. “That kind of helped me have a great race. When I hit the wall, I was quite surprised that my time got that much lower. Overall it was just pretty crazy to try to keep up with the guys beside me in the other lanes.”
Later in the Paralympics he made another final as a member of the Canadian 4x100-m freestyle relay team. Another highlight was attending the closing ceremony held in Rio’s famous Maracanã Stadium, sacred ground for any soccer fan.
“As someone who grew up playing soccer, loving the sport, to be able to be inside the Maracanã Stadium was a surreal experience,” he said. “I wanted to grab a soccer ball and go dangle through the chairs.”
Nathan’s role wasn’t relegated to just swimming in Rio. He was also named the swim team’s co-captain, quite the honour for a first-time Paralympian. His leadership qualities have been noted elsewhere as well – he’s also the captain of the Otters Swim Club. Nathan is already focusing on earning a spot with Team Canada in 2020.
“We’re all in the same age-range of 15-25, so a lot of us are making a run at Tokyo and hopefully that’s when the real hardware starts to come our way,” he said.
Janet chuckles at the notion of Nathan already making podium plans for the next Paralympic Games, but she also knows that it is not wise to doubt her son once he puts his mind to something. She has a lifetime of evidence to back her up.
“Nathan is the sort of person that if you tell him ‘no,’ he wants it more,” she said. “Nathan really, really wanted to make the Rio team. My conversation with him was, ‘Nathan, I just don’t want you to be really disappointed if you don’t make the team.’ And he would say, ‘No, I want to make the team.’ I think Nathan’s strengths are perseverance, dedication and just plain hard, hard work. … He’s worked so hard.”
