Elaine Tanner still remembers the Pan Am Games experience, where she won two gold and three silver medals and broke two world records in the process.
Tanner accomplished those accolades at the 1967 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg, as a 16-year-old Canadian swimming sensation. Forty-eight years later, she still remembers that championship moment.
“When you’re young and naive like that, you just feel like you can do anything and you didn’t put any limitation on yourself,” she says. “You just went for it. I guess I was fearless.”
Tanner says while she's not one to look at her medals, she will forever value the Pan Am friendships with other athletes, like fellow champion Mark Spitz of the American team.
“It's finding the friendships and the experiences that you have is really what I take away from the games,” she says. “It's not even so much of the competition, but it's the comradery. Meeting people from different countries and seeing their culture and stuff like that.”
Tanner won more gold, silver and bronze at the Commonwealth and Olympic games before she retired from competitive swimming. She says it's important to continue to evolve as a person –-a message she's writing about in one of two books due out early next year.
“You can't rest on your laurels. You just have to say that's cool, I did that, but now something else. That's how you have to look at life right?”
Tanner is also writing a children’s book to help send a positive message about growing up and setting goals.
“Set the dream, but the joy really comes in chasing that dream.”
