Passages: Two-time Canadian Olympic Medalist Nancy Garapick, 64
Two-time Olympic medalist Nancy Garapick of Canada died on April 7. She was 64 years old.
Garapick died at her home in Langley, British Columbia, a Swimming Canada statement confirmed.
Garapick was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A product of the Halifax Trojan Aquatic Club, she qualified for a home Olympics in Montreal in 1976 at the age of 14. She finished second in both the women’s 100-meter backstroke and 200 back. She was named Canada’s female athlete of the year in 1976, the youngest person to ever win the award.
She won a silver medal in the 200 back at the 1975 World Championships in Cali, Columbia, to go with bronze in the 100 back. She added medley relay bronze at the 1978 edition of the meet.
At the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Garapick won five medals, including silver in the 200 individual medley (behind American Tracy Caulkins) to go with bronze in the 100 fly and 400 IM.
Garapick continued to swim into the 1980s, first at the University of California and then at Dalhousie University. She won an Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW, the NCAA precursor on the women’s side) national championship in 1981 in the 200 IM. She claimed five Canadian Interuniversity Swimming Championships for Dalhousie, from which she received a degree in 1982. Garapick also won a pair of national titles in the U.S. at the 1977 AAU National Short Course Championships.
In all, Garapick was a 17-time Canadian national champion and 38-time national medalist.
Garapick was inducted to the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame and the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, the latter in 2008. She is also a member of the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame, which in 2018 named her one of the province’s 15 greatest athletes of all-time.
Garapick’s career was among those most affected by the Cold War geopolitics of the era. She was one of many victims of the East German doping regime that only came to light years later. In both Montreal backstroke races, she finished behind East Germans Ulrike Richter and Birgit Treiber, the former winning both events in Olympic records. At Worlds in 1975, she was behind Richter and Treiber in the 100 back and Treiber in the 200 back (though she did beat Richter to silver).
Garapick was not on Team Canada’s medley relay team in Montreal that won bronze, more than seven seconds behind the world record time set by the GDR. She also missed a chance at a second Olympics with Canada joining the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, one of four swimmers recognized as 1980 Olympians by the Canadian Olympic Committee.