Filmmakers Hannah Walsh and Emma Puchniak struck gold when they decided last year to make a documentary on Dutch-Canadian swimmer Betty Brussel, following her with their cameras ever since, the plan to release the end product some time in the autumn.
Her story was already a joyous one before last weekend, but then she only went and broke three world records at a meet in British Columbia.
There’s a good chance that you heard about her feat because it popped up at the end of a bunch of bulletins during the week, in that ‘….and finally’ section, the newsreaders sounding like folk who had to do a double-take when they came to the bit about her age. Brussel will be 100 in July.
For now, she’s a 99-year-old nipper, but she slots in to the 100-104 age category because she was born in 1924, and swimming’s age categories are based on the year of their competitors’ birth.
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Not to be indelicate about it, but you can’t quite imagine that the 100-104 category is stuffed with competitors, although the reports this week said that Brussel usually has around five rivals. It’s a fair old ad for whatever they’re feeding them in British Columbia.
With any class of telling of stories like this, there is, of course, a severe danger of it having a tone along the lines of ‘aren’t old people great to still be alive and doing things’. But after the life she’s had, Brussel is, well, great to still be alive and doing things.
She was two months short of her 16th birthday when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands during World War II, by then her impoverished parents having taken her out of school so that she could help rear her 10 younger siblings.
In all that time, the one speck of joy in her life was when she got to swim in the canal near her home north of Amsterdam. She felt free, she felt alive, there was a beautiful release about it all. It was her time, away from the grinding trials of day to day life.
“I love gliding through the water. Swimming is my love. It makes me forget all of my worries,” she said last week, her feelings about the sport unchanged since those teenage years. It’s still making her feel alive.
She moved to Canada in 1959 with her husband Gerrit, the couple having three children who are now all in their seventies. Her time was filled with rearing them and cleaning neighbours’ houses, the business of her life putting swimming firmly on the back burner.
But Gerrit died just over a decade ago, her children are now rearing their own, so at the age of 68 she returned to the pool and took up competitive swimming. Not too competitive, mind, the medals - and she has a mountain of them - mean little to her, it’s the feeling that washes over her when she’s in that pool that entrances her.
She’s had her health problems. She suffered a heart attack 25 years ago and has worn a pacemaker since. She broke both her feet and cracked a vertebra in a nasty fall, and she’s needed surgery on a shoulder. But every time she returned to the pool.
“You don’t stop swimming when you get old. You get old when you stop swimming,” reads the t-shirt she often wears.
She lives alone in an apartment, reading, embroidery, knitting, crosswords, growing tomatoes and flowers on her balcony her way of chilling out after her two training sessions a week.
“I feel very fortunate to do what I do. I’m not ready for somebody to look after me,” she told Canada’s Globe and Mail. Technology? She has a mobile phone for emergencies. But, “all of my friends died on me,” she said. “Who am I going to call?”
Walsh is smitten with the subject of this documentary. “Beyond the pool, Betty is well versed in the world around her and exemplifies progression and what it means to truly love unconditionally. Growing up in a time when Holland was occupied by the Nazis, she often speaks about how she sees history repeating itself today with current wars, genocide, and the hateful discrimination we see at a policy level and in day-to-day life.”
“While on a swim with her the other day, Betty turned to me and said that she doesn’t understand why we all can’t simply love each other. As a person who has lived through war, her belief is if we could all step into each other’s shoes for a minute, the world would be a much better place.”
Betty Brussel isn’t the biggest sporting story of the week. The loveliest, though. In a time of unrelenting dark news, she’s been a ray of sunshine.
“The pool is my happy place,” she told the Washington Post. When they asked her what was the key to a long life, she said “I am a happy person - I think that’s one of the secrets”.
With a giggle, she described herself as “a late bloomer” when it comes to swimming, although aside from that mid-life sojourn from the sport, it’s taken her back to where she started in that canal north of Amsterdam. Giving her life.
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