RIO DE JANEIRO — Canadian teen swimming sensation Penny Oleksiak had a hard time getting some shut-eye after winning her second medal at the Rio Olympics on Sunday night.
She reached over to grab the new hardware from the nightstand and held her medals tight. That did the trick.
"I couldn't fall asleep. I had to hold them while I was sleeping, which is kind of lame," Oleksiak said with a laugh. "But it helped me fall asleep."
The 16-year-old swimmer from Toronto was second in the 100-metre butterfly final on Sunday, a day after picking up a freestyle relay bronze.
The hashtag "#SilverPenny" quickly picked up steam in Canada with her latest podium appearance. Her Twitter followers more than doubled overnight to well over 5,000 and counting.
Oleksiak has been checking her phone from time to time, adding it "keeps buzzing for like five minutes straight" when she turns it on.
"It's just blowing up with a bunch of Facebook messages, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, everything," she said Monday afternoon at a media availability. "It's a little overwhelming. Sometimes the apps will crash and stuff.
"But I mean it's pretty fun too."
Oleksiak didn't think she would be one of the top Canadian stories of the Games. She admitted her performance has been a bit of a surprise.
"I wasn't really expecting it," she said. "I was kind of gunning for a medal in 2020 but to get two here means so much to me.
"I think it has really set up my career I guess, right?"
There could be more medals to come. The six-foot-two teenager is tabbed to race the 200-metre freestyle relay on Wednesday, the 100 free Thursday and the 100-metre medley relay on Saturday.
Having never raced a world championship, Pan American Games or Commonwealth Games before, the Summer Games are essentially Oleksiak's first senior meet.
"I look at the medals a lot," Oleksiak said. "I feel like they're not real, which is kind of weird. It has just been a weird, unreal experience I guess."
