Canadian Olympic Medalist Sydney Pickrem Retires
Three-time Canadian Olympian Sydney Pickrem announced her retirement from the sport on Thursday.
The 28-year-old has been a stalwart of Canada’s resurgent women’s program, making her first Olympics in Rio in 2016. She won bronze in the women’s 400 medley relay at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and finished sixth in the 200 IM at three straight Olympics.
Pickrem made the announcement on social media.
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Pickrem was born and raised in Florida to parents from Nova Scotia. She attended Texas A&M and remains involved in college swimming as an assistant coach at West Virginia for the last two seasons.
She is the owner of a bevy of international medals. Her breakthrough came at the 2015 Pan American Games, when she took silver in the 400 individual medley and bronze in the 200 IM in Toronto.
While much of Canada’s golden generation of female swimmers came of age at the 2017 World Junior Championships (Taylor Ruck, Kayla Sanchez) and Penny Oleksiak was a teenage Olympic champion in the 100 free at Rio, Pickrem was one of the forerunners of the generation with the tenacity to help the rest through the door.
“She was so brazen and confident, and I’ve seen her grow into one of the veterans on the team who took her leadership role so seriously and really wanted to leave that Maple Leaf in a better spot,” High Performance Centre Ontario head coach Ryan Mallette said in a Swimming Canada press release. “She was so talented and always pushing to do everything she possibly could to maximize her potential.”
Though she downplays it, Pickrem finishes his career with plenty of hardware. She won seven career medals at long-course World Championships, the high point a silver in the 200 IM in Doha in 2024. She won bronze in that event in 2017 and bronze in the 200 breast in 2019. She has the seventh-most for a Canadian athlete at Worlds, male or female.
That positioned her as an Olympic threat in the latter, but the pieces never quite fit together.
At the Rio Games, she finished sixth in the 200 IM and 12th in the 400 IM before forcing more wholeheartedly on breaststroke.
“On paper it isn’t success to write home about,” Pickrem said. “Maggie (Mac Neil), Penny, Kylie (Masse), Summer (McIntosh), they’re star studs. I was there before some of them came along and at their peak. The biggest thing I’ve been able to do with my career is my consistency and my longevity.”
In Tokyo, an illness prevented her from starting either the 200 breast or 400 IM, but she finished sixth in the 200 IM. She won her Olympic medal in breaststroke on the medley relay, while also swimming in prelims for an 800 free quartet that finished fourth in the final in a national record time.
With a condensed program in Paris at what was always likely to be her last Olympic go, Pickrem was ninth in the 200 breast and again sixth in the 200 IM.
Pickrem also won two World Championships in the short-course discipline, with gold in the 200 IM and 800 free relay in Abu Dhabi in 2021. She won gold in the 200 IM and 200 breast at Pan Ams in 2023.
Being a part of that relay in Tokyo was a moment that Pickrem will never forget.
“Being able to stand on the Olympic podium, I didn’t know if that was going to be in the cards for me ever, especially as I was not (known as) a relay swimmer,” she said. “To be able to fight for that opportunity, get that opportunity and make the most of it definitely sticks out.”