Nick Thierry

Nick Thierry

Coach | Inducted 2014
December 2, 1938 – October 2, 2012
Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary

Nick Thierry made one of the most distinctive contributions to Canadian and international swimming of anyone in the sport's history.

He was a successful national-level coach, an administrator and one of the founding leaders of the Canadian Swimming Coaches Association. Yet his greatest legacy came from recognizing that swimming needed something it did not yet possess: a comprehensive record of performances that allowed athletes, coaches and federations to understand exactly where swimmers ranked in Canada and throughout the world.

For more than four decades, Thierry became the sport's unofficial keeper of the record.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1938, Thierry spent his first eight years there before his family moved to Havana, Cuba. He began swimming competitively in Havana and continued after eventually moving to Toronto, where he attended the University of Toronto.

Thierry earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Toronto in 1964 and initially worked professionally in architecture. Swimming, however, remained central to his life.

While still a university student, Thierry began assisting with swimming at the University of Toronto in 1961. He subsequently coached with the University Settlement Aquatic Club and spent more than two decades working with Toronto-area swimmers and clubs.

By the middle of the 1960s, Thierry had developed University Settlement into one of Canada's strongest programs.

His men's team won Canadian national championships in 1967 and 1968, and Thierry consistently placed athletes on Canadian national teams throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. His swimmers included Angela Coughlan, Jim Shaw, Karen Le Gresley, Gaye Stratten and Judy Garay.

Among the most accomplished was Angela Coughlan, who became one of Canada's leading international swimmers of her generation.

Coughlan was part of Canada's bronze-medal-winning 4x100-metre freestyle relay at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Two years later, at the 1970 British Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, she won gold in the 100-metre freestyle as part of an outstanding Canadian performance.

Thierry was Head Coach of Canada's swimming team at those 1970 Commonwealth Games.

His national-team involvement extended across several Olympic cycles. Thierry played an important role in Canadian team selection during the 1960s and early 1970s and served Canada on international tours in addition to his Commonwealth Games appointment.

But it was during these years as a coach that Thierry began developing the work for which he would ultimately become internationally renowned.

He started collecting race results and ranking performances because he wanted his own swimmers to understand how their times compared with athletes elsewhere.

For Thierry, rankings were not simply statistics.

They were a coaching tool.

Knowing where an athlete stood nationally or internationally provided an objective measure of progress, established realistic targets and connected swimmers training in Canada with performances happening around the world.

As Thierry's collection of results expanded, so did his vision.

In the early 1970s he created a Canadian swimming publication that eventually became SwimNews Magazine. Thierry served as its publisher, editor, writer and statistician, turning what began as a national publication into one of the world's most respected sources of competitive swimming information.

SwimNews combined journalism with something Thierry considered equally important: results.

Its pages documented Canadian and international competitions, athletes and coaches while publishing extensive rankings and performance lists. Canadian swimmers could follow national Top Age Group rankings, while elite athletes and coaches could compare performances against the best swimmers in the world.

Long before results databases could be searched instantly online, Thierry was assembling that information manually.

Meet results arrived by mail, telephone and eventually fax. Thierry painstakingly entered performances, checked records and created rankings. As technology changed, he adopted personal computers and increasingly sophisticated methods of managing the enormous volume of information flowing from swimming competitions around the world.

Swimming Canada later described his work as creating one of the most complete records of the sport. His statistics became a resource not only for swimmers and coaches, but for national federations, journalists, broadcasters, researchers and international swimming organizations.

Thierry's influence became increasingly international.

In 1986, during the World Championships in Madrid, his commitment to coordinating swimming statistics helped lead to the creation of the International Swimming Statisticians Association.

Beginning in the early 1990s, SwimNews published monthly FINA world rankings along with annual short-course and long-course statistical compilations. At major international championships, Thierry provided media and broadcasters with detailed information about finalists, including biographies, performance histories, chronological records and all-time rankings.

In an era before online databases and instant access to results, Thierry had effectively built much of that infrastructure himself.

His contribution was not purely numerical.

Thierry understood that a sport also needed to tell its stories.

Through SwimNews he documented Canadian swimmers and coaches across generations, preserving performances that might otherwise have disappeared from the historical record. His writing ranged from athlete profiles and technical analysis to major international competition coverage.

The magazine eventually produced more than 300 editions and became an essential reference throughout the international swimming community.

Thierry also contributed extensively to the administration and development of Canadian swimming.

From the 1960s through the mid-1980s, he served in leadership roles with Swim Ontario, on the national board of Canada's swimming federation and within the Canadian Swimming Coaches Association, where he served as both chairman and secretary.

He was also one of the founding members of the CSCA, helping establish a national organization through which Canadian coaches could share knowledge, advocate for their profession and strengthen coaching across the country.

Eventually Thierry stepped away from regular coaching to devote himself increasingly to publishing, statistics and the documentation of the sport.

The decision dramatically expanded his influence.

A coach can directly affect the athletes standing on one pool deck. Thierry ultimately created tools used on thousands of pool decks around the world.

His work helped establish the expectation that performances should be accurately recorded, ranked and placed into historical context. The systems available to today's coaches and swimmers—searchable rankings, historical comparisons, world lists and detailed championship statistics—perform instantly many of the tasks Thierry spent countless hours completing manually.

International recognition followed.

In 2001, Nick Thierry was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame as an Honor Contributor. ISHOF recognized not only his work with SwimNews, but his extraordinary commitment to maintaining the statistical record of international swimming and making that information useful to the sport.

In 2005, the International Swimming Hall of Fame presented Thierry with the Al Schoenfield Media Award, recognizing his decades of work as a swimming journalist, publisher and statistician.

He was also inducted into the Ontario Aquatic Hall of Fame as a Builder, reflecting his contribution to swimming within the province where his coaching and publishing careers had begun.

Thierry died in Toronto on October 2, 2012, at the age of 73.

His work, however, was preserved.

The Nick Thierry personal papers, including approximately 320 editions of SwimNews, became part of the University of Toronto Archives, ensuring that the extraordinary documentary record he created remains available to researchers and future generations of the sport. Swimming Canada also maintains access to the SwimNews archive as part of preserving his contribution to Canadian swimming history.

Nick Thierry's legacy is difficult to measure in the conventional language of coaching.

There were national championships, international athletes and major national-team assignments. Those accomplishments alone established him as an important Canadian coach.

But Thierry saw something larger.

He understood that athletes needed to know not simply how fast they had swum, but what that performance meant.

Where did it rank?
How did it compare historically?
Who had gone faster?
What standard was required to reach the next level?

By answering those questions for generations of swimmers, Thierry transformed record keeping into a tool for performance, motivation and understanding.

He began compiling statistics to help his own swimmers improve.

In doing so, Nick Thierry ultimately taught the swimming world how to keep track of itself.