Tessa Cieplucha wanted to give it her all in her last meet of the year.
The 23-year-old from Georgetown, Ont., raced to gold in the women’s 400-metre individual medley as Canada opened the world short-course swimming championships with three medals Thursday.
The women’s 4x100 freestyle relay also won gold, while Rebecca Smith captured a silver in the 200 freestyle.
Cieplucha took the lead at the 250-metre mark then held on to win in a personal-best time of four minutes 25.55 seconds.
“That last leg was definitely painful, but I kept telling myself to keep going,” she said.
Ellen Walshe of Ireland was second in 4:26.52 and American Melanie Margalis was third in 4:26.83. Bailey Andison of Smiths Falls, Ont., was fifth.
“I’m really happy with the race,” Cieplucha said. “Coming into this meet I knew it would be one of the toughest fields. It is such a great feeling to start a busy week this way and hopefully I can carry the momentum.”
Kayla Sanchez, Olympic champion Maggie Mac Neil, Smith and Katerine Savard set a Canadian short-course record of 3:28.52 to tie the Americans for gold in the relay.
Smith put Canada in first place to set the stage for Savard on her anchor leg. The 28-year-old fell behind four-time Olympic medalist Abbey Weitzeil of the U.S. before finding a final push to touch the wall in a dead heat.
“I was shaking on the blocks. I knew I was the slowest on the team, but I had a job to do at the end and I wanted to keep our first-place position,” Savard said. “I didn’t breathe the last couple of strokes because I just wanted to touch the wall.”
Mac Neil, who won Olympic gold in Tokyo in the 100m butterfly, withdrew from her 100m backstroke semi-final to focus on the relay final.
“Seeing how close it was scheduled to the relay I wanted to be there for the girls,” she said. “I knew we had it in us to do something good tonight.”
Smith, a 21-year-old from Red Deer, Alta., set a Canadian short-course record time of 1:52.24 in her silver-medal freestyle performance.
Siobhan Haughey of Hong Kong won gold in a world-record time of 1:50.31.
The championships, which run through Tuesday, are held in a short-course – 25-metre – pool, as opposed to the swimming events at the World Aquatic Championships or the Olympics, which are held in a 50-metre pool.