Often, in sports, it all comes down to luck. Just the right break at the right time — a shot that goes in rather than hitting the post, for example — can mean the win. Luck can go the other way too, though, with ill-timed injuries or illnesses cutting seasons short, or simply preventing an athlete from reaching their full potential.
Swimmer Dimitar ‘Mitko’ Ivanov knows this all too well. After a successful first season, he faced two seasons of sickness, becoming a “little sick” in his second year, before coming down with mono in his third year.
“Mono makes you feel tired all the time. You just have a lower level of energy, you go to bed super early, and you can never get enough sleep,” the backstroker explains.
Despite this hurdle, his illness was just that — a hurdle to jump over — as he still swam through it all.
“We had our main competition at the end of November [last year] and I was on antibiotics at the time,” Mitko says. “I actually went through two waves of antibiotics because they didn’t know what I had until December.”
Mono is a pretty good excuse for a subpar performance, but Mitko still put in a tremendous performance, narrowly missing qualifying for the national championship by only a second: “I was sick, competing at our peak meet, and I still got pretty close.”
No member of the men’s swim team has ever qualified for the national championship, and this is not the first time that Mitko has come oh so close, having missed by just half of a second in his second year.
“We haven’t actually sent a man, so it would be really exciting to be on the first men’s team [to qualify],” he explains.
However, getting so close and just missing the cut was a painful experience for Ivanov: ”It was definitely tough. In my second year, we didn’t really know how the system worked yet, so I was confident that I did make it, and then they released the standards in February or March [. . .] and I found out I was so close, it made me pretty sad.
“Then in my third year with the whole mono thing, I was once again pretty disappointed, but I understood, ‘If I’m this close when I’m sick, hopefully next year I can make it.’”
With a clean bill of health, Mitko looks poised to make a serious bid for a spot, and he’s confident that his team will find their way into the nationals as well. “We’ll definitely get some guys to go this year, we have a pretty strong team, a lot of good freshmen,” he says.
Mitko’s priorities are not limited to his role on the swim team, however. Entering his fourth year at SFU, working towards a degree in business and economics, he is just as enthusiastic about his studies as his time on the swim team.
“I love economics [. . .] it’s a different way of looking at the world. You can answer just about any question [like] why would a company set this price for something, or why are we in a recession, why is the economy bad? It’s just weird questions like that, that you wouldn’t really think about, I think about for everything.”
He hopes to use his degree to get into finance, and become a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). He admits, though, that the road won’t be easy: “It’s going to take a while, they require four years of experience, three exams and the fail rate is 50 per cent, so I’m going to have to work pretty hard to get through that.”
Throughout his athletic career, Mitko has shown resilience in the face of sickness, and worked hard to compete nonetheless. While he prepares for his last season with the team, he also prepares for the road ahead which, given his academic drive, sure looks bright.
