On July 18, 1992, Sylvie Fréchette She arrived home in Montreal and found her fiancé dead. Sylvain Lake. All the windows were down and all the doors were closed except one: the one that connected the living room with the garage, where the couple’s car had been running for hours. It reeked of smoke. Lake had committed suicide.
On August 6, 1992, Sylvie Fréchette won gold in the synchronized swimming solo at the Barcelona Olympics after a revolutionary exercise and became a star in Canada. Immediately, the National Bank made her the protagonist of its advertisements and public television gave her a talk show called ‘Simplement Sylvie’.
Between both days, less than three weeks and a succession of events that Fréchette does not remember today. The massive press conference he offered at the Montreal airport before flying to Barcelona, the previous days in the Olympic Village, the opening ceremony, his controversial victory at the Picornell pools, the celebration that did not exist, the massive reception of return home or the thousands of letters of admiration that Canadian fans sent him in the following days. Nothing. For decades his memory has avoided the saddest and, at the same time, happiest moments of his life. At 56 years old, she does not regret any brain disease, she is healthy, but she still suffers from the effects of severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
Fréchette now wants to know. He wants to know what is happening to him, so he has consulted experts, who have told him about his mental disorder, its origin, its effects, how it is similar to what many war veterans suffer from. And he wants to know what he really experienced at Barcelona 1992. That’s why last October he traveled to the city for the first time since the Games, visited the Picornell swimming pools, the Olympic Museum and the Sant Cugat High Performance Center and, among other things, He met a teenager who was a volunteer in that Olympic final, helping the judges: Gemma Mengual.
The Canadian public television that organized her trip and made a documentary about it, ‘Sylvie Fréchette. Retour à Barcelone ‘, she asked Mengual to act as host and the Spaniard accepted excitedly because Fréchette was her childhood idol. Before she won the 1992 Games, I had seen her become world champion in Madrid 1985 and Perth 1991 and I would still see her be Olympic team runner-up at the Atlanta 1996 Games. «I had been thinking for some time about whether or not to return to Barcelona and always I postponed it. She found excuses under the stones. To tell you the truth, she terrified me. She worried me about what she would remember and how she would feel about it. But when I arrived on the first day at the Olympic Museum and met Gemma, ugh! In her eyes I saw how happy she was to help me and her hug was so intense that I thought: ‘Nothing can go wrong here’,” explains Fréchette, in a telephone conversation with EL MUNDO from her home in Canada.