Hockey was the dream job, but swimming became his niche

This feature appeared in the Arizona Daily Sun on May 21, 2004.

Lafontaine is living an adventure

By Ed Odeven
Like all young lads growing up in Quebec, Canada, Pierre Lafontaine dreamt of being a professional hockey player for the Montreal Canadiens. And it didn’t take him very long to figure this out.

“I could skate by the time I was 2 years old,” Lafontaine was saying Thursday during a lunchtime interview. “You’d skate with a hockey stick in your hands so you could stay up. That’s just what you do.

“…We’d be on the lake from eight in the morning ’til eight at night playing hockey.”

Little did he know it at the time, while skating on the frozen water of the Montreal suburb Pointe-Claire, but Lafontaine found his niche in an unexpected place: on an unfrozen surface of water, a swimming pool.

“My mother was a principal at…