Swimmer Santo Condorelli has a bizarre pre-race ritual

SANTO Condorelli does this before every single race. Seems rude, right? That’s just because you don’t know the whole story.

A man of many finger gestures.

IT WAS a movement so subtle that if you weren’t watching Santo Condorelli closely, you would have missed it.

As the Canadian freestyler entered the swimming arena for his 100m freestyle heat in Rio he looked over his shoulder in an attempt to locate someone in the crowd.

After removing his red team jacket and depositing his phone in the bucket provided, the 21-year-old looked back to the same spot he’d peered at earlier and quickly tapped his middle finger on the side of his head.

Condorelli’s reputation in Rio has already surpassed his performances in the pool because of this unique pre-race superstition.

Santo Condorelli’s pre-race ritual is ... unique.

Depending on which country you come from, he’s the swimmer who flips the bird or gives the finger to his father before he climbs atop the starting blocks.

His old man, Joseph, gives it right back.

It’s a routine the pair have been completing for several years — and for good reason.

Despite now standing at 188cm, Condorelli was smaller than most of the other kids he competed against as a youngster. He used to get intimidated by his lack of size when standing up on the blocks, so Joseph devised a strategy.

He’s been doing it for years. Pic: USA Swimming.

“I told him, ‘Enough is enough,’” Joseph told swimswam.com. “‘When you get on the blocks, just put everything out of your mind and swim like there’s nobody near you.’

“He said to me, ‘How do you do that?’ and I said, ‘Well, you say f*** it.’ So he looked at me in the crowd, and we both gave each other the finger, and he started winning race after race and we never looked back.”

Condorelli started winning bigger and bigger meets until he was suddenly making noise on the world stage.

“My dad was like, ‘You know what? Give me the finger before every race, just to worry about us, what we put in, we can conquer anything,’” he said.

He’s a little less blatant these days.

But if you were hoping to see Condorelli stretch his arm out 2Pac-style as he waited to dive into lane five today you would have been sorely disappointed.

Condorelli — who was raised in the US but competes for Canada because his mother hails from Ontario — has toned down his delivery after an unfavourable reception to the move in some quarters.

He was forced to write an apology letter after he was inadvertently caught on camera saluting his father at the 2012 US junior nationals.

“I was unaware about TV broadcasting and all that, and my father was on the sidelines,” Condorelli said. “We gave each other the finger and the camera happened to be pointing right at me at the time so it looked like I was giving the bird to national television and I got … a stern talking to from one of my coaches. Another coach was super offended, (they) thought I was targeting it towards their swimmer directly.”

We feel that given the background to this story has been told enough, it’s safe for Condorelli — who won his heat and qualified fifth fastest for the semi-finals — to bring back the full bird. Let it fly today, mate.

Originally published as Swimmer Santo Condorelli has a bizarre pre-race ritual