Not many people have followed a path like the one Apollo Hess has taken to the Olympic Games.

The 21-year-old from Lethbridge, Alta., a proud member of the Kainai Nation (Blood Tribe), hopes that could change if younger swimmers see themselves in his story.

Hess didn’t grow up in the largest city or have a lot of advantages. Lethbridge has a population of about 100,000 people, and only one 50-m pool, at the University of Lethbridge. He also didn’t have a father in his life growing up, yet his mother, Ingrid Hess, made sure he and his brothers (Remko is four years older, Til a year younger) had the opportunity to participate in sport.

“My mom showed me how to be strong on your own and keep persevering when things aren’t always going your way,” Hess says. “My mom put us in music lessons and sports, drove us to hockey and soccer tournaments every weekend, and she’s a lawyer, busy. She instilled this work ethic in me, that’s something I can really take from her.”

Hess started swimming at age six with the now defunct Excalibur Swim Team.

“I played pretty much every sport available to me when I was young: hockey, soccer, football, volleyball, cross-country, a little bit of everything,” he says.

At 11 he switched to the larger LA Swim Club, and by 13 was “fully switched” to swimming, in part due to concussion issues from hockey and football. He continued to develop there, in 2021 making it to Olympic trials, where he finished as high as fourth in the 200-m breaststroke.

Hess enrolled at the University of Lethbridge and won the men’s 50 and 200 breast at the 2022 U Sports championships. He has five U Sports medals to his credit, but last fall he felt he needed to change his training base for the Olympic year.

Head Coach Ryan Mallette invited him to join the High Performance Centre – Ontario, but first he needed to take a summer job working for an arborist in his hometown.

“I knew I wanted to move but I couldn’t afford it. I had to take time off swimming and save some money,” Hess says. “I was chopping down trees and doing some landscaping.”

The move paid off when Hess earned his way on to the team for Paris 2024 with a strong second-place finish in the 100-m breaststroke at the Olympic & Paralympic Trials, presented by Bell.

As a second-place finisher, his spot was not confirmed until the final night of Trials.

“That was the hardest week of my life,” he says. “I thought I’d just missed the team, then I got disqualified in the 200 breast. I was crushed.”

On the final night, Mallette texted to call him to a meeting with High Performance Director John Atkinson, who informed him he’d made the team as a relay-only swimmer.

“I walked out of that room and broke down in tears,” Hess recalls. “I called my mom, went to talk to my old coach Peter (Schori), gave Ryan a huge hug, (team manager) Jan (Hanan) was there too.”

“He was told to keep it a secret until they named the team, but he was crying and running around hugging everybody in the building. It was probably the worst-kept secret by the time it was announced because he was so emotional,” Mallette says with a laugh. “When he found out about the team breakfast the next day, he didn’t have any family in town. So he asked our assistant coach Rob Novak and integrated support team lead Elton Fernandes if they would go with them because of how close he’s become to them. That was emotional for our staff and meant a lot to all of them that he brought them to that breakfast.”

Now that he’s an Olympian, Hess hopes to use his platform to inspire others to accomplish what he’s done, especially if they identify with his First Nations roots or being raised by a single mother.

“I just want to kind of reach people who are like me, I don’t think there’s been too many people like me get to this point,” says Hess, who grew up about a 30-minute drive from the Kainai Nation and maintains many family connections there.

“I always had a pool within walking distance of me, but I think people on the reserve definitely have a harder time accessing facilities and things that I had access to,” he says.

“And for me, not having a dad growing up was a little bit detrimental. I know for a fact when I would play hockey I wouldn’t get picked for certain teams because I didn’t have a dad the coaches could hang out with, which I feel like is a big part of hockey culture,” he says. “That’s why I fell in love with swimming because none of that mattered.

“It didn’t matter what my name was, it just mattered how fast I got my hand to the wall.”

Mallette says Hess has fit right into the group and has already become a leader. While he didn’t learn his personal story right away, he knew Hess had taken a different path to the High Performance Centre.

“He’s 21 years old and had not been on a senior or junior national team. That’s not a common pathway to a centre,” Mallette says. “In terms of his unique background and family history, I only got to know that more as I got to know him. It’s pretty impressive. We get to coach people from all sorts of pathways in life, but his is very unique and it’s amazing to see how much it all means to him as well.”

While Hess appreciates his First Nations heritage, which comes from his father, the relationship is complicated. When Kainai Nation honoured Apollo with a ceremony and presented him with a headdress as a gift in honour of him making the Olympic team, his father did not participate. They’ve only met a few times.

But he keeps in touch with relatives such as his uncle Roy Fox, who is chief of Kainai Nation, which is a member of the Blackfoot confederacy and the largest reserve in Canada. His cousin Piinaakoyin Tailfeathers is also on the band council. His grandfather, Norbert Fox, was an accomplished boxer who died in 2021, his uncle Charlton Weasel Head was a standout basketball player for Brandon University. Through his relatives, as well as some of his mother’s legal work, he has learned about residential schools.

“Both my grandparents on my dad’s side, an aunt and uncle of mine have also been there, and (my mom) used to represent people who went to residential schools and knows a lot of people from my reserve,” Hess says. “Even though I didn’t have a good relationship with my dad, my aunts and uncles and cousins always tried to make me feel like I belonged.”

He’s hoping his half-sister Tirzah Swampy will be able to attend the Games, along with his older brother and mother. He hopes to make them proud, whether he only swims once or is called on for more.

“I’d like to go 59 on a relay,” says Hess, whose personal best is 1:00.99. “I think I’m capable of it, I know I’m capable of it and I want to do my best to help my teammates get to the final. If they put me in a final, great, but I just want to do my best and represent the country well.”