2025 Canada Games Profile

Leading up to the Canada Games, Swim Ontario is highlighting some of the members of our fantastic team!

There is exhaustive training and competition, yet Ryan Layton-Matthews always tries to think of the good times.

Days of excitement, fun, and hard work, also includes the surprises and vigorous challenges.

As a competitive swimmer, Layton-Matthews devotes an average of 13 hours a week in the pool plus the dryland training that is physically and mentally straining while prepping for that next race.

Deep in his conscience, there is always a primary responsibility. That is to focus on excelling and doing his best, which usually results in a great deal of confidence and good fortune.

On a regular basis, Layton-Matthews hears the encouragement that comes from family members, his coach, teammates and others.

While focusing most intently on improving critical times in a race, there’s constant strengthening of stroke movement, finding ways to drop milliseconds, the breathing techniques - all tossed in with overwhelming pressures.

Layton-Matthews has been selected by Swim Ontario – Canada’s largest provincial swim organization - as one of the elite 34 swimmers chosen to represent the province at the prestigious Canada Games set for August 8 to 25 in St. John’s, Nfld.

Ontario’s contingent is made up of 24 Olympic (that’s where Layton-Matthews fits in), six Paralympic and four Special Olympics athletes. Known as the largest amateur sports event in the country, it’s a showcase of able-bodied athletes and athletes with physical and intellectual disabilities.

Up for grabs, are medals, personal best times, provincial bragging rights and a great deal of limelight and notoriety. The scene: the Aquarena Fitness Centre located on the campus of Memorial University. Friendships are generated from these events and like in all sports, so is the appetite to triumph over others.

Layton-Matthews learned of his invite to the Canada Games through an e-mail from Swim Ontario.

“I was at home and when I read it, it was a bit of disbelief and so I read it again and again,” he recalled. “I had been training hard for this kind of an opportunity, a first for me, and I only told my parents. I didn’t tell anyone until it was officially announced.”

After performances at the Canada Games, there will be remarkable things that do happen.

“I swim a strenuous stroke, the butterfly,” said Layton-Matthews. “It’s one of the toughest and always a huge challenge, but you have to put lots of work into something like that to be the fastest in the event.”

With home being in Kingston (that’s in Ontario and not Jamaica), the 17-year-old is soon to enter his final year of high school at Loyalist Collegiate. His academic grades have been in the honors category. His interest is in a career in physiotherapy or kinesiology, but he’s also wanting to combine school and sport in a scholarship to a dominant school in the United States.

He’s another example of how swim lessons as a youngster led to the competitive level at age six and now is in his 11th season with the Kingston Blue Marlins swim club.

The road to swim success all started, as he recalled in a telephone conversation, at a 25-metres privately-run Kingston neighborhood pool on Henderson Boulevard, operated by the Lakeshore Swimming Pool Association.

This year, he’s piling up personal best times in the 50, 100 and 200-metres butterfly – and just in time to take on the best from other parts of the country.

Success can build - and Layton-Matthews knows it. In fact, he’s been nothing short of a viral inspiration for younger swimmers.

His times, in 2025, tell a story. In April at a meet in Gatineau, Que., he was clocked in two minutes, 09.08 for the 200-metres fly. A month later in Vancouver, he finished the 100-metres fly in 56.4 seconds and swam the 50-metres fly in 26.00 seconds.

While Layton-Matthews hasn’t had an opportunity to compete outside of Canada, count on that happening very soon.

“I’m a pretty calm guy that looks at life in a realistic view, but also with dreams and goals,” he said. “I want to put the work in to get to a goal. It’s not always motivation, but discipline that will make you achieve goals.”

When Layton-Matthews enters the water, he’s not your typical teenager ready to dazzle. There’s an eruption of power that leads to quantum supremacy. People see it when he works out at the Queen’s University pool in Kingston or with the Ontario Swim Academy in Toronto.

Swimming has been one of Canada’s most successful sports on the international circuit. As for Ontario, that’s where swimmers have dominated the Canada Games since 1990 – with eight consecutive national titles.

“Getting a medal would be amazing and super cool at the Canada Games,” said the 6-foot-1 power swimmer. “Most important, though, is winning for the team and keeping the legacy alive for Ontario. It would be exciting to be part of that in addition to being an amazing learning experience with top athletes.”

Layton-Matthews has a story about his first race. He was six years old at the time. It was the 50-metres freestyle, and he had difficulty putting on his goggles and swim cap. He didn’t get any help. When assistance arrived, and the race was over, he was left upset and vowed to never let that happen again.

Since then, the podium finishes have piled up, there has been improvement in conditioning and taking good advice. As for his personal collection of awards, it’s growing along with renewed hope.

David Grossman is a veteran multi award-winning Journalist and Broadcaster with some of Canada’s major media, including the Toronto Star and SPORTSNET 590 THE FAN, and a Public Relations professional for 50+ years in Canadian sports and Government relations.