Today, Penny Oleksiak is an Olympic silver and bronze medalist at the Rio Summer Games. Next month, she’ll be a Grade 11 student at Monarch Park Collegiate in Toronto.

The 16-year-old has been a pleasant surprise on Canada’s Olympic squad, swimming her way to two medals in the opening weekend of the Games. Oleksiak is scheduled to race the 200-metre freestyle relay on Wednesday, the 100 free Thursday and the 100-metre medley relay on Saturday, meaning she may find her way to the podium again before the Olympics are through.

Oleksiak medals again: Arthur

“I look at the medals a lot,” Oleksiak said Monday afternoon at a media conference. “I feel like they’re not real, which is kind of weird. It has just been a weird, unreal experience I guess.”

Oleksiak didn’t think she would be one of the top Canadian stories during these Olympics.

“I wasn’t really expecting it,” she said. “I was kind of gunning for a medal in 2020 but to get two here means so much to me… I think it has really set up my career I guess, right?”

While she is the first Canadian to win a medal on each of the first two days of the Olympics, Oleksiak was nowhere close to a household name before Saturday.

Oleksiak, who turned 16 on June 13, previously attended Kew Beach Public School and Glen Ames Senior Public School. Known as “the child,” she is the youngest member of Canada’s Olympic team in Rio de Janeiro.

“I’m pretty envious of my friends when they just get to chill and hang out. I’m like, ‘Guys, I can’t go out tonight, I have to practice,’” she said last month. “I’m glad they’re all having a good time with their summer and I’m having a good time with mine.”

Oleksiak didn’t start learning to swim until she was nine years old, which, for context, is more recent than the Beijing Summer Games. She got into the sport because she enjoyed swimming in her friend’s backyard pool.

“I learned to swim in a neighbour’s pool and I still swim in that pool every day,” she told Metro News. “The pool’s about 10 metres long, 15 metres maybe. I was just a nine-year-old girl who liked swimming. When I told my parents that I enjoyed it, my dad said, ‘Okay, you should try doing it competitively.’”

But her early days as a swimmer did not come easy. She tried out for the Toronto Swim Club as a nine-year-old but failed to swim two laps of the University of Toronto pool, the necessary requirement to be accepted for the program. She also couldn’t complete two laps at the Scarborough Swim Club, where she tried out next.

By age 12, she was up to snuff, as she practiced and trained at the Toronto Swim Club.

Oleksiak comes from an athletic family. Her older brother Jamie is a defenceman for the NHL’s Dallas Stars, while another older brother, Jake, played NCAA hockey. Hayley, her older sister, is a rower for Northeastern University. Her father Richard was a multi-sport athlete and her mother Alison was also a swimmer.

Oleksiak stands six-foot-two, but told The Star in April she was still growing.

“A few months ago I was five-foot-11,” she said.

Prior to the Olympics, Oleksiak had never raced in a world championship, Pan American Games or Commonwealth Games. She won six medals at the 2015 World Junior Swimming Championships and in these Olympics broke the national and world junior records in the 100m butterfly.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

She told CBC’s David Amber following her silver medal win on Sunday that she’s worked hard especially to close out races in strong form since she was 10.

“These… last, like, 10 metres I try to put my head down and just go,” she said.

Oleksiak’s popularity has grown rapidly overnight since the Games began, especially on Twitter, where her bio states, “Yo sauce me a follow.” Plenty have done just that, with her account swelling from roughly 800 followers to nearly 5,000 by Monday morning.

She says her phone buzzes for five minutes straight every time she turns it on.

“It’s just blowing up with a bunch of Facebook messages, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, everything,” she said. “It’s a little overwhelming. Sometimes the apps will crash and stuff.”

With so much success early on while competing with athletes many years her senior, it’s easy to forget just how young Oleksiak still is. She still travels with a grey blankie that she says is her good luck charm.

But on Sunday night, it was her medals, not her blankie, that she couldn’t sleep without.

“I couldn’t fall asleep. I had to hold them while I was sleeping, which is kind of lame,” Oleksiak said with a laugh. “But it helped me fall asleep.”

With files from The Canadian Press, Star staff and Metro

MORE ON THESTAR.COM:

Canada’s Penny Oleksiak makes waves at Olympic swim trials

Want more Olympics news? Sign up here for our daily sports newsletters and receive an evening Rio 2016 newsletter with updates on that day’s events and athletes.