Julian Fletcher, the Bermuda swimmer, hopes to make the most of his “big chance” to qualify for the Rio Olympic Games at this week’s Canadian Olympic Trials in Toronto.

Fletcher missed out on reaching last night’s 100 metres breaststroke final at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre, finishing eighteenth in the morning’s preliminary heats in a time of 1min 03.63sec.

The 25-year-old, who represented Bermuda at last summer’s Pan Am Games in Toronto, had been aiming to reach the Olympic A standard in both the 100 (1:00.57) and 200 metres breaststroke (2:11.04).

He will now turn his attention to the 200 when he competes in tomorrow morning’s preliminary heats.

“I’ve been working towards hitting my goal times at the Canadian Olympic Trials,” Fletcher said prior to the trials, which started yesterday.

“Training has been going really well and I’m looking forward to seeing what the results bring me.

“I’m trying to get the A standard and we’ll see how that goes. I’ve been swimming fast this season and that’s given me a lot of motivation to push harder.”

Fletcher said that qualifying for the Rio Games would feel like “redemption” after narrowly missing the cut for the London Olympics in 2012.

“[The Olympics] has been a goal of mine since I started swimming at Sharks Swim Club and it would be great to do it this year,” said Fletcher, who moved to Los Angeles in 2014 to train full-time with the Trojans Swim Club under coach David Salo at the University of Southern California.

“I had a hard break in 2012 and missed the cut by six-tenths [of a second] and it will be a little bit of redemption for me to make the cut for Rio and represent Team Bermuda.

“The Canadian Olympic Trials is my big chance to make Rio, so I need to make it count.” Fletcher, who also competed at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, is one of several Bermuda swimmers aiming to qualify for the Olympics.

Also competing in Toronto is Roy-Allan Burch who will be swimming competitively for the first time since rupturing his patella tendons in both knees in April last year.

Burch, a two-times Olympian, will compete in the 100 free heats on Friday and 50 free heats on Sunday.

“I’ve been doing stuff that’s showing that I can do it, so it will just be about controlling the nerves and executing,” Burch said last week.

“I feel good, I just want to get there and see what I can do and hopefully I do it. My coach [David Marsh] feels I can do it.”

Madelyn Moore, Rebecca Heyliger and Lisa Blackburn are also pushing to qualify for the Rio Games.