PARIS – Head coach Glenroy Gilbert loved the resilience he saw from Canada’s athletics team in Paris.
Five of Canada’s 27 Olympic medals were won by track and field athletes. While there were mishaps, with some medal favourites missing the podium, there were also a handful of historical moments made under the bright lights of Stade de France.
“I chalk it up as an awesome display of resilience by our athletes,” said Gilbert, calling the Games a success. “We’ve had athletes fall, we’ve had athletes not advance … we’ve had athletes have mishaps on this journey but it did not impact the team.
“People kept showing up, they kept getting out there and performing.”
Three of the five medals were gold thanks to Ethan Katzberg and Camryn Rogers sweeping the men’s and women’s hammer throw for Canada as they did at the world championships a year ago.
The 22-year-old Katzberg, from Nanaimo, B.C., became the third Canadian to win an Olympic medal in the event and the first since Duncan Gillis earned silver at the 1912 Stockholm Games.
Meanwhile, the 25-year-old Rogers, from Richmond, B.C., became the first Canadian to medal in the women’s hammer throw at the Olympics and won the first Canadian gold medal in a women’s athletics event since the 1928 Amsterdam Games.
“To see us have so much experience and be so strong, I think as a throwing nation, it’s pretty incredible,” Rogers said. “And things like that don’t just happen.
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“It takes years to be able to develop a dominance in a sport, I think.”
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Then, there was the men’s 4×100-metre relay team. The group of Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake, Brendon Rodney and Andre De Grasse snagged a gold medal that most did not see coming, especially given that none of them had reached an individual final at these Games.
De Grasse, now a seven-time Olympic medallist and the most decorated Canadian Olympian ever alongside swimmer Penny Oleksiak, dealt with the most adversity.
He revealed on Wednesday that he had been struggling with a re-aggravated hamstring injury, which initially surfaced weeks before the Games, causing him to miss the 100 and 200 finals — his first Olympic final absences in his career.
A day before that, his coach Rana Reider had his accreditation revoked by the Canadian Olympic Committee, which De Grasse admitted was a distraction.
After making it into Friday’s relay final as the slowest qualifying team, De Grasse willed the Canadians from third to first in the anchor leg.
It was Canada’s first gold in the 4×100 relay since 1996. Brown, Rodney and De Grasse, who have been together since 2015, have now won Olympic bronze (2016), silver (2021) and gold (2024) together.
Gilbert said they were the best example of the team’s resilience. Meanwhile, chef de mission Bruny Surin, who was a teammate of Gilbert’s on the 1996 team, said he didn’t sleep that Friday night.
“Just before Aaron went, I just stood up and yelled, ‘let’s go guys!'” he said. “I was out of my comfort zone because normally I’m quiet, but now we have to go and I felt the energy as soon as Aaron went and passed the first exchange, my thought was like, ‘we can do this.’
“And he kept running and kept running, and after the other exchange, I’m like, ‘we’re going to get this.’ And when Andre took it, the emotion that it brought, was incredible because I lived that moment 28 years ago and to live it right at the stadium and to be chef de mission, it’s like a dream.”
“The chemistry that our guys have, that’s what made the difference,” Surin added. “Look at the Americans — no chemistry.”
There were also silver and bronze medals that proved to be historic.
Alysha Newman, from Delaware, Ont., earned bronze in the women’s pole vault after making her first Olympic final in her third appearance at the Games. It was Canada’s first-ever Olympic medal in women’s pole vault and it came with a Canadian-record height of 4.85 metres.
Marco Arop, from Edmonton, nabbed silver in his first Olympic final in his second appearance at the Games, running the fourth-fastest time ever and a Canadian record of one minute 41.20 seconds in the men’s 800. It was Canada’s first Olympic medal in the event since Bill Crothers earned silver at the 1964 Tokyo Games, and fifth ever.
“Whenever you could have three gold medals — I’ve been on this team in times where we had no medals, we had one medal,” Gilbert said.
“In a hard-fought Olympic campaign, we came away with five medals. … This is all part of showing, not just versatility, but the array of — with every event group, we’ve had people perform well.”
— With files from Morgan Lowrie.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 11, 2024.
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