It’s a good time to be a fan of track and field in this country. With a home-soil Pan Am Games which saw Canada win a record 24 medals, our team held the momentum through August with a record eight IAAF World Championship medals in Beijing. Less than one year out from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Canada looks in position to challenge for one of its best Games in athletics ever with a number of potentially exciting story lines. But most importantly, Canada now has a set of exciting stars to root for in Rio. We’ve gotten ourselves some legitimate running heroes, and that’s something we haven’t really had in a generation. Though world championships and Olympics are of course not the same, they are the meetings which most closely resemble each other within single four-year cycles. The athletes who win and medal at the world championships in the years preceding Olympics are tough to ignore the following summer, and so with the country’s eight world championship medals we should be excited at the prospect of a strong team moving into 2016. Canada’s track and field team hasn’t won more than three medals at an Olympics since 1984, a year when they won five (and it should be noted the Soviet-bloc teams boycotted those Games). In only one of the preceding world championships—1995 in Gothenburg, Sweden—did the team win more than two medals. Back in ’95, Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin emerged as sprinting superstars in that championships, going one-two in the 100m and leading Canada to a 4x100m gold medal. And we all remember what happened the following year in Atlanta. Taking the nation’s attention by storm through the summer, Andre De Grasse seems ready to showcase the country in what most would consider the Olympic’s premiere event, the 100m dash. He was the face of the Canadian team in Toronto and didn’t disappoint in Beijing, after a long, tough season in the NCAA (where he won the 100m and 200m national titles south of the border). Over the course of the summer, the mainstream media in both Canada and the United States fell in love with De Grasse, which is very good news for Canadian trackies. The CBC even decided to pick up the World Championships at the last minute, broadcasting the full meet live and online, as well as key races on their main network, which is something we haven’t seen from a television station in a few years. All signs point to the national public broadcaster’s increased commitment to the track now that they have their marketable star, particularly seeing as they own the rights to next year’s Games. We’ll hopefully get to watch De Grasse evolve from charming young upstart to feared contender over the next 12 months, and the mainstream media will be along for the ride as he heads to Rio. The most shocking and impressive performance for fans of distance running came from Melissa Bishop. Her impressive week in Beijing started with a new national record. Running 1:57 for a 800m showed to the world that Bishop is a generational talent for this country, not merely a nice addition to an international field. In the final, she showed she’s capable of running with the very best in the world and didn’t look for one moment out of place. Coming down the final stretch, Bishop revealed that she’s become a complete runner. She’s a fun story for Canadians, mostly training at home in Windsor, Ont., with her university coach, Dennis Farrell. After turning pro, Bishop performed the way we had come to expect Canadians to on the world stage in 2012 in London and the 2013 world championships in Moscow – qualifying and then flaming out in the opening heats. In Beijing, she showed she belongs racing for the podium with the best runners in the world. Now, we can and should get very excited going into the 2016 Olympics, because Canada has a truly world class medal contender in a distance event. Bishop is a veteran runner who is hitting a career peak at the right time. And arguably stronger in the field than on the track, Canada won two gold medals. This country hadn’t won any since 2003. In addition to the new stars who emerged over the summer, there are plenty of young athletes to be excited about and others with Olympic experience banked already—Mo Ahmed and Cam Levins to name standouts, but there are others. If Levins and Ahmed can get themselves into a 5,000m and 10,000m final in Rio in top form, they could contend for a medal in a championship style race. A lot can happen in eleven months, but fans of the sport have a lot to be excited about.
Author information
The post Opinion: Canadians should be very excited about track and field appeared first on Canadian Running Magazine.