Swimmer Oleksiak takes prize in CP vote
Teen honoured Tuesday after winning 4 medals at Rio Olympics
Penny Oleksiak stared at the wall and told herself to be proud of her performance. Her country already was.
It was 20 seconds after she touched the timing pad in the women’s 100-metre freestyle final that Oleksiak finally turned to the scoreboard and joined in celebrating her Olympic gold medal.
Winner of four medals at the Rio Summer Games, the 16-year-old swimmer has been voted the Canadian Press female athlete of the year.
The Toronto native was the overwhelming favourite, earning 61 votes (94 per cent) in the annual survey of editors and broadcasters from across the country.
“Penny Oleksiak not only made all Canadians proud, but she did it with a wonder in her eyes that we could all share and relate to,” said Hamilton Spectator sports editor Jeff Day.
Past winners of the Bobbie Rosenfeld Award, which has been handed out since 1933, include golfer Brooke Henderson, tennis player Eugenie Bouchard, hockey player Hayley Wickenheiser and speedskaters Catriona Le May Doan and Cindy Klassen.
“It’s kind of unreal to be a part of those names, because I know who all of them are,” Oleksiak told The Canadian Press. “They’re all definitely people I’ve looked up to for a really, really long time and people that are super, super inspiring to not just me, but a lot of other young girls getting into sport. It means a lot to me.”
Henderson, last year’s winner, received two votes in 2016. Moguls skier Chloe DufourLapointe and bobsled pilot Kaillie Humphries each received one.
Oleksiak isn’t the youngest woman to win the award. Figure skater Tracey Wainman was 13 when she was the recipient in 1981.
Sprinter Andre De Grasse won the Lionel Conacher Award as Canada’s male athlete of the year on Monday. The CP team of the year will be announced today.
Given the choice of three words to describe her year, Oleksiak went for “dream come true.”
She had already won a butterfly silver and swam the anchor legs for a pair of freestyle relay bronze in Rio before her thrilling come-frombehind swim for gold.
Second-last at the turn, Oleksiak hunted down five competitors and touched the wall at the same time as Simone Manuel of the United States.
Oleksiak achieved a series of firsts by a Canadian athlete in 2016. She was the first Canadian swimmer to win four Olympic medals and the first Canadian athlete to win four Olympic medals at one Summer Games. No Canadian woman had ever won an Olympic medal in the 100 freestyle and before Oleksiak, no Olympic champion had ever been born in the 2000s.
The Canadian put an exclamation mark on her year at December’s world short-course championship in Windsor, Ont., winning a freestyle bronze medal and anchoring relay teams to a pair of golds and a silver.