‘Silver’ anniversary
20 years after medalling on the track, Tracey Roche was back in Manitoba at the Canada Games
The night before the biggest race of her life, Tracy Roche had visualized walking 25 minutes to win a Canada Summer Games medal.
She finished the 5,000-metre race walk in 24:59 exactly 20 years ago here in Manitoba, winning silver for Newfoundland and Labrador at the 1997 Brandon Games.
While she could accurately predict her time in her final race of the Games, there was no way Roche could envision then how her life would eventually unfold.
Roche (or Tracy Hussey, as she was then known) was back in Manitoba this week, at the 2017 Canada Summer Games watching her step-daughter, 17-year-old Gabrielle Roche, suit up for Newfoundland’s basketball team.
Tracy Roche has literally done it all since then, from brewing beer, to arresting crooks to becoming a doctor. On the playing field, she became a top-flight distance runner, a high-level basketball coach and an elite rower, finishing second to M5 with her JAC team in Wednesday’s Royal St. John’s Regatta.
Earlier this week, however, it was about Brandon and the 1997 Canada Games, where 20-year-old Tracey Hussey from Mount Pearl set a provincial record of 24 minutes and 59.18 seconds in finishing runner-up in the 5,000m race walk.
It was, at the time, the first silver medal for Newfoundland track and field at any Summer Games.
“I remember the feeling of crossing the finish line,” Roche said this week, during halftime at one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s basketball games.
“I knew I had to walk 25 minutes to finish with a medal, and I had visualized doing that. I have a photo of me crossing the finish line and behind me is the race clock showing 24:59.”
Roche had kind of stumbled on race walking by accident. A basketball player in junior high and high school, her hoops coach at the time, Mike Sutton, had suggested track and field as a method of training. Plus, she was pretty quick.
“I got randomly put into race walking because it’s a distance event, and I did well. A Canada Games coach was out at the track and suggested I should come out and start training,” she recalls.
Next thing you know, Roche was at the 1993 Kamloops Summer Games as a 16-year-old, finishing sixth in the race walk.
“So I knew what it took to medal,” she said. “Chris Pickard trained me for four years after that.”
The problem with race walking in Newfoundland then was the fact there was very little competition. Newfoundland is not alone — the sport has been dropped from the athletics calendar in the Canada Games.
She had an invitation to attend the University of Ottawa and train with the national team — “unfortunately,” she said, “although things happen for a reason” — but at the time she was in her last year of a biochemistry degree program at Memorial University.
And by this time, she’d taken up distance running (she would go on to register a number of Top 10 finishes in the Tely 10).
“Ultimately, there was just no competition (in race walking),” she said.
Roche finished university, and thus the start of a career odyssey that began in the beer industry.
She went to work for Molson Brewery, completing two years of a production training program to become a master brewer. She worked with the brewery for eight years, in Toronto and St. John’s.
When Molson and U.s.-based Coors amalgamated, Roche’s job in St. John’s became redundant.
Not wanting to move from St. John’s, she turned her sights on another career, one to which she’d given some thought for years — becoming a police officer.
She applied for and was accepted into the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary’s training program. Her brother, Chad, was accepted into the RCMP program, and the two finished training about a month apart.
After graduating from the academy, Roche was in a patrol car for about a year
But while she was in training for the RNC, she had also applied for medical school, which was a two-year process.
It was while she was on the street in uniform that she got word she’d been accepted into med school, leaving her with a tough decision.
She opted to trade in her badge for a stethoscope.
In the years since, she’s gotten married, is a step-mom to three kids and mother to two more young children.
In fact, she just finished medical school, specializing in family medicine, because she had the two babies during her residency.
One of the step-kids is Gabrielle Roche, a pretty fine basketball player who played on the powerhouse Waterford Valley high school team the past couple of years, in addition to the Canada Games team.
It’s through Gabrielle that Tracy got involved with hoops again. She coaches the Beaconsfield girls’ team, assists Geoff Moore with the Waterford Valley squad, and was an assistant to Moore on the provincial U15 team which finished 4-2 at the U15 nationals last week in Regina, Sask.
Wednesday, Roche and her JAC teammates finished second to M5 by 14 seconds in the women’s championship race at the Regatta, not a bad showing given the strength of the M5 six.
It goes without saying Roche has done quite a lot in her 40 years, and from an athletic perspective, the highlight was Brandon 20 years ago.
She still has the medal, although she hadn’t seen it in years.
“It was in the Mount Pearl Hall of Fame, but they had done some renovations and it was in storage.
“I just tracked it down and got it back. It was great to hold it again … brought back a lot of memories.”