Warm YYJ welcome for Olympic athletes
Story, A3
Woody and Jutta Woodland did not personally know the Olympians who arrived at Victoria International Airport on Tuesday from the just-completed 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Still, they came out to greet the athletes after reading a mention of the arrival in the newspaper. Jutta placed a homemade red-andwhite lei around the neck of rower Caileigh Filmer, while Woody greeted the Olympians by playing O Canada on his cornet.
Another stranger approached Filmer, hugged her and said thanks for representing Canada. Fellow Vic City rower Emma Gribbon was there to greet Filmer with a bouquet of flowers.
“I don’t think it’s all really hit me yet,” said Filmer, who at 19, was the youngest member of the Canadian Olympic rowing team.
“The first time it starting hitting home was when someone I didn’t know messaged me in Rio and wrote that I had 35 million strong behind me.”
Also arriving at the airport, with bronze medals around their necks, were rugby sevens players Ashley Steacy and Kayla Moleschi. Passengers on their plane from Vancouver erupted in claps when it was announced they were on the flight.
Filmer, who was in the stroke seat, was part of the Canadian women’s eight rowing crew that made the Olympic final and placed fifth after leading at the half-way point.
“I’m proud of the way we went for it,” she said.
The Mount Douglas Secondary graduate won’t have long in her hometown. Filmer leaves today to start classes in environmental science, and begin her sophomore year rowing, in the NCAA at the University of California, Berkeley. And what stories she is bringing back from Rio to tell her Pac 12 Golden Bear teammates.
“I started a journal in Rio to document my Olympic experiences so I can look back when I’m older at all these memories,” she said.
Filmer said she could have three Olympics in her and is charting her course for the next Summer Games, Tokyo 2020. Kai Langerfeld, a fellow Rio Olympic rower who was on the same flight to Victoria from Toronto on Tuesday is doing the same.
“This has been an Olympic journey with so many highs and so many heavy downs,” said the Parksville product, whose dad, York Langerfeld, rowed in the 1976 Montreal Games.
The rower had a sixth-place finish in the men’s four final.
“Unfortunately, we just couldn’t find our rhythm and did not have our best race in the final,” Langerfeld said.
Canada’s 22 medals equalled its best in a non-boycotted Summer Games, a record set at Atlanta in 1996.
Athletes associated with Vancouver Island contributed, with the silver medal by rowers Lindsay Jennerich and Patricia Obee and bronze medals by swimmer Hilary Caldwell, the Canadian women’s rugby sevens team and mountain-biker Catharine Pendrel.
Pendrel was a casual and hesitant athlete when she began mountain biking on the Hartland trails under the tutelage of coach Dan Proulx. That humble beginning came full circle when Pendrel won Olympic bronze at Rio with Proulx as Canadian Olympic team head coach.
Proulx also returned with the first wave of athletes and coaches on Tuesday at Victoria International.
“It was amazing when our plane from Rio, which was full of Olympians, landed in Toronto and was greeted with a full watercannon welcome by fire engines on the tarmac,” Proulx said.