Next generation of Island stars take aim at Canada Games gold
When Hilary Caldwell goes for the podium today at the world swimming championships, to try to reprise her medal performance in the women’s 200-metre backstroke at the 2016 Rio Olympics, she does so knowing she was aided by the springboard known as the Canada Summer Games.
The newest Canada Games generation — following in the footsteps of alumni and eventual Island Olympic medallist such as Caldwell, Ryan Cochrane, Lindsay Jennerich, Patricia Obee along with other Victoria greats such as Steve Nash and the Gait twins — makes its case beginning today in Winnipeg.
You can get there from here.
“I want to wear the Canada jersey one day,” said Lauren D’Agnolo of Victoria, who will contest the women’s 400 metres in the 2017 Canada Summer Games in the Manitoba capital.
D’Agnolo is among 92 Island athletes on a Team B.C. contingent numbering 354 athletes competing in 16 sports. That includes soccer star Emma Regan of Burnaby, today’s opening ceremony flagbearer for B.C. The honorary captain for B.C. is two-time Olympicmedallist swimmer Cochrane.
This is a big deal even for athletes who aren’t in Olympic sports. The Canada Games is where the superstar Gait twins of Victoria first became known nationally before going on to revolutionize lacrosse.
Among the non-Olympic sports is men’s softball.
“I want to compete to a high level. My dream is to win a medal at the Canada Games and eventually make the senior national team for events like the world championships and Pan Am Games,” said 20-year-old Charlie Andrews of Nanaimo, a Wellington grad and third-baseman for the B.C. men’s softball team in Winnipeg.
Diving, however, is an Olympic sport and Bryden Hattie of Victoria Boardworks Club has his eyes on a dream: “My goal is the 2024 Summer Olympics.”
The 16-year-old Claremont student has already started on the international trail with medals at the Youth Grand Prix in Germany this spring. He will be in his home pool this fall for the 2017 Pan American Junior Diving championships being hosted by Saanich Commonwealth Place.
“This [Canada Games] sets the stage for the next steps and I am really excited and focused to be here,” Hattie said, by phone.
He will try to emulate his sister, Courtney Hattie, a Victoria diver and former Canada Games gold medallist who earned an NCAA Div. 1 scholarship to Texas A&M.
Future Olympians and Commonwealth and Pan Am Games athletes say the multi-sport experience from the Canada Games proved invaluable to them. Most of these performers in Winnipeg have never before been in an athletes village and eaten in a large canteen and stayed in dorms with athletes from other sports.
“It feels like going into live at university dorms for the first time,” said D’Agnolo, the Reynolds Secondary running star, who will do just that this fall as a freshman U Sports athlete who studying criminal justice and public policy at the University of Guelph.
“I am very excited about this Canada Games opportunity.”
The all-Island B.C. men’s golf team — Mill Bay’s Tristan Mandur and Victora’s Keaton Gudz and Nolan Thoroughgood — is comprised of touted next-generation talents and will be closely watched.
This is the 50th anniversary of the Canada Games.
B.C. was third in the last Summer Games, behind Ontario and Quebec, with 122 medals, including 47 gold, at Sherbrooke, Que., in 2013.