Crew found strength, success in shot put
TORONTO — Brittany Crew is at home in the shot-put circle, where she crouches with a steel ball buried in the crook of her neck before exploding in a spinning blur that’s as much ballet as brute strength.
It’s where Crew overcame bullying in school. Where she pulled herself back from the brink of depression and drinking. And where she became an Olympian and a national record-holder.
The 23-year-old from Toronto will compete at the Canadian track and field championship this week in Ottawa to officially book her spot on the team for the world championships in London in August. It’s virtually a foregone conclusion — she’s already achieved the world qualifying standard six times.
It’s been an incredible turnaround for the thrower who a couple of years ago was working two jobs — at McDonald’s and Loblaws — and binge drinking on weekends.
“I’ve come great strides, let’s put it that way, in the last three years,” she said. “I’ve kind of turned my life upside down.”
Or right side up. She’s enjoying a breakout season, shattering the Canadian record twice in May over the span of 48 hours.
She broke Julie Labonte’s record set in 2011, when she threw 18.47 metres. Then she went even better two nights later with a toss of 18.58, a distance that ranks her 12th in the world in an event where athletes traditionally peak much older.
Crew had a chaotic upbringing with drug addiction part of her family dynamic.
“Sports has always been my coping mechanism,” Crew said.
Soccer was her first love. But she took up track, encouraged by a high-school coach who said she had the perfect build for a thrower — she’s been five-10 since Grade 6.
A woman’s shot put weighs 8.8 pounds. A man’s shot is 16 pounds.
But it was hard: “Especially when you’re in high school and you’re a female, you’re just trying to find your way, and it’s a masculine sport, you get bullied for that,” she said.
She wrote a paper on body image for a university kinesiology class, addressing society’s skewed version of the ideal female body as “a thin girl with the six-pack abs.”
But Crew excelled in the sport in high school. She set a Canadian interscholastic record and later accepted a full scholarship to Eastern Michigan University.
In her freshman year, she tore the ulnar collateral ligament in her elbow before ever competing in an NCAA outdoor meet.
Unable to throw, a thick fog of depression rolled in. She considered suicide.
“Your self-esteem just gets crushed when you can’t do what you want to do. You define yourself as an athlete, and if you can’t do that anymore, then what are you? That’s what I was going through, I didn’t know who I was without doing track and field.”
She moved back to Toronto and started working the two jobs.
“And then every weekend I was going out and I was partying because I’m injured, I was depressed. And then it’s like, ‘Uck, I can’t train today because now I’m hung over, I don’t feel well.’”
She was living with her grandmother, whom she credits with getting her back on her feet. She called Richard Parkinson, who coaches throwing for Athletics Canada out of York University. And she enrolled at York.
Because of the long commute from her grandmother’s house to school for 7 a.m. practices, she started crashing at Parkinson’s house in Stouffville, where Parkinson lives with his wife Andria Case, a CTV Toronto news anchor.
“I feel like they’re my second parents,” Crew said. “Richard and Andria have that positive attitude ... they mean a lot to me. When I go there I don’t think about anything negative. I don’t think about wanting to go out partying, because it’s so nice and calm. We’ll watch a movie, like a family.”
Parkinson is proud of Crew’s progress, in track and in life.
“I think a lot of (her progress) has to do with her maturity as an athlete and as a young woman. She’s coming into her own. And she has stability.”
Crew won last year’s Canadian championships to earn a trip to the Rio Olympics, where she was ninth in her qualifying group. During the Olympic team announcement at Edmonton’s City Hall, Crew ducked out early. It was a lot to take in. “I just got so overwhelmed ... just the steps I had to take to get there, and it just made me really emotional. I had to leave. The tears were all the struggles and all the heartaches I went through …”