Inspiring Sinclair is in league of her own
Score one for emotion. Score one for je ne sais quoi over the bottom line. Score one for how it made us feel, as a nation, for longer than our usual five-minute attention span.
Sports voting — for halls of fame, all-star teams, awards of all kinds — tends to get hung up on statistics, or the Big Prize, by which standards anyone who doesn’t lead the planet or win a championship, preferably both, must not have done the job.
But when Christine Sinclair sweeps all the major athlete-of-the-year awards in Canada this year — the CBC’s last week, the Lou Marsh on Monday, others surely still to come — it will not be for statistics alone or for a championship at all.
It will be for galvanizing a nation, for making Canada stand up on its hind legs and howl about something few of us had any idea we cared about in the first place.
“I’m just in shock,” Sinclair said Monday. “I can’t believe first of all, the year I’ve had and the year my teammates had. And then to have this continue on, it’s incredible, especially to have a female soccer player in Canada win this award.”
The statistics? Sure, they mattered, too. Scoring 23 times in a single soccer season, figuring in 66 per cent of all the goals Canada scored all year, isn’t too bad. Winning the Golden Boot at the London Olympics, scoring six goals, three of them in a 4-3 overtime loss to the U.S. that might be the greatest performance by a Canadian soccer player, male or female, ever ... those are numbers not to be ignored.
But if it were about pure achievement, speedskater Christine Nesbitt, with two world titles and a world record, would have won it. Or cyclist Ryder Hesjedal, whose Giro d’Italia victory was unprecedented in Canadian history.
So what was it about Sinclair that allowed her to win the Lou Marsh, having led the Canadian team to a mere bronze medal?
Well, one thing the 29-year-old striker from Burnaby did was lead a women’s sport to a place, in her country, above the men’s equivalent. It’s no coincidence she is the first soccer player to win in the 76-year history of the award.
It could never happen in hockey, where it’s all NHL and Stanley Cup, and the achievements of Hayley Wickenheiser and Danielle Goyette, of Jayna Hefford and Jen Botterill, of Angela James and Cassie Campbell et al. have been doomed to a secondary place of prominence — partly, of course, because so few nations play the women’s game yet at any serious level.
But in soccer, the men’s side has been an utter gong show for generations, with little evidence of improvement in the offing, barring a total revamp of the development model.
Sinclair and the women’s team, meanwhile, have been to the last two Olympics and last three World Cups. And by nipping at the heels of the mighty U.S. team in the leadup to the London Games, and then having the Yanks down 3-2 at iconic Old Trafford in the dying seconds of a match that could have put them in the gold medal game — only to be denied by a series of appalling calls and non-calls — Sinclair and Co. made the whole country agonize right along with them.
She didn’t make the final three in voting for FIFA’s female player of the year, but even if there were no overt sportsmanship component to the FIFA vote, Sinclair’s omission could hardly be considered a shock.
The same world governing body that suspended her four matches for abuse of an official at the Olympics could hardly be expected to whitewash that little technicality in conducting its own poll.
Fortunately in Canada, our standards are not so narrow. We don’t consider it much of a negative for a captain of our national squad — who is superior in every other way, who is unselfish and rises to the occasion and doesn’t roll around on the turf every time she is touched by an opponent — to express our national rage when her team has just been jobbed.
Overwhelmingly, after an incident that in normal circumstances might have been a national embarrassment, the country rallied around Sinclair, and her fellow Olympians chose her to carry Canada’s flag in the closing ceremony.
Sinclair said head coach Jon Herdman deserves plenty of credit for her winning the Marsh.
“I know he brought back the passion and the love of the sport within me,” she said. “He had me believing that absolutely anything was possible as an individual soccer player and he’s the first coach in a long time that has had the veteran players learning new things.”
There will be those who question Sinclair’s selection Monday, but she connected with Canadians on a level deeper than any simple calculation of her goals and assists or the colour of her medal.
She may well have inspired an entire generation of little girls to dream big dreams.
If the voters were half this smart about the Hockey Hall of Fame, Paul Henderson would be in it.
He had me believ
ing that absolutely anything
was possible CHRISTINE SINCLAIR