AT LONG LAST, GOLD
Captain Christine Sinclair's long, eye-catching run to the top
Christine Sinclair jumped onto the heap of celebrating teammates Saturday morning in Yokohama, about 45 minutes outside of Tokyo. Her familiar No. 12 topped the mass of bodies like a candle on a cake.
Her eyes were wide; her mouth gaping. Soon, an Olympic gold medal would be wrapped around her neck.
Sinclair's soccer resume, one of the world's thickest, had never been quite right. She knew it. That missing gold disc jumped from one end of her storyline to the other.
“To be considered among the best you have to win,” Sinclair said in 2006. “That's something Canada still has to do and I have to help my country do.”
And now it's 2021, Sinclair is 38 years old, and aunt Sue Gant Jensen — once a prominent B.C. soccer player in her own right — had a small family gathering planned back home in Burnaby. She'd risen early and watched Canada's 3-2 penalty-kick victory over Sweden. She was teary-eyed at the end, and still “walking around on Cloud 9” a few hours later.
“We're going to have some champagne and celebrate,” Gant Jensen said via phone. “We're so proud of her, and so, so proud of the team. ”
Geri Donnelly, who scored the national team's first two goals in 1986, said this week that she played in the “BC” era of Canadian women's soccer — Before Christine.
Canadian soccer needed a Christine Sinclair the same way Canadian hockey needed a Hayley Wickenheiser. Both women lifted their teammates and their sports — Wickenheiser with a stick, Sinclair with a foot.
Seldom has soccer seen a foot like Sinclair's; seldom has a player integrated that appendage so seamlessly with both body and brain. Sinclair's pitch talents are many. The most conspicuous is her ability to kick a ball into a net.
“She learned the art of scoring goals very quickly, and didn't need much guidance,” national-squad teammate Andrea Neil said 20 years ago.
Nobody, male or female, has scored more international goals than Sinclair. She's collected 187 of them, built off a youth spent on the pitch and an adulthood steeped in determination.
Sinclair started playing at age four. From five to 10, she practised with the South Burnaby Sounders, a rough-and-tumble boys team coached by her father, Bill.
She later remembered that she “had to battle for every square inch of grass.”
“She suffered her fair share of physical abuse,” Bill told the Vancouver Sun in 2001. “The boys didn't show her any mercy just because she was a girl, and that made her a much more aggressive and determined player.”
When Sinclair was 16, she scored two of Canada's three goals against Denmark — helping her national women's squad place fifth at a pre-olympic tournament in Portugal — then flew home and settled in for games on the local pitch with her high-school team.
Canadian soccer great Bob Lenarduzzi called the teen sensation “the Michael Owen of women's soccer,” referring to the prolific English striker.
By that point, Sinclair — still in high school — had scored 20 goals in her first 24 games with the national team, and her greatness was charted.
But it took an Olympic gold medal, on a steamy-hot day in Tokyo, to fix that legacy in cement: Weeping Swedes, ecstatic Canadians, wet faces everywhere. Sweat, tears, high drama. Thirty-five years after the humble, underfunded, straight-from-a-manger launch of Canada's national-team program, the once-impossible happened. A key architect was right there, in uniform, as 20-year-old Julia Grosso kicked a ball that deflected off the hand of Swedish goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl and into the top left corner of the net.
After bronze in 2012 and 2016, Christine Sinclair has her gold medal.