Canada’s medal count climbs in Tokyo
Charron, Masse, Beauchemin-pinard bring medal total to eight
TOKYO — Maude Charron spent three years at circus school, training to be a high-flying acrobat before injuries left her looking for another pursuit.
On Tuesday, she soared to heights of another sort — the top of an Olympic podium.
The 28-year-old from Rimouski, Que., won gold in the 64kg division in women’s weightlifting.
Charron, the defending champion at both the Commonwealth Games and Pan American Championships, set the pace with a 105-kg hoist in snatch.
Although she failed on her first attempt in clean-and-jerk, she returned two minutes later and was successful on a 128-kg lift. She later added three more kilos, padding her lead.
Charron posted a combined total to 236kg, four better than any of her competitors.
Charron’s triumph marks Canada’s eighth medal at Tokyo 2020. This is the second gold, following Maggie Mac Neil’s victory in the pool.
MASSE GETS SILVER IN POOL
When the pandemic first arrived and pools everywhere were shuttered, Kylie Masse worked out a solution in her parents’ southwestern Ontario backyard. They rigged ropes to the fence and she swam against them, the contraption providing some extra resistance to make up for the fact that the pool was missing about 40 metres of length.
More than a year later, after all the weirdness of the path to Tokyo 2020, the pauses and the postponements, the lockdowns and the lack of competitions, all of it came down to a dash of somewhere between 57 and 58 seconds in the Tokyo Aquatics Centre pool.
Fifty-seven seconds and 72-hundredths of a second, to be precise. Masse, the 25-yearold from Windsor, touched the wall a quarter second behind Australia’s Kaylee Mckeown to win the Olympic silver medal in the 100-metre backstroke. It was an improvement, by one shade, over the bronze medal Masse won in the same event at Rio 2016.
“I’m happy with it. I upgraded from 2016, so I’m happy with that,” Masse said, her eyes expressing a smile above her mask-covered mouth. “I knew it was a really talented and fast field that had been swimming crazy fast this whole year.”
“All I was trying to focus on was myself, and I’m proud of myself for getting on the podium tonight.”
Masse won the world championship in the event in 2017 and 2019, but Mckeown had been coming on like a rocket, setting the world record at the distance just last month. The Aussie’s time of 57:47 set a new Olympic record. Masse’s time was just off her personal best by two hundredths of a second, and would have set a new Olympic record but for Mckeown’s race. American Regan Smith took bronze in 58:05.
Masse was leading at the turn, with her fastest first 50 metres ever, but she said she had no regrets about her all-out race strategy.
“It would be incredible to have gotten gold and I absolutely would have loved that, but I’m still really happy with a silver,” Masse said. “I knew it was going to be a challenge. She’s been swimming so fast this whole year. I went the second-fastest time I have ever gone and I have to be happy with that in an Olympic final.”
Masse’s medal was the third in as many days at the Tokyo pool for the Canadian women. Penny Oleksiak, who won a relay silver on Sunday to add to her four medals from Rio, has a chance to add to her haul on
Wednesday morning here in the final of the 200-metre freestyle. Oleksiak didn’t have her strongest race in the semifinal on Tuesday morning, but she posted the sixth-fastest time of the two semis to give herself the shot at hardware. Her teammate Maggie Mac Neil also had the sixth-fastest time in her 100-metre butterfly semifinal, then went on to win gold in the Monday-morning final.
Masse said the strong performances of the Canadian women has had a motivating effect.
“It’s extremely inspiring to be around people like that,” she said, adding that excite
ment from Mac Neil’s win on Monday pushed her into her backstroke semi-final. “I was so fired up,” she said. “I was telling myself I need to ‘calm down, calm down,’ because it was a semi-final.”
ANOTHER JUDO BRONZE
Catherine Beauchemin-pinard on Tuesday won Canada’s second bronze on the mats in as many days, this time in the under-63 kg women’s weight class.
At the Nippon Budokan arena in Tokyo, the 27-yearold from Montreal defeated Anriquelis Barrios of Venezuela in one of two bronze-medal matches by successfully executing a match-ending waza-ari move on Barrios— throwing her to the mat wit h control and accuracy.
Beauchemin-pinard instantly knew she’d won. She pumped her fist and screamed in triumph. Moments later, she ran into the arms of Canada’s coaches to celebrate, then fell to her knees, crying into her hands with joy.
Beauchemin-pinard’s bronze is Canada’s second ever in women’s judo, coming just one day after Jessica Klimkait of Whitby, Ont., won hers in the under-57 kg weight class.
Earlier Tuesday in the round of 32, Beauchemin-pinard wiped out Denmark’s Laerke Olsen 10-0, before defeating Austria’s Magdalena Krssavoka by the same score.
In her quarter-final, Beauchemin-pinard beat Brazil’s Ketleyn Quadros, but narrowly lost 1-0 to eventual gold medallist Clarisse Agbegnenou of France in the semis.
Agbegnenou defeated Slovenia’s Tina Trstenjak in the goldmedal match.
SOCCER
A win against Great Britain would have put Canada in prime position to change the colour of the medal in the women’s soccer tournament at the Tokyo Olympics. However, after a 1-1 tie against Great Britain at the Ibaraki Kashima Stadium on Tuesday, Canada, the two-time defending Olympic bronze medallist, will have a tougher road to the final. Canada will have to go through Brazil, then either the Netherlands or United States in the knockout round after finishing second in Group E.
Canada face Brazil in the quarter-final in Rifu, Japan on Friday.