Peterborough runner sprints to gold medal at national meet
Sixteen-year-old Gavyn Small wins in the 60-metre dash only 10 months after dedicating himself to the sport
When Gavyn Small first ran track in elementary school, there was no hint of a national championship in his future.
“I’d win at my school but then I’d go to the bigger meets and lose,” said Small, 16, a Grade 11 student at Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School.
Just 10 months after deciding to dedicate himself to sprinting, Small won the gold medal in the 60-metre dash in the boys U18 division at the Canadian National Indoor Track & Field Championships in Montreal at the Claude Robillard Sports Complex on March 16-17.
In his Grade 9 phys-ed class, he ran a 40-metre time that caught the attention of his teacher, Bond Bjorgan, who suggested he should try out for the track team. He placed second in the 100 metres at the Kawartha District meet, but at COSSA he fractured his hip during the heats.
“I was in the middle of my race and I felt this really bad pop in my hip and I couldn’t walk,” said Small. “The doctor said it was the stage of development my body was at where the bone couldn’t handle the tension the tendon was putting on it.”
The next year, Small was determined to get back on the track.
“I came in with a chip on my shoulder. I wanted to do better and kind of avenge myself,” the Douro native said.
He repeated as Kawartha champion, won gold at COSSA and finished third at the Eastern Regionals to qualify for OFSAA, where he placed 13th.
“Every meet I went to, I got faster and faster,” Small said.
He decided to take his training to a new level and he joined the Peterborough Pacers Legion Track Club.
“Bond told me to look into it. He said I should keep training and not just wait for school season to roll around every year,” said Small.
He learned a lot from Pacers coach Eric Sutton.
“It was a new perspective. I didn’t know track could have so many complex aspects. There are so many different types of specific training and a lot of ways for me to get even better,” he said. “Breaking down the race into different parts, how you do your starts and how you come up out of the blocks and how you transition from being down low at the start of the race to coming up full speed and maintaining that throughout the race with correct posture and striking your foot against the ground in the correct way and swinging your arms in the right motion. Things like that.”
Small placed third at the Ontario Legion Track and Field Championships last summer and ran a 100metre personal best of 10.99 seconds in finishing fifth at the Ontario Track and Field Championships at U18 in London. He transitioned to the indoor season, running a number of meets. He hit a wall in the middle of the season where he couldn’t seem to improve on his 60-metre personal best of 7.12.
He headed to nationals hoping to land on the podium and felt good the first time he touched the track.
“You could tell it was a fast track. The material it was made out of doesn’t absorb your hit but it was better for striking. It was more firm,” he said.
Racing in a class of 32 runners, Small ran a personal best of 7.06 to place first among all racers in the heats. He followed that up in the final by obliterating his personal best with a gold-medal-winning 6.99.
“Going into the heats, I was checking the seed times of the other people because I was nervous. I didn’t know what the competition would be like. I saw there were a couple of people running 7.04 and 7.05. in order to qualify for the final, I had to finish top six, so I told myself I had to go out there and push my hardest and just go,” he said.
The heat result gave him confidence.
“It surprised me, but then it kind of filled me with confidence seeing I had the best time going into finals. I thought it might make the other people a little nervous and give me a little bit of an edge,” he said.
“After having done the first race and getting a good start, which I was worried about because that’s probably my weakest part, I felt confident and sure of myself. I told myself I had to do that again but faster.”
He finished 0.03 ahead of the runner-up.
“It was overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time,” said Small.
“It was overwhelming but you can’t process it and don’t truly get to appreciate it or understand what just happened. As it set in, I got more hyped and I was superexcited to go up on the podium and get a medal.”