Canada’s Lavoie bowls first perfect game in Pan Am history,
Francois Lavoie has 12-strike game while teaming with Dan MacLelland for doubles title
Put down your poutine and hoist a beer Canada. We are a bowling nation.
Canucks Francois Lavoie — chipping in a perfect game nobody saw coming — and Dan MacLelland absolutely dominated the field Thursday to win bowling gold in men’s doubles at the Pan Am Games. Talk about being on a roll. Not only did Lavoie, a 22-year-old from Quebec City, score the first 300 —12 consecutive strikes — in Pan Am Games history, he and MacLelland set five Games records en route to the podium. Among them, MacLelland, who manages a bowling centre in Kitchener, set a mark for a 12-game total pins with 2,930, a stunning 244 average. The two bowlers took down 5,607 pins over the two days, 347 more than any doubles team since bowling was introduced to the Pan Ams in 1995. In their victory Thursday, they finished 318 points ahead of runner-up Columbia.
MacLelland won a world singles championship in December but this victory stirred some extra emotion. The 30-year-old became a father seven weeks ago and his wife Kristy and daughter Harper were on hand for the win. He left the pro tour and took a steady job, he said, in order to avoid being on the road for 20 to 25 weeks a year so he could “watch his daughter grow up.”
“Just to have them here and do it in front of my new family, I had tears the whole time,” he said. “First thing I did I went over there and grabbed my daughter and gave her a million kisses.”
While both players put up excellent totals, it was Lavoie’s perfection in the day’s fifth game that was the highlight. He’d actually been rather mediocre the three previous games failing to reach 200 in any of them.
“I talked to the coach and I said, ‘I’m struggling.’ He said, ‘Just hang in there, we’re going to figure it out,’ ” recounted Lavoie. “And sure enough we did. The next game we changed the surface on the ball (creating more friction in the lane), changed alignment a little bit and things went our way from then on.”
When Lavoie, who is a business administration student at Wichita State University, got up to bowl the 10th frame, the anxiety was palpable in the small sold-out crowd that gathered behind his lane. You could have heard a pin drop. And drop they did as Lavoie crushed three straight strikes with impressive authority sending the fans into a cheering tizzy.
“Usually your nerves start to kick in, maybe in the ninth or 10th frame, but this was different,” said Lavoie, who figures he has bowled between 30 and 35 perfect games. “I actually just had this feeling of joy in the 10th frame going up there. I wasn’t nervous at all. I just executed a great shot in the 10th and it’s like I knew the next two were going to be good.”
MacLelland hopes one day, maybe when his daughter is five, that he’ll get the chance to compete for a gold medal at an even bigger Games.
While dozens of athletes use the the Pan Ams to either qualify for the Olympics or as a dress rehearsal for Rio 2016, for bowling it is the entire sport that is trying to elevate to a higher level of competition and a higher level of respect. It has been shortlisted for inclusion at the Tokyo 2020 .
“We’ve always thought bowling matters,” said MacLelland. “We’ll do anything we can, the bowling community across the world, to try and get it into the Olympics because it is a sport, it should be here.”