Home hardware stores built from the heart
Top shelf to Tupperware, Canadian medal winners preserve Pan Am honours
After a Pan Am medal is placed around the neck of a proud athlete, selecting its next destination can be a challenge.
Does the ribbon match the wallpaper? Will the gold catch the light better in the living room or the kitchen? Do we really need a guest room?
Bedroom shelves, Ikea cabinets and mom’s house are some of the spots where Canadian athletes stash their hardware, according to an informal Star survey. But first, the medals often go on the road.
Haley Daniels, bronze medallist in whitewater canoe slalom, is keeping hers close by for now — in her purse. “Many of my friends, family and supporters have been very keen to see it,” she wrote in an email. “My mom has already given me five different carrying cases to store it in.”
After winning freestyle wrestling silver last Saturday, 28-year-old Korey Jarvis took the medal to work Tuesday morning. A co-worker wanted to take it home for a night.
“He’s a big supporter of mine,” says Jarvis, who works as a welder. “So I said: Go ahead, take it home. I trust him. He’s not going to steal it.” Kayaker Hannah Vaughan has a longer road trip planned with her gold, Canada’s first of the Games in the K-4 500-metre event. Coming up: training camp in Montreal and the world championships in Milan before returning home to Dartmouth, N.S., in September.
“I think there’s a shelf it will have a nice spot on,” she says.
Marc Tarling, Vaughan’s boyfriend, has canoe medals of his own on that same shelf from past events.
“I have a feeling eventually it might end up maybe in a drawer or something down the road,” adds Vaughan, “but definitely something I’ll keep, and keep safe. The Pan Am Games being in Canada was something that I’ll never be able to experience again.”
Kayaker Mark de Jonge keeps his Pan Am, Olympic and world championship prizes where most of us keep old birthday cards: in a Tupperware container in the furnace room, on a dresser and under papers in his office.
“I don’t want to display them,” he says. “I have the experience of winning the race and standing on the podium getting the medal around my neck.”
Swimmer Audrey Lacroix has been to two Olympics and is the veteran of Canada’s swim team. Maybe that’s why her parents thought she was done after London 2012 and converted her trophy room into a dining room. She’ll soon retire her newest medal, gold in the Pan Am 200-metre butterfly, to a time capsule of sorts.
“I’m old enough to know one day I’m going to open that Rubbermaid bin and all those medals and trophies and jackets I’ve kept as souvenirs, they’re going to tell me a story,” she says.
Jarvis’s gold from the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow is his most prized medal.
“It was four years in the making,” says the wrestler who missed out on a medal at the 2010 Commonwealths in Delhi.
That gold medal is the centrepiece of the trophy room/guest room/office in his Guelph home. His wife also posted a world map there with pins to mark each spot where Jarvis has competed. They hope to add Rio, host city for next summer’s Olym- pics.
“Hopefully it works out and I can get a couple more to display,” adds Jarvis, who used to display medals — now numbering roughly 50 — on his bedroom wall in his younger days. He left one silver medal with his mom.
Jessica Phoenix’s parents still have some of the equestrian’s medals from when she started competing at age 11.
“I think they are very at home where they are,” says Phoenix, who won individual silver and team bronze at the Pan Ams, destined for an Ikea cabinet in her Cannington, Ont. home.
Husband Joel has won awards for prized dairy cows and Phoenix, feigning disdain, lets him store those in the same place.
Fellow equestrian Ian Millar, who at 68 has competed in more Olympics (10) than any other athlete, says he has always meant to get a trophy case together, but it hasn’t happened yet.
“They’re here and there and everywhere,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t appreciated it very much and hold it very close and dear. It’s that we’re always on to the next thing.” With files from Kevin McGran