Wrestlers keep getting up off mat
Nothing seems to come easy, but Canadian team has eyes on three or more medals
NIAGARA FALLS, ONT.— Carol Huynh, the assistant chef de mission for Canadian athletes heading to Rio, is in the middle of telling a story about how she felt before her first Olympics eight years ago when the power on her microphone goes out.
No matter. Huynh is a two-time Olympic medallist in wrestling and wrestlers know how to make themselves heard. She raises her voice, just as she did in 2013 when her sport was in danger of losing its place in the Olympics.
Her microphone comes back to life just in time for the wrestlers waiting backstage to hear the part she wants them to take to heart, hoping it will help quiet any doubts that may creep in before Rio.
“Keep in mind you’ve earned this spot,” she says. “You’ve overcome all those obstacles.” Six women — Canada and Japan are the only countries that qualified a full women’s slate — and two men were named to the Rio team this week. And overcoming obstacles is a significant part of the story for each of them from 48-kilogram wrestler Jasmine Mian all the way up to the team’s big man, Korey Jarvis, at 125 kg.
“Wrestling is a truly physical sport so we’ve had athletes coming off some fairly serious injuries,” national team coach Leigh Vierling says.
A team tally suggests several orthopedic surgeons will be holding their breath during the women’s matches in Rio on Aug. 17 and 18.
Jillian Gallays, who learned a lot about perseverance early on as a kid with dyslexia, had three knee surgeries, including one last year, and still earned a Rio berth for Canada.
Dorothy Yeats sandwiched her knee surgery between gold medals at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto.
Michelle Fazzari made her first national team two years after shoulder surgery, which she was told would end her career, and competed at the Pan Ams three weeks after knee surgery.
Danielle Lappage was finally becoming the wrestler she’d spent a decade trying to be, winning multiple international titles, before a knee injury in 2014 sidelined her for more than a year.
Haislan Garcia, the only Olympic veteran on the team, dislocated his shoulder and qualified for Rio all in one match in May at the last-chance qualifier in Turkey.
For others, the obstacles were more emotional than physical.
Mian and Erica Wiebe were both riding a nice streak of wins before things went off the rails. They lost their top spots on the national team and missed their chance to compete on home soil at the Pan Ams. Wiebe figures she started wrestling safe, and there’s no safe on the mat, and Mian was struggling to balance training and finishing her master’s degree.
They both fought their way back to the top and won national trials this past December which, given how strong the women’s wrestling field is in Canada, makes them medal contenders for Rio.
“I realize now that failure really positioned me to do well later on,” Mian says.
It wasn’t long ago that Jarvis, who spent years working full-time as a welder in a Guelph machine shop, was ready to pack it in.
“So many times I’d go to practice fed up, have a crappy day at work and then have a crappy practice and ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this? Is it worth it?’ ”
The 29-year-old has been the best in Canada in his weight class for years but wasn’t ranked high enough globally to get funding. Just a couple months ago, a friend in his home- town of Elliot Lake, Ont., stepped in and raised enough money for him to take time off work and train full-time for Rio.
“My workload has almost doubled in training but my body feels better than it did when I was working,” he says. “I’m smiling because I’m ready for that next day.”
The women’s team in particular is ready to challenge for medals in Rio and there are more of them to win than ever. In the 2008 and 2012 Games, women only had four weight classes to the men’s seven in freestyle wrestling but in Rio — as part of the changes the sport made to stay in the Olympics — there are six classes for each. Huynh and Tonya Verbeek both won medals in Beijing and London.
“We’ve had two medals, twice, but we’ve not had three medals and that’s really what we’re shooting for,” Vierling says. “I know any one of the six is capable of it.”