After the joys of summer have gone
To celebrate our country’s birthday, the Star is showcasing 150 of the quintessential Canadian sporting characters and moments of the last 150 years. In the sixth of a 10-part series, we highlight Canada’s summer sports stars:
The Matchless Six
It was a time when Victorian ideas about the unseemliness and outright physical dangers of women competing in vigorous activities were starting to change. More doors were opening to women and, at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, women were included in track and field competition for the first time.
But not everyone was supportive — Canada’s own president of the amateur athletic union was against it — and so the competitors knew they’d be watched closely.
It was a monumental year in sport for women and Canada’s team more than delivered.
Toronto sprinters Fanny (Bobbie) Rosenfeld, Ethel Smith, Myrtle Cook and Florence Bell delivered gold and a world record in the 4x100-metre relay.
Rosenfeld and Smith also won silver and bronze, respectively, in the 100-metre sprint after their teammate Cook, the worldrecord holder, was disqualified for false starts, ending the chance for a Canadian sweep.
Saskatoon’s Ethel Catherwood, wrapping herself up in a Hudson’s Bay blanket between jumps, won high-jump gold in spectacular fashion. It still remains the only Olympic gold in track and field ever won by a Canadian woman. And Penetanguishene’s Jean Thompson, despite injuring her leg days earlier, finished just off the podium in fourth in the 800, one spot ahead of Rosenfeld.
With two golds, a silver and a bronze, Canada’s track and field women won more than any other nation. Those six women, who came to be known as the Matchless Six, took on the best the world had to offer — including the United States, which sent a team of 20 — and beat them all.
George Lyon
He played baseball, rugby, cricket and even set a national polevault record as an 18-year-old, but it’s golf, a sport he didn’t take up until later in life, where he made his mark.
Lyon was 38 and running an insurance business in Toronto back in 1896 when he first took up golf at the urging of a friend. Within two years he captured the first of his eight national amateur championships.
His swing was unorthodox and variously described by tuttutting traditionalists as a coal heavers’ swing, raking hay or a butcher killing a steer. He certainly walloped the ball with great enthusiasm and it served him well in 1904 when he faced the best in the world in St. Louis and came away with the first and only Olympic gold medal ever handed out in golf — that is until the sport rejoined the Summer Games program last year in Rio.
Donovan Bailey
After three false starts, the 100-metre sprinters stepped into the starting blocks for a fourth time at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games and the anticipation couldn’t have been higher.
Bailey’s start wasn’t the fastest but at 40 metres he was moving up the field and by 60 he was in control of the race. He won in incredible fashion, setting a new world-record time: 9.84 seconds.
For Bailey, those Summer Games earned him the rare triple title of world champion, Olympic champion and world-record holder.
For Canadians, it was sweet redemption and a way to finally put the ghost of Ben Johnson and his positive drug test at the 1988 Games to rest.
The Paris Crew
It couldn’t have been any more of a Canadian moment. A week after Confederation, three fishermen and a lighthouse keeper from Saint John, N.B., arrived in Paris lugging a boat weighing 100 pounds more than the boats their competitors were using at the world amateur rowing championships.
They wore funny looking clothing, had an unorthodox rowing style and no coxswain to steer or tell them what to do. Really, there wasn’t anything about them that wasn’t ridiculed by their upper-class rivals and the European press.
How sweet it must have been, then, when those Robert Fulton, George Price, Samuel Hutton and Elijah Ross won the race so easily that one of them was able to stop rowing and wave to the crowd as they crossed the finish line.
The Canadian foursome was taken more seriously after that and only got better, beating their famed competitors in the second event by three boat lengths.
The Paris Crew was the undisputed world champion and Canada’s first victorious team.
Christine Sinclair
She’s the most successful soccer player to ever compete for Canada and also one of the quietest, always letting her game on the field do her talking.
Canada’s women’s soccer team is known internationally as well as Canada’s men’s hockey team and Sinclair is integral to that.
She made her debut with the senior national team as a 16-yearold at the 2000 Algarve Cup, where she scored her first of 168 career goals, ranking second only to American Abby Wambach (184) in all of women’s soccer, and has led Canada to consecutive Olympic bronze medals in 2012 and 2016.
She’s competed with broken bones and through family tragedy, not for personal glory but to see the Canadian team achieve the international excellence she always believed was possible. And, at 34, the Burnaby, B.C., native isn’t done yet.
George Orton
He was Canada’s first Olympic champion. And he did it while competing for the United States.
Orton was severely injured as a young boy and began walking, then running, behind the family buggy in Strathroy, Ont., as part of his treatment, all the while discovering he was a natural at running long distances.
He studied at the University of Toronto before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where he captained the school’s track team in 1895 and 1896 and continued to add to his reputation as one of the premier runners of the late 19th century.
Orton was chosen to compete for the U.S. at the 1900 Paris Olympics — Canada didn’t send a team that year — and won gold in the 2,500-metre steeplechase and bronze in the 400metre hurdles.
A Philadelphia sportswriter once hailed him as “the premier American athlete of all time,” but we know better; we know he was ours.
Daniel Igali
The Nigerian-born wrestler became a Canadian citizen after claiming refugee status following the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria. He later provided one of the most emotional moments of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
After winning the gold medal in 69-kg freestyle — the first Olympic gold in wrestling for the country — Igali spread a Canadian flag on the mat, knelt and kissed it after using it as a cape in a victory lap around the venue. A touching and emotional moment for the then-26-year-old. “Putting (the maple leaf) down and running around was saying I made a complete cycle,” he said in Sydney. Chantal Petitclerc
When she was 13 a barn door fell on her, crushing her spinal cord, and though Petitclerc hadn’t been athletic before her accident she would go on to become one of Canada’s most decorated athletes in history.
During her wheelchair racing career she set numerous world records and won 21 medals, including 14 gold, at the Paralympic Games between 1992 and 2008, but her greatest achievement was winning five gold medals in the 100-, 200-, 400-, 800- and 1,500-metre distances — for the second Paralympics in a row — in 2008 in Beijing.
The last thing her grandfather, who died just before the Games, told her was this: “You beat everybody in China.”
So she did; nothing could stop her. Not a host country with national pride on the line, not sprinters with faster starts than hers, not two races just 90 minutes apart, not a wet slippery track in her final event in the Bird’s Nest.
Five races, five gold medals. Again. Penny Oleksiak Talk about making an immediate impact on the sports world. Then a 16-year-old who had been anonymous to many Canadian sports fans, the Toronto high school student became the sensation of the 2016 Rio Olympics, forever etching her name in the country’s sports lore.
Oleksiak won four medals — gold in the 100-metre freestyle, silver in the 100 butterfly and two freestyle relay bronzes (4x100 and 4x200) — to become the youngest medallist in Canadian sports history as well as the first Canadian to win four medals at Summer Games.
And to prove the season was far from a fluke, Oleksiak has already set a Canadian record in the 50-metre butterfly this year.
Golden rejects
Canada’s only gold medal of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics came from an unlikely source: George Hungerford and Roger Jackson in rowing’s coxless pairs.
Neither man had even expected to be in that boat just six months before the Games. They were thrown together by a series of circumstances from teammate injuries to a case of an infectious virus. Add in a boat borrowed from the United States and it’s fair to say that public expectations were low.
But Hungerford and Jackson turned out to be a perfect match and in just six weeks they formed the balanced rhythm that took top crews years to develop. They went out fast and hung on through a sprint finish with the Dutch boat to claim their victory and earn themselves the nickname Golden Rejects.
Jerome Drayton
He held down a full-time job, considered a bath and a beer sufficient post-run therapy and yet, in 1975, Drayton set the fastest ever time for a Canadian in the marathon.
Born in Germany in the tumultuous post-WWII years, he immigrated to Canada with his family at 11, changed his name and set about forging a new identity as a distance runner.
In 1969, Toronto’s Drayton came to broad attention when he set a North American record at the Motor City Marathon in Detroit; in 1975 in Fukuoka, Japan, he ran even faster, setting the Canadian record of 2:10:09; and in 1977 he won the prestigious Boston Marathon on a sweltering day — without any water on the course.
Incredibly, given all the advances in sports science and athlete training, Drayton’s 2:10:09 marathon time set in 1975 remains unmatched by a Canadian to this day, making it the longest standing athletics record in the country.
Daniel Nestor
A seemingly ageless wonder, the list of accomplishments the wondrous doubles tennis master has put together in a career that’s spanned three decades is stunning.
Nestor was a 2000 Olympic gold medallist, has won eight Grand Slam doubles titles (and four more in mixed doubles) and four ATP Tour Finals championships.
The Serbia-born, Toronto-raised 44-year-old, who broke into the national consciousness with a Davis Cup singles win over Stefan Edberg as a teenager in 1992, was the first player in doubles history to win all four Slams, a Masters Series event, the year-end title and an Olympic gold at least once in his career.
Gaylord Powless
To see him play was like watching a game played in slow motion for one player and full speed for everyone else. When it came to lacrosse, Powless always seemed to be in the right place doing exactly the right thing.
A Mohawk from the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nations near Brantford, Ont., his instinct and skill for the game first played by his ancestors, before Canada was even a country, were legendary.
And his sporting honours were numerous: he led the Oshawa Green Gaels to four consecutive Minto Cups (1964-67) and had a successful professional career including scoring 63 goals, twice as many as his nearest competition, for the Detroit Olympics in the 1968 National Lacrosse Association season.
He faced racism as a professional in lacrosse and battled back the best way he knew how: winning the game.
Greg Joy
American-born and Vancouver-raised, Joy provided Canada with one of its few highlights from the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
Joy, who moved with his family from Portland to Vancouver as a young boy, earned a silver medal in high jump in Montreal, matching the highest medal won by anybody representing the host nation.
The six-foot-four Joy, who would later marry Canadian Olympic canoe medallist Sue Holloway, jumped 2.23 metres to capture silver, beating third-place American Dwight Stones but finishing behind Poland’s gold-medallist Jacek Wszola.
Joy was named 1976 winner of the Lionel Conacher Award as Canada’s top male athlete for his accomplishment.
Rosie MacLennan
The skill and dedication it takes to become an Olympic gold medallist is unimaginable to many, with years and years of hard work the only way to mount the top level of the podium. Imagine, then, how hard it must be to do it twice. Only one Canadian who has ever competed in an individual Olympic sport knows that feeling: Trampolinist Rosie MacLennan, who won her first gold medal at the 2012 London Games and repeated the feat four years later in Rio.
What made it even more impressive is that the 28-year-old from tiny King City, Ont., suffered two concussions prior to defending her title in Rio. She lost valuable training time recovering from the dizziness, headaches and other symptoms and was ultimately forced to scale back her routine, yet still came away victorious.