GIRL POWER ROCKS PODIUM FOR CANADA
ROWING TOWARD GLORY Carling Zeeman of Cambridge, Ont., competes in the women’s single sculls quarter-final on Tuesday. Zeeman secured a place in Thursday’s semifinals with Tuesday’s performance. Women win all five of this country’s first five Olympic meda
Ottawa’s Evie Scantlebury watched the TV with wonder Monday night as Canada pounded Great Britain 33-10 in the Olympic bronze-medal match of women’s rugby sevens.
Only six, Scantlebury pointed in adoration at the powerhouse that is Canadian rugby captain Jen Kish.
“Daddy,” she said. “I want to be strong just like her.”
Canada had won five medals as of Tuesday afternoon — one silver and four bronze — and all of them had come from women.
“Girls in Canada, meet your new role models,” six-time Olympic medallist Clara Hughes wrote on Twitter. “You can be all that you dream to be.”
Indeed. Four days in, Canada’s female athletes are proving to be the superstars of these Games.
The women’s four-by-100-metre freestyle relay team kicked off the party Saturday night with a bronze, followed by 16-year-old Penny Oleksiak’s shocking silver Sunday in the 100-metre butterfly. One day later, there was another shock in the pool, with Kylie Masse claiming bronze in the 100-metre backstroke. Meaghan Benfeito and Roseline Filion added to the total Tuesday with a come-from-behind bronze in synchronized 10-metre platform diving.
“I think it’s great what women are showing Canada,” the 20-yearold Masse said Tuesday. “Just knowing that women are equally as strong and powerful as anyone else and just they have the same opportunities as everyone in sport.”
Canada is clearly a country obsessed with men’s hockey, as evidenced by sports highlight packages that routinely lead off with the NHL, even in the dead of summer. Football, baseball and basketball
all receive plenty of airtime.
Women’s sports, on the other hand, are rarely mentioned outside of golf, tennis, figure skating, curling, and perhaps the odd blip on Christine Sinclair and the national women’s soccer team.
Female athletes only accounted for four per cent of the 2014 programming on Canada’s primary national sports networks, according to a study released in March by Canada’s dairy farmers and the Canadian Association for Advancement of Women and Sport. Only five per cent of national print media sports coverage researched was dedicated to women, and that was in an Olympic year.
But for the last four days, Canadian women have owned the airwaves and the sports pages.
The party is projected to continue through Aug. 21.
“All the medals so far are from women in Canada,” a reporter said to Masse on Tuesday. “Are you starting to give it to the guys?”
“Maybe a little,” she replied. “But I think they’re super talented and they’ll get it.”
One of the goals for Kish in Rio is to help Canadian girls feel comfortable in their own skin.
“I’m not the most femininelooking person in this room or in rugby,” Kish said. “But I’m proud of who I am and what I have become, and I think rugby has helped build that character.
Winning, for Kish, is hearing via social media of the moment Evie Scantlebury found herself a new role model in her own living room.
“To have a six-year-old point at the TV and say they want to be like you, that inspires me to keep going,” Kish said. “I know I’m doing something right. I wish that little girl the best in her dreams, and I hope she achieves them.”
There really is no age factor in shooting. If you think I’m here at the Rio Olympic Games to finish my career, you’re so wrong. I will be fighting for a spot at Tokyo 2020. … I am here to show the whole world that if you want something, you can do it. BRAZILIAN SHOOTER JANICE TEIXEIRA, WHO MADE HER OLYMPIC DEBUT AT 54