CANADA’S GAZE FIXED ON BRONZE
‘Back-to-back podiums’: Sinclair leads rallying cry into match against Brazil
It’s the loveliest thing to know about Christine Sinclair — the thing her coach and the team’s press ofcer and perhaps some of her teammates knew, but she didn’t.
When the great captain of the Canadian women’s soccer team takes the pitch Friday at Corinthians Arena, it will be her 250th cap, as they call it in soccer, the 250th time she has played for her country in an international match.
“She just doesn’t count these things,” head coach John Herdman said Thursday after pregame training on a cool and shivery day.
“Seems not long ago we were celebrating her 200th cap.”
No one was planning to tell her before the game, either.
As Herdman said, she’s been “carrying a country” on her shoulders since she got her first national team cap at the age of 16. Now 33, the last thing she needs is another reminder of the weight upon her.
Just a day earlier, Sinclair and her teammates had been crushed — Sincy, as everyone calls her, standing off alone on the field for just a few minutes to compose herself, others weeping openly — after a 2-0 loss to Germany that saw the team out of the chase for the gold medal and into another for the bronze.
Now the Canadians are fighting for the bronze against a Brazilian team that is bound to be the overwhelming favourite of what’s expected to be the biggest crowd — perhaps 60,000 people — of the women’s tournament.
“It’s why you play,” Sinclair said, for “the growth of the game.”
The Brazilians had their own kick to the gut to get over, a penalty-kick loss to Sweden in a game where they’d clearly been the better and certainly the most exciting team.
But they, as their coach Vadao (his real name is Oswaldo Fumeiro Alvarez, but like many in this country, he goes by a single name) said, had recovered by Thursday morning.
“If we’d spoken to them (after the loss to Sweden) about the bronze medal,” Vadao said, “it wouldn’t have any effect … It usually takes 48 hours (for the loss) to wear off. Everybody was really upset and disappointed, but since this morning their spirit has changed.” Ditto the Canadians. “We had one night to be mad and upset,” Sinclair said. (According to Herdman, after the loss to Germany, she’d actually given her mates all of two hours.) She acknowledged her own acute disappointment, but said, as she famously told the 2012 team at the London Olympics, “We’re not leaving here empty-handed.
“An Olympic medal is on the line,” she said, whatever the colour.
Intensely private, so at ease in her own skin on the field — she prowls the pitch as Wayne Gretzky once prowled the ice, sometimes almost walking, the wingspan when she stretches out her arms enormous for someone so thin, she’s ridiculously narrow when you look at her from the side — but so constrained off it as to be almost awkward, Sinclair allowed herself to be just a little reflective.
She was proud of her team — and as captain and its heart and soul, it remains her team — and she knows how it has grown even since last summer. Young players like Ashley Lawrence, Janine Beckie and Deanne Rose have flourished and have yet to know the joy of an Olympic medal around their necks. For some veterans, Sinclair said, “this may be the last international game for them” and the last Olympics.
As Herdman put it, “They’ve moved on (from the loss). They’ve got the bronze medal in their sights, they want those back-to-back podiums.”
The resilience of the elite athlete is boundless, whether it’s in the physical pounding of those who put their bodies on the line or bringing what Herdman calls “a creative spirit” to the play, “a release of human” imagination. Both require gobs of courage, he said, and here he mentioned the kids by name.
Watching them all rise to it, be so brave and willing as to test themselves, he said, “That’s why I love this job.”
The game itself he expects will be a “hell of a match” between two teams that have met many times.
“They kick the hell out of each other,” he said.
There’s something about that — the big crowd hooting, the pressure — that makes it most difcult to perform.
The Brazilians have as their superstar the electrifying Marta, who left her impoverished family at the age of 14 to ride a bus for three days to get to Rio to try out for Vasco da Gama’s women’s team. She made it.
The Canadians have Sinclair, with that cool level gaze of hers, that dignified reserve that simply will not be breached and that crazy wingspan.
“We’re still breathing the Olympic air,” Herdman said. “We’re blessed to be doing that.”