As we were saying

Home Is What You Make It

GUELPH

 A Ticat veteran, who had never been here before, walked hesitantly across the track at Alumni Stadium looked around a little dazedly at the garish, checker-board end zone, and said, ‘so this is home, eh?’

 The short answer?

Yep.

The longer one?

Make the best of it, because the slightly bemused, fish-out-of-water, expression that was on many of the Ticats’ faces as they filed off their buses from Hamilton----dressed in practice gear and carrying their pads---is the same expression that visiting teams will have this year. Only they won’t have the rest of the season to get used to it as the Cats do.

    Home field advantage at Guelph started Saturday morning with that bus trip, and you could tell that partway through the Cats’ black-and-gold practice, they had become accustomed to their surroundings. There is still a game-day procedure to go through, true, since the Cats, and the opposition, will dress in specially-modified portables near the adjacent field house.

And that’s not as rinky-dink as it sounds. The locker rooms are huge, bigger than at Ivor Wynne. (of course your bathroom is bigger than the visitors’ room at Ivor Wynne was).

 When the team gets the tour of the facilities off the field, and realize how much work went into refurbishing this stadium and how so many little details were anticipated, it’s likely to give them a lot of faith in the organization. And that’s never a bad thing for a football team.

Anyway, Saturday was an important step in getting a leg up on the visiting teams who have a slight advantage to start with since they’ll stay in Guelph, about a mile from the stadium, while the Cats have to bus up on game day. Not that it’s an arduous trek from Hamilton, and it can have its unifying forces too, sort of like a moving locker room speech. But the biggest leg up on this, as the organization knows, is to get a few wins under the belt early. Then this really does become a home field.

Wrestling Breathes Out.....For Now

A guy sits at Tiger-Cats rookie camp with one eye on the International Olympic Committee, which has obviously felt the social and cultural backlash about its decision to remove wrestling from the Games it helped start.

As wrestling types hoped, the IOC is including it among the three finalists for inclusion in 2020. We've said it before and we'll say it again, removing wrestling from the core sports was wrong on the part of the IOC, but wrestling's international body has to take a lot of blame because they didn't see it coming and take enough steps to head it off. You have to be more prescient than that at the world level.

 

Here's the official statement from Lutte Canada Wrestling. Lutte, for the uninitiated, is rasslin' in our other official language.

(Ottawa, ON – May 29, 2013) Wrestling Canada is relieved that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board voted wrestling as one of the three remaining sports vying for an Olympic berth in the 2020 Olympic Games and beyond.
 
“We are happy and extremely relieved that the IOC Executive Board has voted to keep wrestling for the final vote in Buenos Aires in Argentina. We as a community have worked extremely hard in the last four months to be where we are today,” said Don Ryan, Vice President of the FILA Pan-American Council and President of Wrestling Canada.
 
“Eight sports were on the ballot for this first vote, and we are thrilled to see wrestling as one of the three moving on to the final round. We have not won the battle yet, we must continue as a community to persevere in our efforts,” continued Ryan.
 
Two Canadians were in Moscow as panellists for Wrestling, making a presentation to the IOC Executive Board: Olympic Champions Carol Huynh (2008, Beijing) and Daniel Igali (2000, Sydney).
 
The next steps for wrestling are to continue its efforts to modernize the sport and fully implement its new structure, and continue its preparations in advance of the 125^th IOC Session, which will happen in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from September 7-10.
 
“To put it in terms of wrestling: we’ve won the first round. We must now win the second round to claim victory, and that won’t be so easy. The race will be tight, and everyone will show up ready to fight. We now have to keep the momentum as a community, keep our spirits high, stay motivated and continue to push for Wrestling,” continued Ryan
 
The IOC Executive Board has voted in favor of a recommendation to remove wrestling from the core Olympic Program at meetings in February. Since then, the wrestling communities worldwide rose, and advocated for the sport across the world, including working on changing the FILA leadership.
 
FILA adopted a new leadership in the wake of the IOC recommendations, a leadership that acted quickly and swiftly on implementing changes to its structures. New rules have been adopted for the sport of wrestling, which were voted at the last FILA Extraordinary Meetings in Russia.
 
Ryan: “The FILA has done exceptional work with very short timelines to get where we are today and receive this vote of confidence. This doesn’t mean we must stop actively working – we must now turn our focus to the September vote in Argentina, and work towards that objective.”
 
Other positive steps include more opportunity for female and athlete representation at the FILA bureau level and the introduction of several new commissions.
 
Canada has a strong High Performance Program in place, for both men and women, and we will continue to field teams to the World Championships and other major events across the globe,” contributed Leigh Vierling, the Head Coach of the National Women Wrestling Team. “We hired Gia Sissaouri as full-time coach to develop the men’s program, as well as three-time Olympic medallist Tonya Verbeek as new Talent Identification Coach to spot the future generation of Olympic wrestlers.”
 
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Sochi already taking steps

One of the first major events after 9/11 was the Salt Lake Olympics, where security was unprecedented, including no-fly zones.

Sochi 2014 is only 10 months away and the Boston Marathon bombings have added yet another layer of threat to those Games. Here's a piece which discusses Russia's situation, in regard to Boston's. click here to read

WATCH FOR HEARTY DISCUSSION AROUND NEW OLYMPIC EVENT

LONDON

 

            When Sochi 2014 rolls around---and it’s less than 11 months away, folks---it will the first time in 42 years the Olympics will feature a new figure skating event.

            And it will be a much bigger deal than anyone outside the very inner circle of this rapidly evolving sport recognizes at this point.

            For one thing, figure skating is an individual sport, no matter how much the top organizations, such as Skate Canada, have created a team concept. The team won’t be at centre ice with Kevin Reynolds and Patrick Chan tonight when the first bar of music plays with everything on the line.

            For another, because NBC still essentially finances the Olympics (it pays the largest rights fee) and Americans have a traditional love affair with only women’s skating, the network insisted that it be the final event of the Sochi skating calendar, as it usually is. The International Olympic Committee readily agreed and told figure skating that their desire to have the team event at the end of the schedule, when it makes more practical sense, was denied.

            And for the Salchow Set it came down to this choice: agree, or lose their chance to have a new medal to shoot for. And that’s no choice at all.

            This medal may be new, but it will be very important, more prestigious than most of the  other relatively new medals in the Games, because it’s figure skating, the first of the winter sports to actually be in the Olympics (the summer of 1908 , pre-dating the Winter Games by a dozen years) and has always been one of the core, and powerful, sports.

            Essentially Team Skating is this: the top 10 countries in the world, based on this week’s world championships here, each enter one male skater, one female skater, one pair and once dance team.

The principle is that the members of each team  already have to have qualified to skate in the Olympics in their specific individual (or pair/dance) events.

 Those countries , such as Japan, which can mount qualified entrants in only three divisions, will be allowed one of 10 alternate spots (essentially wildcards) so they fill their short spot with a skater or couple which hasn’t met the high Olympic qualifying standard.

            But with the team event being held first, and the men’s and pairs events staged fairly early in the Games, countries which have more than one man or pair to choose from---Canada, for instance---might find some resistance from their competitors. The men’s team finale, for instance, is only four days before the men’s individual short program.

            An Olympic gold medal can be worth millions, in the long run, to some skaters and if there’s any worry about injury, or fatigue, or staleness from repetition, or about peaking mentally twice in the same fortnight, it could be that the top skater in a country will say “Um, get someone else.”

            That can only happen in disciplines in which a country has more than one entrant in the “main” part of the competition. But Canada, the U.S. (in dance) and Japan will certainly have multiple entries in at least one category in Sochi. If there’s only one entry that person or team must skate. But the International Skating Union has yet to announce how it plans to handle skaters who refuse to skate in the team event.

            The ISU people were saying this morning that a shift in thinking is on the horizon in many aspects of skating, and the team event is one of those aspects. That shift will involve moving from concentrating strictly on individual (or couples’) success to accommodating a team mentality. It will take time to sell, and even after it’s sold, there will always be controversy. Especially with the event held first.

At the moment the team medals have no palpable importance attached to them, because the event has never been held at a real world championship (there’s an  event like it in Japan each year), but if gymnastics is any indicator, it will become important very, very soon, especially to the governing body in each nation.

            Canadian officials have already discussed the concept with their athletes, but we still predict this: the team event will create more news, most of it controversial, in the opening week of the Games than anyone expects.

            And that might actually be good for the sport. Controversy is always better than apathy.

Virtue and Moir have rare home ice advantage

LONDON

 

This week, London is the Lions’ Den and Meryl Davis and Charlie White are not the lions.

            It’s rare—especially in the post-war era---for a figure skater to have a home-court advantage at the world championships, but that’s exactly what Davis and White’s career-long rivals have at the Budweiser Gardens (What, John Labatt Centre too Canuck for you, Anheuser-Busch?).

            Tessa Virtue is from London, and owns a house not far from the Knights’ home rink which has turned into a huge welcome mat for her and her partner Scott Moir, who’s from nearby Ilderton, the first farm town northwest of London.

            There have been few medal favourites who have ever competed at the Worlds in their home town. Russia, for instance, rarely staged the Worlds in the Communist era, so Moscovite Irina Slutskaya’s victory in Moscow eight years ago was the first time a hometown skater had won there.

            Virtue and Moir have competed here before at the national championships and know the city like the back of their hands. While they really want to make sure they meet and greet all the familiar faces, they almost have to cocoon themselves from the pressure at times.

            Davis and White train with Virtue and Moir in Canton, Michigan and have for several years. In a way, they all grew up together and have spent a lot of time socializing. While the American champions hold the edge this year, and beat the Canadians for the world title two years ago, Virtue and Moir won the 2010 Olympics, the world championship a month later, and last year’s world championship.

            Less than a year from now the Canadians will retire from Olympic skating ranks and they were mentioning this week that they already can see the end of that tunnel and it makes them a little wistful.

            But there’s lots of important stuff before then, including Thursday’s Short Dance here and Saturday’s freedance final. Both want to go into the Olympics, obviously, as world champion.

            With that on the line, you’d assume Davis and White wouldn’t get a warm reception here. But this is skating, and this is Canada, and Canadian audiences are notorious worldwide for their acceptance of even the most dangerous threats to Canadian medal hopes, and these are Americans are very dangerous threats. But they’ve been welcomed, and cheered, at practice sessions.

            “We’re very comfortable,” Davis told the London Free Press’ fine sportswriter Ryan Pyette earlier this week. “The crowd has been so welcoming and friendly. We’ve skated in Canada many times and have always been received warmly.”

            Warmly is the word. But Virtue and Moir will be received hotly.

A Shout-out to Pre

    As part of a CFL notebook in Wednesday's Spectator, we note that Noel Prefontaine's release from the Argos got short shrift in the avalanche of attention afforded Kent Austin's re-arrival in Canada.

    Hopefully Pre gets another fulltime gig n the league, although that's not a gimmee despite his Canadian passport. He's in his late '30s and teams like to be established for the longterm at the kicking positions. But there's always some flex in the CFL punting/kicking pool and Prefontaine could easily be someone's shorter-term answer, even if it's not from the start of the season.

    Pre kicked seven times in the Grey Cup for more than a 44-yard average, and those kicks were important.

    Although in his teenaged years he was a Californian and a quarterback, Prefontaine has embraced the country which is responsible for part of his ancestry. He's been a great salesman for his league and his team, and a constant in the  Argo-Ticat rivalry over 10 of the past dozen years.

    We write it in The Spec at least once a year, and we'll do it again. The most valuable player on the Argos so far in the 21st Century is Noel Prefontaine.

Ta-ta London, and ta

Almost completely out of words except for the favourite one of old-time journalists:

Thirty.

That (30) was what was typed at the end of a reporter’s copy when it was handed in to the typesetter and meant: Done.. (Lots of concepts in that little explanation which will perplex anyone under 40.)

London 2012 was great, but plenty long enough thanks. And, knock on wood, (that’s a sports writer tapping his weary head) we get out of here without the slightest scent of any trouble. You felt safe here and you felt welcome, and those two aren’t always co-habitants.

There’s usually a bittersweet echo on the last day of the Games,and you can hear it today: the sound of intense, but short-term, concerns, geographical familiarity, relationships, all kinds of things, winding down.

Hopefully a year from now, a generation from now, Britons will still feel that it was worth it. I think they will. This city fell in love with itself again and the country fell in love with its capital again, when there was so recently so much self-loathing. There is a physical legacy in the city’s east end that will be a constant reminder of what can happen when all the cricketers are dressed in the same whites.

And the beauty of these Games was the way they radiated: the astounding soccer and sailing and other sports contested far away from London. And most beautifully, most uniquely, in an oh-so-provincial way: the painting of one Royal Mail box gold in the town or borough or village from whence the gold-medal-winning athlete came. This is a country that believes in roots, sometimes smotheringingly, but this time touchingly.

A nation that’s re-found its pride should try really hard to keep it intact.

Sorry to give such seemingly condescending advice, being a colonial and all.

            Bye.

 

It's not marathon tradition, there's great tradition here

Writing this at 10 a.m. London time. London, England, that is. Sitting beside ancient brick buildings, just off The Mall and the finish line of the men's marathon, which isn't quite the Olympic tradition that it once was.

For one thing, it's not the last event. Men's hoops final, showcase for aka DreamTeam.5,  takes place this afternoon. For another, the marathon doesn't finish in the Olympic Stadium. Haile Gebreselassie, the great former world record holder from Ethiopia, took a run at that change in the morning rags here. He says there's nothing like coming into the packed stadium: "the best crowd I've ever seen in athletics."

It's supposed to be the hottest day of the 16 full days of competition at these Games which, combined with the cobblestone surfaces on parts of the course and several tight turns, does not bode well for a Canadian record here.

Canada has a full complement of three runners---Eric Gillis, Dylan Wykes and Hamilton's Reid Coolsaet--in this race for the first time since Atlanta---and, in reality, a great achievement for them would be for one of them to break the oldest record in Canadain track: the 2:10.08 set by Jerome Drayton way back in 1975.

Consider that Wykes, in his last chance to qualify, ran the second-fastest time in Canadian history 2:10.47 (eight seconds faster than Coolsaet's best), and that there are 33 starters in this field over 100-plus who have run under that, and you see what the Canadians are up against here.

With the heat, the cobblestone and the corners, it'll be tough for any of the trio to better Drayton. But that doesn't mean this isn't a big day for Canada. The country hasn't qualified a single men's marathoner since 2000 and this time there are three. And they're three men who've helped change the way elite runners are approaching their sport in Canada. These guys, and their compadres, are back to the power mileage of the 70s--Drayton's era---turning in 240 km or so a week. People like Adam van Koeverden are in awe, and people like Simon Whitfield spent a lot of time with them this year, to soak up the same kind of pace-setting.

There's something about a lengthy race in England--home of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner---that stirs the blood and the inherited memory.  Buckingham Palace, Westminster Bridge, and The Mall. Sure they're using the building to get the Opening Ceremonies ready but with this kind of setting downtown, it's no wonder they're not running into the stadium to end it all.

 

 

And a discipline which had no Canadian entries at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics suddenly had the full allowable complement for the first time in 16 years. (No Canadian women made the female qualifying standard for London).

The First Games without Randy

Everyone, from the highest Games official to the lowest ink-stained wretch, is spectacularly bushed by the final weekend of any Olympics, and fatigue is always a great catalyst of excess emotion.

But you could have been a poisonous cynic, in the best shape of your life, with a clear mind and coming off 10 straight days of sleep and something, somewhere inside of you, would still have broken  at Canada House this morning.

The Canadian Olympic Committee did a good thing, the right thing, and held a breakfast in honour of the Toronto Star's Randy Starkman, with his daughter and brother as special guests. Olympic athletes past and present, reporters,family, media attaches, COC members and employees---friends one and all of the man who covered nearly 30 years of amateur sport in this country until he died unexpectedly this spring--almost all of whom had been at his funeral gathered to give Starks a second send-off and, in some ways, a more specific one. This was his second home, The Olympic Games, and it was our first one without him.  

We were all given tee-shirts by the Starkman family, with a cartoon  of smiling Randy on the front and a classic photo of pensive Randy on the back. Their touching way of saying thanks, for us saying thanks.  His brother and daughter alternated reading lines of a poem they wrote together and it had us alternately giggling and fighting tears. It was classically simple and rhythmic and sooooo Starks.

COC boss Marcel Aubut spoke touchingly and uncharacteristically briefly, chef de mission and Olympic gold medallist Mark Tewksbury spoke from the heart via video because he was with the athletes in the sphere of play where, a COC rep said, "Randy would want him to be" and there was a stunning video featuring many clips of Randy at work at the Games, his distinct  voice modulations coming back at us all, sometimes too clearly to bear. 

And Marnie McBean spoke for all the athletes, then and now, when she said that Randy covered not only the Canadian athletes' big moments, but their little ones. "He got it," she said, and went on to sum  it up perfectly: "He covered us when we were nothing, until we became something."

Marnie had barely begun her memorial when she started to cry. Thinking, as ever, on her feet she  said, "and if you're not crying too, I'm not doing my job."

She did her job.

 

The morning after the night before

    It was a late night for the new heroines of Canadian sport.

    After winning the bronze medal in an improbable---a woefully insufficient adjective---1-0 victory over the French (who actually could have been in the gold medal game and came home with only tears and an uncertain coaching future), the Canadians went to Wembley for the US-Japan final and to receive the bronze medals which felt like gold, moved their belongings into the Athletes Village, and did media interviews until after 4 in the morning. And some of them had to be back for more press probing at 11:30 this morning.

One of the things that we got into a small discussion about, with head coach John Herdman---who could use this as a resume to get any job, in any field, in any corporation in Canada right now---was that final goal by Oakville's Diana Matheson, an inspiration for the Potential of the Petite, everywhere.

    What remains front of mind are several things, including the sudden, almost-bizarre, realization that she was all alone in front of the gaping net with the future of Canadian soccer on her feet, the sure steer-in and most of all, much larger teammate Rhian Wilkinson excitedly flinging Matheson over her shoulder like a sack of very light potatoes.  I will replay the mental image of that for a long, long time.

    In the excitement of the moment, we probably lost something else: the 15 seconds in which Matheson completely defined all the roles of midfielder, which demands more all-round skills than any other position.

The French had this game into extra time, with the ball in their possession and a clearing kick on the way. And with Canada dead in the water, physically and emotionally had they not scored,  extra time would probably have given the French the goal which somehow the soccer Gods had kept from them in the shooting-gallery that was the second half.

But as the French player tried to clear the ball, Matheson blocked it (defence), which resulted in the ball going to a teammate (passing), then circled into open space to her right (game sense) to put her into position to take advantage of a bad bounce and drive home the winner (scoring).

"That was the power of not wanting to go into extra time driving her," Herdman quipped. "She’s a phenomenal player."

Herdman said that in the short time the team had from official duties they'd watched not only the final goal on replay, but lots of other details of the game.

 "We watched Desi's (Desiree Scott's)  clearing of the ball on the line, Erin's (McLeod) save," He said. "There's just so many little features of that game. Watching Sinky (Christine Sinclair) almost out of gas and then lifting up for the final goal."

Here's guessing they'll all watch it again and again and again, the rest of their lives.