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Golden end to Games

But we got our butts kicked by Saskatchewan in medal count

By: Paul Wiecek

Posted: 08/30/2009 10:50 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Team Manitoba starts the celebration after defeating Ontario to win gold in women's volleyball Saturday in Charlottetown. (ANDREW VAUGHAN / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

There was good news and bad news for Team Manitoba Saturday as competition at the Canada Games in Prince Edward Island wrapped up.

The good news? The Manitoba women’s volleyball team provided a golden ending for this province, defeating Ontario 3-1 (18-25, 25-17, 25-21, 25-21) in the gold medal game to capture Manitoba its fifth gold — and 24th medal overall — on the final day of competition in P.E.I.

"That was tremendously satisfying," said Manitoba women’s volleyball coach Kevin Neufeld. "We had youth on this team on the one hand and leadership and experience on the other.

"Sometimes that’s a tough fit. But they just blended well together."

The volleyball medal helped put the Manitoba contingent within one medal of the goal organizers had set heading into the competition.
"We had hoped for 25 medals," said Ted Bigelow, chef de mission for Manitoba. "Overall, we’re quite pleased."

So what’s the bad news? Well, the bad news is that those 24 medals were exactly one-half of the 48 medals won by our sister Prairie province, Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan finished sixth in the medal standings, just one place ahead of Manitoba, but they had a lot more medals to show for it.

Now, it is one thing to get drilled in the medal standings by a population behemoth like Ontario, who won the overall competition with 202 medals.

But to get drummed by Saskatchewan, with its similar geography and demographic, raised the question Saturday: If you could do it all over again, would you do anything differently?

It was a question Bigelow has obviously already been asking himself. "I think I probably would have put more resources into the sports with individual medals," said Bigelow, "things like swimming and paddling and rowing. Because that’s where a lot of the medals go.

"I would have put not only more financial resources, but also more human resources into those sports in terms of creating a better support team. And I think that’s where we’re going to go (in the future)."

Bigelow noted that some of the best performances in P.E.I. for Manitoba were in individual sports, while many of the team sports — basketball, softball, baseball, soccer — that received a lot of the resources and recognition returned no medals.

The glaring exception, of course, was the women’s volleyballers, who were rewarded for their gold medal performance on the final day with the honour of leading the Manitoba contingent into the stadium for Saturday afternoon’s closing ceremonies.

"Winning a team medal when you’re from Manitoba is tough," said Neufeld, noting the smaller population base from which we have to draw.

Manitoba swimmer Chantal Vanlandeghem, who won five individual medals this past week — including two gold — was rewarded for her extraordinary performance by being handed the Manitoba flag to carry into the closing ceremonies.

Bigelow also pointed to the performance of our triathletes, who took down three medals in what was a new event for the Canada Games, as evidence of the wisdom of devoting more resources to individual sports.

On the other hand, there was the men’s volleyball team, who 48 hours ago looked to have legitimate gold medal aspirations — only to lose the semifinal to Ontario on Friday and then the bronze medal game to B.C. on Saturday to head home with nothing but ‘what if’s?’

Manitoba men’s volleyball coach Cam Johnson said Saturday that his squad came out flat in the bronze game, still stinging from a loss the day before.

"I don’t think we’d gotten over that game," Johnson said.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

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