Manitoba’s sweet 16

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/07/2015 (3921 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The thing cost $2.5 billion and traffic is already a mess, but what that will bring Toronto is nothing short of the biggest Canadian athletic effort ever seen.

When the 2015 Pan Am Games kicks off Friday night, a battalion of 722 Canadian athletes will march into Rogers Centre for the opening ceremony. It is the largest contingent ever to wear the maple leaf at a multi-sport games, surpassing even the dominant United States, which sent about 625 competitors to Toronto.

Canadian talent is everywhere at these Games, with at least one in each of the 36 sports on the program. Fifty will race and throw and leap in athletic disciplines; on the flipside, Saskatchewan’s Rusty Malinoski, the 2008 wakeboarding world champion, will be the lone Canuck in his competition.

Quantity isn’t everything, though. This could be, media reports beamed this week, one of the stronger collections of Canadian athletes yet assembled. National sport officials are hungry to finish second in the medal haul, a feat not seen since 1967 in Winnipeg, when there were half as many athletes and sports.

Last time around, at the 2011 Pan Ams in Guadalajara, Mexico, an October start meant Canada fielded a more developmental group that finished fifth in medal standings. On home soil, the nation will be led by well-known names such as four-time Olympic paddling medalist Adam van Koeverden, who was lured home for his Pan Am debut, and the star-studded diving crew of Roseline Filion, Jennifer Abel, Meaghan Benfeito and Pamela Ware.

For the most part, in other words, the stars of Canadian summer sport are coming out to play. So, what’s Manitoba’s share of these Games?

While Canada’s delegation swelled for Toronto, the number of Manitobans remained stagnant. Sixteen Manitobans will compete at these Pan Ams, about 2.2 per cent of the total and a third less than Manitoba’s ideal proportional share would be.

That figure is nearly identical to 2011, when 17 Manitobans competed in Guadalajara, about 3.5 per cent of the 492 Canadian athletes at those Games; and similar to 2007, when 15 Manitobans joined a 495-strong Canadian brigade at the 2007 Pan Ams in Rio de Janeiro.

If those consistent figures mean anything, it’s hard to say. The numbers are small enough that individual moves can swing it either way. For instance, Winnipeg cyclist Leah Kirchmann is skipping Toronto to gear up for the elite La Course, the Tour de France women’s event in which she finished third last year.

Sport development is also cyclical — and at the highest levels of Canadian sport organization, sheer volume of athletes is secondary to winning.

“Home games are always really tricky,” said Jeff Powell, director of the Canadian Sport Centre Manitoba. “There are some different qualification rules. Certainly we would want, in a perfect world, to be growing the share of the population… but to the extent that we’re talking about those that will be shooting for international medals, that expansion of 200 athletes, an organization like Own The Podium will be less fussed about that.”

No doubt, the Manitobans on Team Canada include accomplished names and promising young competitors, from breakout Brandon gymnast Isabela Onyshko to 38-year-old racquetball icon Jennifer Saunders, who is making her third Pan Am run. Water polo standout Shae Fournier will be gunning to help Canada continue its Pan Am medal tradition, and Dauphin’s Tabi Love will lead the Canadian women’s volleyball team.

Manitoba has always churned out volleyball stars. The national women’s team trains here, and nearly a third of Manitoba’s 2015 Pan Am athletes play that sport — though interestingly, only former University of Manitoba Bison and beach star Taylor Pischke is from Winnipeg. Volleyball is strong, outside the Perimeter.

So athletes from across the province will be seen at these Pan Ams. Still, it feels as if their numbers are just a little thin. As if, in this unprecedented Canadian sporting effort, Manitoba should have a little more to give — especially since the province is just 16 years out from its own Games.

In the fading days of August 1999, Winnipeg was recovering from Pan Am fever. Those Games were widely considered a success, rocking with sold-out events and a frenzy of fan interest, including for sports of which most Winnipeggers were only glancingly aware. (At the time, handball organizers told the Free Press while fans who packed their events didn’t seem to know the rules, they were nonetheless “pumped.”)

Boosted by looser home-qualification rules, locals were everywhere at those Games. Of the 5,000 athletes who converged on Winnipeg that summer, 58 were already at home, and about half of those captured a medal. Olympic cyclist Tanya Dubnicoff blazed to two golds on home turf, to seal the surging buzz.

Those Games were supposed to leave a legacy in three forms: facilities, people and participation. On the infrastructure end, the benefits are still evident. The ’99 Pan Ams footed most of the bill for the $8.2-million Investors Group Athletic Centre at the U of M, a sorely-needed venue which remains in heavy use today.

The Games also invested $800,000 into what is now Shaw Park, and upgraded the Winnipeg Soccer Complex and the aging Pan Am Pool, among other spots.

People too came through, to pull the whole thing off. In 1999, Jeff Hnatiuk was director of Sport Manitoba, at the centre of the Pan Am storm; he was recently seconded to spearhead the 2017 Canada Games effort in Winnipeg. He still sees how those Pan Ams raised Manitoba’s capacity to organize big events, still stops to chat with Winnipeggers he sees walking around in ’99’s salmon-coloured volunteer shirts.

“That was a huge, huge benefit of hosting a major games,” Hnatiuk said. “The feel was so good. You can still talk to people to this day… We’re talking about people getting involved to help the Canada Games, and people are going ‘sure,’ because they enjoyed their experience. It’s very hard to measure that.”

Then there’s this: in the days after the ’99 Pan Ams, local sport organizations were bursting with optimism. Many were fielding a surge of calls from curious new participants. Smaller sports in particular, such as field hockey, told reporters they hoped the Pan Am fever would heat up their support.

“The greater legacy may not be the crowds, but people getting into these sports long after the Games have ended,” Pan Am Games vice-president Mike Moore told the Free Press in August of that year. “I’ll bet now baseball participation will skyrocket because of the Pan Ams.”

Some sports did see a spike, but it was not always sustainable: field hockey no longer has an officially recognized provincial sport organization. For others, though, the Games did prove a longer boon. “I think you’re right that every sport comes out of those Games thinking this is going to be a big turnaround for them,” Powell said. “There will be some for whom it would be pretty challenging to trace a long-lasting benefit of any kind.

“But my background is rowing, and there’s been a Manitoban on every rowing team at the Olympics since ’99, in part because there was an equipment legacy left to Manitobans. I think that rowing would be one where you could point to a fairly directly link, and a longer-term positive impact.”

Now, Powell is in the position of trying to manage one of the Games’ centerpiece legacies. The ’99 Pan Ams turned a profit, which allowed it to invest millions in an endowment for the Canadian Sport Centre Manitoba, which helps with training and support for local athletes pushing into international competition.

Of the athletes competing in Toronto this month, the CSCM has worked with most of them, including Onyshko and rising triathlete Tyler Mislawchuk.

Still, times have changed. Today, just over a year after Powell was hired as its new executive director, the CSCM is looking to refocus its mission

“In its infancy, it was really trying to find its way,” he said. “We are finding that we have to rework our involvement a little bit. We have begun to get a little bit broad for the funding we receive. What was a wonderful endowment in ’99 is still wonderful, but it doesn’t go quite as far as it used to. There are things we can do better still to really help these Manitobans to succeed.”

For instance, Powell said, the next step for Manitoba — and Canadian sport in general — involves not only better training facilities, but building a more sustainable model, one that isn’t pronePo to ebbing and flowing waves of sponsorships and government funding.

And while the number and proportion of Manitoban athletes at these Pan Ams may or may not mean anything concrete about the strength of Manitoba’s high-performance pipelines, Powell already knows that there is more work to be done.

“If I were being very honest, I would not say it’s not where I want it to be,” Powell said. “It’s in a period where we really need to consider if it’s what we want for our highest of high-performance athletes, and whether the cultural and social significance of Manitobans representing their country internationally has value to us here.

“If we decide it does, there’s a number of initiatives we could do and really be quite good at.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Manitoban Athletes at the 2015 Pan Am Games

Jason Lyon (archery): Competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and finished fifth overall at 2011’s world championships, the best performance by a Canadian recurve archer in decades.

Isabela Onyshko (artistic gymnastics): The Brandon gymnast is the reigning floor and bars national champion and all-around silver medalist, with some big international wins this season.

Nicole Sifuentes (athletics): Middle-distance runner made it to an Olympic semifinal in London, and recently won Canadian championship gold in the 1,500- and 5,000-metre lengths.

Erin Teschuk (athletics): University of North Dakota runner won gold and set a new meet record in the 3,000-metre steeplechase at 2015 Canadian championships.

Taylor Pischke (beach volleyball): The 22-year-old former U of M Bison star and her partner, Melissa Humana-Paredes, are making a real Olympic push earlier than many predicted.

Jennifer Saunders (racquetball): The third and possibly final Pan Am visit for the Thompson product and decorated racquetball legend, who has 11 world championship medals.

Monica Fyfe (shooting): Already on her third Pan Am games at just 24, the shooter has won five national titles and finished seventh at the Pan Ams in 2007.

Chantal Van Landeghem (swimming): Winnipegger, NCAA standout and Canadian record-holder has been training in Ontario, aiming for the 2016 Olympics.

Tyler Mislawchuk (triathlon): At 20 years old, is already in his third year with the national team and was recently the highest-ranked Canadian at an elite event in London.

Lisa Barclay (volleyball): Brandon hitter was one of the best CIS players in the nation during her time with UBC, though injuries hampered her senior season in 2014-15.

Tabitha Love (volleyball): Dauphin product is the only Manitoba woman ever to win an NCAA volleyball championship, and will lead the national team.

Toon Van Lankvelt (volleyball): Senior national team regular and the pride of Rivers, is a key contributor on a strong men’s side that recently won its first NORCECA Cup.

Dustin Schneider (volleyball): Brandon setter is a sparkplug for the men’s national team, many times anointed with tournament awards.

Shae Fournier (water polo): Led the national junior team to golds at the 2008 and 2010 Pan Am juniors, now an NCAA standout in her second year of senior play.

Marie Josee Aires Pilon (weightlifting): Recently named Canada’s top female weightlifter, coming off a bronze-medal finish at the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Daryl Conrad (weightlifting): The reigning national champion in the 77 kg weight category, finished seventh overall at the Commonwealth Games last year.