Penny Oleksiak, Maggie Mac Neil … Long list of female Canadian medallists at Tokyo Olympics tells girls ‘anything is possible’

Opinion

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This article was published 28/07/2021 (1506 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TOKYO—It’s not that we do this every Olympics; it just feels like we do this every Olympics, or at least the summer ones. For the second straight Summer Games, Canada’s women are carrying the load. They’re the stars.

Five days into the Tokyo Games, Canada had nine medals — 10 after rowers Caileigh Filmer and Hillary Janssens added a bronze Thursday morning — and all had been won by women. That’s pretty good, though in Rio, Canada’s first 12 medals were won by women before Andre De Grasse’s bronze in the men’s 100-metre dash on Day 9. We’re only through Day 5 here.

But it has already become a notable outlier, again. As in Rio, the swim team and Penny Oleksiak are leading the way in the first week: Maggie Mac Neil, (gold, 100-metre butterfly), Kylie Masse (silver, 100-metre backstroke), the women’s 4×100 freestyle team. (Oleksiak, MacNeil, Rebecca Smith and Kayla Sanchez, silver), and Oleksiak’s bronze in the 200-metre freestyle to become Canada’s most decorated Summer Olympian at age 21.

The men’s 4×100 relay team finished fourth, and these things can move in cycles. But Canada’s 14-year-old Summer McIntosh finished fourth in the women’s 400-metre freestyle, too. Right now, the women rule, and stick together.

“I don’t think I would be as happy as I am if I didn’t have those girls to train with, because they seriously pushed me in and out of the pool, and they’re the nicest girls ever,” Oleksiak said back at the Canadian trials in June.

“They are all very open about things they struggle with. They come into the pool every day, they’re smiling, they’re ready to go. And I think just having that atmosphere and having these specific girls, I honestly would not want to train with anyone else.”

But it’s been all across the board. Jennifer Abel and Mélissa Citrini-Beaulieu won silver in three-metre synchronized diving. Canada has won 14 diving medals since 2000, and all but two — Alexandre Despatie’s silvers in 2004 and 2008 — came from women. Canada had never won a medal in women’s judo, but this was their moment: Jessica Klimkait won a bronze, and a day later Catherine Beauchemin-Pinard won a second. And Canada had a judoka, Christa Deguchi, who was ranked above Klimkait before the world championships decided which one would come here.

Canada’s women’s softball team won its first medal in the sport, after years in the wilderness. (And Canada’s women’s basketball and soccer teams remain alive.) Maude Charron won Canada’s first weightlifting gold, in the 64-kilogram class, since Christine Girard’s delayed gold at London 2012 in the same women’s category. One, in that case, helped inspire the other.

Nobody should make a Ladies First reference here. It’s just assumed, at this point.

“I think as a nation we have a number of tremendous female role models — not just in sports, but in so many other parts of our society,” said Anne Merklinger, the CEO of Own The Podium, which helps fund Canada’s athletes.

“For sports, it’s been as long as I can remember that we’ve had very successful female and male Olympic and Paralympic athletes.”

She listed a few:

• Carla Qualtrough (former Paralympian and current minister of employment, workforce development and disability inclusion)

• Chantal Petitclerc (21-time Paralympic medallist and current senator)

• Cindy Klassen (speedskater)

• Clara Hughes (speedskater and cyclist)

• Susan Auch (speedskater)

“I think it perpetuates a belief in young Canadian girls and women that anything is possible. I think it just becomes a part of the fabric of the sport,” Merklinger said. “We’re pretty deep in our country as far as accomplished female athletes.”

Indeed, it’s probably not an accident that Canada’s three most decorated Olympians ever are Oleksiak, Hughes and Klassen, each with six career medals.

Across the Games, this is a more progressive and equal Olympics than we have seen. The Olympic Broadcasting Service has decided it will spend less time leering at female athletes, though that wasn’t quite the wording they used. German gymnasts insisted on wearing unitards that extended to their ankles.

Tokyo also features better gender equity with new women’s events in canoe, sprint canoe, canoe slalom — Canada is a big fan of the canoe sports, for semi-obvious reasons — for the first time, along with the first women’s 1,500 freestyle swim. Canada has long been an advocate for the inclusion of female events and better gender equity.

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There are still arguments over depth of field in men’s and women’s sports, and Canada clearly funds its female athletes. But Merklinger also points out that when the Own The Podium program was created in advance of the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, it wasn’t based on gender equity or spreading the money out as wide as possible. It was about who could win. More women won gender-specific medals in Vancouver (14) than men, with 11.

“It’s about evidence of medal potential, or not. It was very objective,” said Merklinger, who was a national team swimmer and accomplished curler who won the 1990 Tournament of Hearts. “Men, women, Olympic, Paralympic, summer, winter.

“So there’s no emphasis on one gender more than another, but what we see is like where you have what happened in Rio, where you had a tremendous performance from the female swimmers (and) four to eight years later you’d see the impact of that performance on the depth of the athlete pool. So it’s a domino effect.”

And that may be what happens next. These Games aren’t easy to watch back home, but Rio’s weren’t, and maybe this helps sustain and expand Canada’s self-perpetuating sporting motion machine: the inspiration that people like Cindy Klassen and Clara Hughes and Beckie Scott provided, pushed forward to Penny Oleksiak and Maggie Mac Neil and Maude Charron, spinning out into the future for girls who see women who are strong, successful, independent, powerful and brave, and want to be like that. See you there.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur