Dylan Armstrong and Jessica Zelinka headline the 40-member squad named Sunday, the morning after a stunning women’s 100-metre hurdles final saw Olympic bronze medallist Priscilla Lopes-Schliep’s London dreams dashed.
Canada has only once fielded a larger track and field team, for the 1984 Los Angeles Games, which were boycotted by 14 Eastern Bloc countries. The team is also one of the youngest ever, with just seven athletes with Olympic experience.
“That’s pretty crazy seeing the team up there getting their jackets. I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to learn some new names’ because there’s a lot of great new talent on the team,” said Zelinka. “But also it’s missing a lot of great veterans who have represented Canada in the past that I’m used to being around. So it was a bit empty without some of them for sure.”
Triple gold medallist Michelle Stilwell and five-time medallist Diane Roy will lead the 20-member Paralympic team.
Canada has targeted three medals in London and six to eight top-eight finishes.
The 30-year-old Zelinka, from London, Ont., will be one of Canada’s top hopes, coming off a stunning performance at the Olympic track and field trials that saw her win the heptathlon in a Canadian-record performance and then capture the hurdles title in a career-best time.
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Zelinka beat a world-class field including Lopes-Schliep, whose bronze was Canada’s only track and field medal four years ago in Beijing, and former world champion Perdita Felicien. Lopes-Schliep crashed into the seventh hurdle in the final and finished fifth, while Felicien was disqualified for a false start.
“Certainly Priscilla Lopes-Schliep and Perdita Felicien have the credentials to hit the podium — they’ve done it at world championships, and Priscilla has done it at the Olympic Games,” said Athletics Canada head coach Alex Gardiner. “Certainly that was a bit disappointing, no doubt, but we’re going to see them back I think.
“Most importantly the three women in the event — Jessica Zelinka, Nikkita Holder and Phylicia George — also have the credentials to get to the podium.”
The squad is one of Canada’s most diverse ever. Emerging star Cam Levins of Black Creek, B.C., who will run both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres, leads a large contingent of distance runners that includes three marathoners: Dylan Wykes, Reid Coolsaet and Eric Gillis.
Armstrong, the shot put world silver medallist from Kamloops, B.C., leads Canada’s largest group of throwers ever.
“Hands down (it’s the largest),” said hammer thrower James Steacy of Lethbridge, B.C. “It’s definitely growing, and it’s only going to get bigger from here.”
Steacy’s sister Heather will compete in the women’s hammer throw in London. Brothers Justyn and Ian Warner of Markham, Ont., are both London-bound, Justyn in the 100 metres and 4x100 relay, and Warner in the relay.
“I’m really happy, and to be able to go with my older brother, it’s my first Olympics and we’re doing it together . . . It doesn’t get more golden than that,” said Ian Warner.
Armstrong is gunning for Canada’s first Olympic throwing medal, after missing the podium by less than a centimetre in Beijing.
“It would be nice to get one in the books. That would just be an awesome, awesome achievement,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong, Zelinka, James Steacy, Gillis, sprinter Jared Connaughton, Nathan Brannen (1,500 metres), and Mike Mason (high jump) are the only team members with Olympic experience.
“It’s a great thing — up-and-coming athletes. We’re getting better, we’re getting stronger. Hopefully we can get that top-12 as one of the goals and get a couple more medals than the one we had in Beijing, and make a name for Canada and represent our country,” said Justyn Warner, 25.
Mark Tewksbury, Canada’s chef de mission for London, pulled the veterans aside Sunday morning at the team announcement at the University of Calgary.
“I told them: Please make sure you set the stage and let this team know what to expect going into London, because it’s so different than a world championships,” said Tewksbury, an Olympic champion in swimming.
Tewksbury was at Foothills Athletic Park on Saturday to watch the final dramatic day of competition unfold.
“Athletics is like swimming. It’s that head-to-head competition where it’s all on the line, it’s over really quickly, but those seconds that it’s happening are excruciating to watch because you never know what’s going to happen,” Tewksbury said. “As usual, lots of upsets, lots of surprises, some spectacular performances, some disappointments, and you’re reminded why we love sports so much. It’s that duality that really connects our humanity.”
The track and field team will hold a training camp in Germany and then travel to London in waves.
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CALGARY—Perdita Felicien waited most of eight years for Saturday afternoon. Priscilla Lopes-Schliep had been on a remarkable comeback trail for most of nine months.
But in a calamitous conclusion to the Canadian Olympic track and field trials, neither of the GTA’s star hurdlers earned a long-awaited ticket to the 2012 London Games. On a day when Calgary-based Jessica Zelinka announced herself as Canada’s best female athlete, winning the highly anticipated 100-metre hurdles some 48 hours after breaking her own Canadian record in heptathlon, Felicien and Lopes-Schliep suffered the bitter disappointment of falling short of their five-ringed goal.
Pickering’s Felicien, the 2003 world champion, ran the race under protest after being flagged for a false start. And though she crossed the line third — a top-three result would have earned her an Olympic berth — her protest, based on her contention that she was distracted by noise in the starting blocks, was denied and she was disqualified.
Whitby’s Lopes-Schliep, the 2008 Olympic bronze medallist, had her dream of a return trip to the Games waylaid when she hit a hurdle and nearly veered out of her lane. Making a return to competition after giving birth to daughter Nataliya in September, she chalked up her fifth-place finish to the breaks of an unforgiving game.
“Darn hurdle seven,” Lopes-Schliep said with a laugh.
London-bound are Markham’s Phylicia George, who finished second, and Pickering’s Nikkita Holder, who moved up to third with Felicien’s disqualification.
The women’s 100-metre hurdles was by far the most talent-packed event of the trials. While most Canadian athletes who had previously achieved the Olympic qualifying standard spent the week cake-walking to the top-three finish required to get to London, a record six Canadian hurdlers had met the required standard. Only three could run for Canada in the Olympiad.
“It’s going to be heartbreaking as hell,” Alex Gardiner, the head coach of Canada’s Olympic track and field team, had said before the event.
Even Gardiner couldn’t have envisioned Saturday’s gut-wrenching goings-on.
First came Felicien’s misstep out of the starting blocks, which she chalked up to the distracting noise that accompanied those tension-filled moments before the gun. The 10-time national titleist in the event, Felicien has weathered her share of heartbreak. She fell at the first hurdle at the 2004 Athens Olympics as gold-medal favourite, and missed the 2008 Olympics with an injury. Her eight-year odyssey to find her way back to the five-ringed festival at age 31 was undone in a cruel instant.
“You never see yourself false-starting, so honestly to feel that happen to me was devastating, quite honestly,” Felicien said. “I also feel like the starter didn’t have a great control of the race in the sense of telling the crowd to be quiet, listening for when people were clapping . . . Unfortunately it’s a race of nerves, it’s a race of milliseconds, and breaths and heartbeats. One person laughs, one person coughs, one person’s clapping, or cheering for somebody else at the wrong moment, it sets you off. It’s like you’re on a gun ready to be cocked and let go, and I got the short end of the stick today. No excuses, my fault.”
Lopes-Schliep made no excuse for her performance. She chalked it up to fate, but said she would “definitely” consider appealing to be named to the team on the basis of her previous body of work, which includes a silver medal at the 2009 world championship.
“We’ll see how it goes. It should be interesting,” Lopes-Schliep said. “I know that I am potentially qualifying for a medal spot. I’m a very serious competitor, very determined. We’ll see what the future holds.”
For at least a moment on Saturday, Zelinka considered the possibility of forfeiting her Olympic berth in the hurdles to concentrate solely on her effort in the heptathlon, wherein she hopes to be a medal contender. Zelinka’s coach, Les Gramantik, said emotions came into her decision. If Zelinka forewent hurdles, her longtime friend Angela Whyte, who finished fourth, could have been named to the Olympic team.
“I’m torn,” Zelinka said after the race. “This is a horrible situation. There was no good outcome really.”
In the end, though — after Zelinka took time to frolic on the track with her 3-year-old daughter Annika — Gramantik said Zelinka had opted to run both events in London.
“If she would have struggled with a (time of) 12.99, third place, I would say, ‘Jess, let’s not worry about it.’ But in reality she showed superiority here . . . against the best, or some of the best, in the world. Because this is a very, very good field.”
Zelinka’s winning time of 12.68 seconds wasn’t the fastest by a Canadian this year. Lopes-Schliep ran a 12.64 in May that, according to the international governing body’s website, is the ninth-fastest time in the world in 2012. Even Gramantik acknowledged Saturday’s events weren’t exactly a boon to Canada’s Olympic medal hopes in by far its deepest event.
“(Zelinka) is not going to win a medal in 100-metre hurdles,” Gramantik said, and then he caught himself. “Well, maybe. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope. I was wrong twice. I was married twice.”
Gramantik laughed at his own joke. For Felicien, it was difficult to see the humour in the moment. After waiting about 45 minutes to find out a jury had overturned her protest, she smiled bravely as she answered questions from reporters. It started to rain, then the sun brought a rainbow. But there’d be no precious metal at the end of her horizon.
“I’ve never imagined not being at the London Games. It’s been eight long years to get back to the Olympics,” Felicien said. “But for me, not to sound like a fairytale, I don’t just define myself (by) what happens at the track. I hold my head up high. I represent my country with pride in what I do . . . It’s extremely disappointing, because it’s a fate that I held in my hand, I held in my own control. It’s not like somebody else did it to me. What’s next? I don’t know . . . (I’ll) just go home and sleep and see what happens tomorrow.”
CALGARY—Jessica Zelinka made the decision to return to the track after becoming a mom knowing she had the ability to both break her Canadian record and win a medal at the London Olympics.
One down, one to go.
The 30-year-old from London, Ont., lowered her national heptathlon record Thursday en route to winning the Canadian Olympic track and field trials for her seventh national title.
Zelinka posted 6,599 points — the third-best score in the world this year — to better her previous Canadian record of 6,490, set while finishing fifth in the gruelling seven-discipline event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“I don’t think it’s quite sunken in,” Zelinka said, still out of breath moments after winning the final event — the 800 metres. “I’ve been feeling (the record was possible) for a while . . . I guess I wasn’t ready yet until now.”
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