Sport Shorts: Whitfield Leads Canada Into Triathlon World Championships
Watch for Whitfield: This week the world’s best triathletes will gather on the Gold Coast of Australia. Among them is Victoria’s Simon Whitfield, winner of Olympic gold and silver medals this decade. He will be joined by a cast of Canada’s best in triathlon: Brent McMahon (Victoria), Paul Tichelaar (Edmonton), Kyle Jones (Oakville, Ont.), Kirsten Sweetland (Victoria), Lauren Groves (Vancouver) and Kathy Tremblay (Montreal). You can watch them all yourself on CBC (check local listings). It runs Sept. 9 to 13.
On a separate triathlon note, Carol Montgomery (North Vancouver) became the sixth athlete inducted in the Triathlon Canada Hall of Fame at a ceremony last month. Montgomery’s career includes an amazing 15 World Cup wins, three medals at World Championships, gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games and bronze at the 1999 Pan Am Games. She was an Olympian in 2000 and 2004.
Acquiring Track Hardware: Two of Canada’s best track athletes came through at the Van Damme Memorial athletics event, part of the Golden League circuit. Priscilla Lopes-Schliep (Whitby, Ont.) won the silver medal in 100-metre hurdles. Despite damp, cold conditions, she ran the fastest time of her career, 12.49 seconds. Then, teammate Gary Reed raced the 800 metres in bronze medal time of 1:46.82, one second from gold.
Underdog Hoopsters Pull it Off: Canada’s young national basketball team has earned its first trip to the World Championships since 2002. On Sept. 4, they defeated the Dominican Republic in the quarterfinal of the men’s FIBA Americas Championship. This earned them a ticket to the 2010 worlds. Canada wound up fourth place after losing to Argentina in the bronze medal game. Fourth place certainly beat expectations and helped the team reach a very significant goal that will play out next year when they share the court with the world’s best teams.
Hockey Completes 2010 Sport Events: The final test of Vancouver’s Olympic venues ended as the U.S. beat Canada 2-1 at GM Place in the gold medal game of the Hockey Canada Cup. The U.S. is ranked No. 1 in the world, though Canada has won gold at the last two Olympic Winter Games. Each venue in Vancouver, Whistler and Richmond were “tested” with major international competitions, most of which occurred in January and February 2009. VANOC has leveraged these “sport events” to test its Games-time operations, in terms of volunteers, field of play, press operations, timing-results-scoring and anti-doping measures. During the Games, GM Place will be known as Canada Hockey Place.
2014 Youth Olympic Games: The International Olympic Committee announced Guadalajara (Mexico), Nankin (China) and Poznan (Poland) as candidates to host the 2014 Youth Olympic Games. The IOC will announce the winning bid at the 122nd Session in Vancouver next February. The first edition of the Youth Olympic Games will be held in Singapore next August.
