Sport Performance Weekly

June 19th , 2006

Canada was best moment of Brock Miron’s life.

Standard-Freeholder (Cornwall)

With an ear-to-ear smile, Cornwall native Brock Miron made a special visit to his hometown on Saturday. Miron is one of 150 athletes chosen by the HBC Canada department store chain to receive support for his training for the next four years before the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010. A special fundraiser - Run for Canada - will be held by HBC stores on July 1. All funds will support the athletes. The local Zellers department store was selling paper cutouts to promote the upcoming fundraiser. Miron was on hand to promote the run which is taking place in 10 major cities, the closest one being in Ottawa, and he signed autographs and visited with staff at the store.

Miron, who is originally from Cornwall, but now lives and trains in Calgary, Alta., said the sport of speed skating fell into his lap when he was a teenager. “I lived in Cornwall until I was 14 years old,” Miron said. “My family moved out to Rocky Mountain House, Alta., and I took up hockey, but I liked skating much more, so I found my sport.”

Quickly excelling on the ice, Miron’s natural abilities and quick times glided him into Olympic trials last December. Making Team Canada for Miron was the best moment in his life to date.
“Obviously, when you’re training and training you have a lot of dreams to go to the Olympics,” Miron said. “But finding out that I made Team Canada, it was the biggest moment for me, it meant everything.”

Placing 29th in the 500-metre speed-skating race in Torino was a disappointment, Miron said, but he learned a lot from the Torino Olympics. “I think I was mentally not prepared and now I am in training full time and getting ready for Vancouver.”“It’s time to rock, and that will be my time in Vancouver. I am ready.”

Over the years, Miron and his family have spent a fortune to get him ice time and training, and they give a lot of thanks to HBC for their program. “Any program to support our Canadian athletes is a needed one,” said April Miron, Brock’s mother. “We were not a very wealthy family, considering all of the travelling and the training. “We have no regrets, but for a teenager who wants the dream, it’s many long hours and lot of money,” she added.

For more information, or to support the HBC Run for Canada, log onto: www.hbcrunforcanada.ca.

Swimming Canada selects Vancouver as location for its Western base National Training Center.

Ottawa, ON – Swimming Canada, in collaboration with PacificSport is excited to announce that the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver will be the setting for its Western base National Training Center. “We are thrilled to announce that the National Training Center for Western Canada will be in Vancouver” states Pierre Lafontaine, CEO of Swimming Canada.  “The dynamic environment at UBC will not only facilitate the process of building great athletes, but also great individuals.”

The Vancouver based National Training Center will offer swimmers the capability to train in an indoor 50 metre, 8 lanes pool as well as access to the outdoor pool which hosted the British Empire Games in 1954. 

Canadian Athletes attending the National Training Center will also benefit from a variety of support services such as sport science, medical support, access to one of the countries’ top Academic institution in addition to on campus accommodations.  University based athletes have the opportunity to compete within the Canadian Intra-University Sports (CIS) circuit.

“By creating the “Canada First” campaign in partnership with the CIS, our goal is to attract and keep more Canadian Athletes to our Canadian Universities” adds Lafontaine.  “The National Center in Vancouver will facilitate the day to day agenda for athletes who are also students at the University level, allowing them to reach their swimming and academic goals.  Furthermore, the center will be a great asset to our young up and comers and their personal coaches.”

Swimming Canada, the governing body for competitive Canadian swimming, will hire two high performance coaches that will oversee the National Center Training Program in Vancouver.  In addition to service the high performance athletes, the other mandate for the National Training Center will be to offer services to clubs, coaches and athletes across the country as part of a National outreach program.  The National Training Center in Vancouver will begin operation on September 1st, 2006.

Canadian fencer Sherraine Schalm-MacKay wins 2006 World Cup Circuit.

Havana, Cuba – World no.1 women’s épée fencer and author of Running with Swords, Sherraine Schalm-MacKay was one point away from winning her sixth world cup of the season before falling 15-14 to her Hungarian training partner, Emese Szasz in the final of the Havana World Cup Grand Prix today. 

With the silver medal Schalm-MacKay of Brooks, Alberta has officially won the 2006 World Cup Circuit by accumulating the most points throughout this season. ”It feels amazing to win the World Cup Circuit! I’ve had an really consistent year and this is congrats for it!  I’m so, so happy!”

This sort of success has been foreign to Canadians as Sherraine steps into unmarked territory in the fencing world medalling at 13 of the last 15 world class events she has attended. ”I came 2nd today and yet I still won the world cup!” Schalm-MacKay said with her usual witty sense of humour, “Emese fencing really well today and now I can’t wait for Worlds…only three months to go!”

Sherraine now fixes her eyes on winning gold at the 2006 World Championships in Torino this fall as she tries to better her bronze medal performance from last year. Laura Flessel-Colovic of France and Lubov Shutova were the other medal winners taking home bronze.

Other Canadian results: Julie Leprohon of Montreal finished 32nd, Toronto’s Ainsley Switzer placed 40th and Catherine Dunnette from Calgary was 60th. Schalm-MacKay, Leprohon, Dunnette and Switzer will represent Canada in the team event Sunday.

Women’s soccer gets a big assist: Private funding should help bridge gap between Canada and elite nations.
The Vancouver Sun

The Canadian women’s soccer team was on the way back to its hotel from dinner in Nanaimo this week when the vans were instructed to stop for an ice cream break. It seems hard-driving head coach Even Pellerud, who is grinding his players through a week-long training camp, recognized they needed a Dairy Queen treat.

Pellerud isn’t the team’s biggest Sugar Daddy, however. That honour goes to Vancouver Whitecaps owner Greg Kerfoot. Earlier this spring, the soccer-loving, but publicity-shy, millionaire businessman committed nearly $1 million over the next two-plus years to supplement the players’ carded-athlete funding. It will essentially allow them to become full-time soccer players.

That’s something Pellerud, a stickler for the kind of detail that can only come with practice, desperately wanted in the leadup to the 2007 World Cup—the Canadians head to CONCACAF qualifying in November—and the 2008 Olympics. “This is a significant change of direction for us,” said Pellerud. “It means the players will be able to commit much more time to soccer. It was very demanding and challenging for me to create the program big enough to compete with the bigger nations. We did that in 2003 [when Canada finished a surprising fourth in the World Cup] and we think we have the potential to do it again, but only on the condition we spend the time together. “The mentality is changing, the attitude is changing to the better. They will get fitter, be better soccer players and be able to accelerate the development we have seen over the last two years.”

Kerfoot’s largesse will basically amount to $20,000 Cdn a year per player. It’s a nice top-up to the $18,000 a year the players earn in carded-athlete funding, though the total is still far less than the $70,000 US most American players will get each year under a contract negotiated earlier this year with the U.S. Soccer Federation.

Still, it is enough to allow the Canadian women not to have to find part-time jobs to meet mortgage and car payments—and more importantly, it will allow them to spend more time together in residency. “You try to find the time to run a camp here or there or work with clubs, but it’s just so hard to hold down a real job . . . when you’re expected to come in and be in residency when we’re preparing for qualification and World Cup,” says defender Randee Hermus, 26, who worked part-time in the past as a server at a restaurant.

“There’s nobody that’s going to hire you. When I came back [from a brief stint with a pro team in Norway in 2003], I wanted to get my serving job back, but they said ‘You can’t have it, you’re never here.’“What Greg Kerfoot has done helps out a great deal and we’re extremely fortunate that he’s willing and able.”

Striker Christine Sinclair, who finished up her standout college career at the University of Portland in the spring, said that without the salary put up by Kerfoot, she likely would have had to return to Portland to pick up some clinic and coaching work once the Whitecaps women’s W-League season is finished in early August. “There’s no way a person can live off the carding money,” she said. “People need to make money somehow.”

Sinclair would also like to see the Canadian Soccer Association—whose financial contribution to the women’s team goes primarily to setting up international friendlies, travel, accommodation and training camp expenses—step up with more money directly for the players. “Before Greg came in, we were pretty much playing for nothing. You can’t expect to get the results that the coaching staff wants, that we want, that the CSA wants, without having funding to have the players around each other at camps and practices.”

The Canadian women, many of whom play their club soccer with the Whitecaps, had little time together prior to qualifying for the 2004 Olympics and didn’t make it to Athens after being upset by Mexico. “What we’ve seen so much in the past when you compare us to powers like the U.S. and Germany, who do have residency camps, is that they do play so well together,” said Hermus. “They know each other, they have the cohesiveness of a club team. That’s what we need, to be able to practice year-round together, so you know how somebody plays personality-wise and player-wise. “That was the biggest thing with the Olympic qualifier. We didn’t have the team cohesiveness and individuals started trying to do it for themselves.”

“The greatest thing would be if it ever started the ball rolling and other people got on board and supported other teams or other sports, especially as we head to the 2010 Olympics.” “We need more private sector involvement in the game in Canada and, by extrapolation, all sport. We can’t expect government to pay all the bills. “People like Kerfoot, who love the game, deserve all the credit . . . but it’s also important that we create an environment that gives investors a business reason to invest in soccer in this country.”

Cyclists top list of drug users: Baseball, soccer follow in global tests.

The Vancouver Sun

LONDON—Cycling produced the most positive tests for banned substances of any Olympic sport in the latest global statistics compiled by the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA-accredited laboratories reported 482 positive samples for cyclists in 2005. Baseball was second with 390 positives, while soccer was third with 343. Track and field—the most tested sport—was fourth with 342.

Cycling also had the highest percentage of positive tests, with 3.78 per cent out of 12,751 samples, followed by baseball (3.69 per cent out of 10,580), boxing (3.41 per cent of 2,433) and triathlon (3.41 per cent of 2,170). Track and field had 1.67 per cent positives out of 20,464 samples.

Overall, the number of positive samples increased by 34.4 per cent, to 3,909 in 2005 from 2,909 in 2004. Of the total samples, 2.13 per cent tested positive last year. WADA’s 33 labs tested 14,150 more samples in 2005 than they did in 2004. “It is positive to see that more and more samples are collected throughout the world and that the number of adverse analytical findings is raising as well,” WADA spokesman Frederic Donze said from the agency’s Montreal headquarters. “It shows an encouraging commitment to anti-doping.”

WADA oversees drug-testing in Olympic and some non-Olympic sports, handling both in-competition and out-of-competition controls. Steroids accounted for the most positive tests in 2005, with 1,864 or 48 per cent.

One reason for the increase in positive tests is WADA’s policy of target-testing specific athletes, Donze said. Also, the threshold for testosterone to epitestosterone ratio was lowered from six to four. Despite the increase in positive samples, Donze said that analysis methods and techniques are constantly being refined. “The fight against doping is a constant work, and global efforts help closing more and more the net on cheaters,” Donze said. “Designer steroids such as THG [tetrahydrogestrinone] and DMT [desoxy-methyl testosterone], which were discovered by anti-doping authorities in the past few years, are certainly a concern for anti-doping authorities.

“WADA and WADA-accredited laboratories around the world discovered a number of new designer steroids on which we are working at the moment, and we know that we have to constantly remain vigilant.” The Los Angeles lab tested the most samples (39,775) and had the most positives (538). Paris, which had the third most samples, had the second most positive tests with 491.

Athletes credit support: Team Visa open to nominations.
(The Vancouver Province)

So, you think you know someone who has what it takes to represent Canada at the 2008 Olympics or Paralympics? Visa is giving you a chance to help them get there.

Team Visa—a support network for Olympic athletes—is expanding its 16-member roster this fall and they want the Canadian public to help with the nomination process. Athletes who are chosen for the program will get an annual cash stipend as well as practical support in the form of mentors. These mentors are former Olympic and Paralympic athletes.

The program is currently adding potential 2008 Olympians, but includes winter and summer sport athletes.= “Anything you can do to help you perform better is a benefit to you,” said Montrealer and three-time Olympic hockey player Danielle Goyette, who was selected for the program last year after teammate Cassie Campbell nominated her. Goyette has a silver medal from 1998 in Nagano and golds from 2002 in Salt Lake and 2006 in Turin.

People might wonder why an athlete like Goyette who has a coach, teammates and a wealth of experience would need a mentor. But across today’s Olympic stage, where the slightest mistake in competition or in preparation can mean the difference between winning a medal or finishing fourth, stones left unturned can become hurdles. “Visa doesn’t just support us financially, but on the mental side, too,” said Goyette. “Programs like this make a big difference. Dealing with the pressure is not easy to do.”

Currently there are 12 athletes, including swimmer Brent Hayden of Mission, Fernie alpine skier Emily Brydon and four mentors including ex-sprinter Bruny Surin and former figure skater Kurt Browning. “The best person to nominate an athlete is a coach or a friend because they know what the athlete is going through,” said Goyette. “That’s why it’s so great for Visa to go to the public because you can nominate an athlete and make a difference in an athlete’s achievement.”

Nominations will be reviewed by a selection panel of individuals from Visa, VANOC, the Canadian Olympic Committee, the media as well as mentors Nathalie Lambert (speed skating), Ian Balfour (Paralympian, alpine skiing), Marnie McBean (rowing), Marni Abbot (Paralympian, wheelchair basketball), Surin and Browning.

The nomination deadline is Sept. 30 and selections will be made by the end of the year. The panel will be looking for athletes who are either currently ranked or have the potential to be ranked in the top-30 in the world (top 10 for a team sport) and actively trying to qualify for Beijing in 2008. For more information about selection criteria, visit www.teamvisa.ca