Goal Accomplished!

A very intense WOC week is over! This year our team was battling with sickness, stress, crammed accommodations, crazy logistics, broken internet and to top it all off the weather Gods threw in a relentless heatwave...

But our athletes produced great results all week and we felt better and better as we approached the last day of the program with the Relay on Saturday. We talked already from the first day that our big goal this year (and coming years) was to produce one top-16 result (top-half if less than 32 participants) and we knew that our best chance was the Women's Relay.

Carol Ross took the first leg and her job was to repeat her great relay performance from last year and that's exactly what she did! She kept mistakes to a minimum in the very difficult terrain and came in with a pack of runners only 7:30 down from the leaders.

Emily Kemp went out on the second leg with a focus on her own run and to let the other teams make mistakes. She put in one of the best performances in Canadian WOC history, losing only 40 seconds on the lead, moving the team up to 11th position and giving Louise Oram a huge gap down to the chasing teams.

Louise's job was again to focus on a clean run and she did that brilliantly. She did not stress and always made sure she was on track and she was able to bring the team home with a first ever top-half result for the Canadian Women at WOC. A fantastic team effort!

This means that Team Canada is starting to get on track for Sport Canada Elite funding, which would mean a huge step forward for the High Performance Program. We need a few more years of these type of results, but it is clearly within reach!

Thanks for your support this year and keep checking this blog for team photos later this week (and perhaps one or two pictures from the banquet and party as well)!