Soccer history belongs to Sinclair

Opinion

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This article was published 30/01/2020 (1792 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a record broken in near-anonymity. It wasn’t just any record.

On Wednesday, shortly before 5 p.m., Canadian women’s soccer team midfielder Jessie Fleming played a clever pass to teammate Adriana Leon, who cut the ball back to Christine Sinclair. The long-time captain controlled it with her left foot, shifted it to her right and seemed to pause before the history-making moment, when she beat St. Kitts & Nevis goalkeeper Kyra Dickenson at the far post.

And with that, in an almost empty stadium more than 4,000 km. from her hometown of Burnaby B.C., Sinclair became the top international goal-scorer of all time. In the absence of a national television broadcast (streaming service OneSoccer carried the match, as did Rogers TV), many Canadian fans learned about and saw replays of the goal, the 36-year-old’s 185th, on social media.

They will also, hopefully, have seen Sinclair’s celebration — a joyous run with arms outstretched and eyes turned briefly to the sky before stopping in her tracks and waiting for her teammates, first Leon and then Julia Grosso and then all of them, to celebrate with her. What a wonderful, appropriate few seconds. Just the hero, the legend in the frame, alone with history, her history. Think Wayne Gretzky’s brief, inadvertent solo skate after scoring number 802. Incidentally, that’s the sort of milestone we’re talking about here. Sort of, but maybe even more significant.

Sinclair made her international debut as a 16-year-old in 2000 (she scored her first goal in her second match, against Norway), and there’s an argument to be made that in the 20 years between then and now no Canadian or Canada-based athlete has had as much of an influence on youth sport in this country, on girls and boys both. Vince Carter might be the only other person in the conversation.

Some no doubt will chortle at this, but that will only serve to underline the fact that we still don’t understand, nevermind appreciate, the sport-playing woman — her obstacles, her realities, her ambitions, her achievements. Absurdly, us men still try to measure a female athlete’s accomplishments against her male counterparts’. How pathetically insecure. Perhaps it’ll one day occur to us that those measures are meaningless in the first place, and that tossing them out is central to embracing girls’ and women’s sport on its own terms.

In the meantime, the record books will list Christine Sinclair as the highest-scoring person in soccer history. But don’t expect her to bask in her success, however unprecedented. That’s not her style. In that light, it’s somehow poetic that her 185th goal came in the quiet of a small stadium in south Texas. Just she and her teammates. As understated as she would have wanted it. How very Canadian.

The thing is, the legacy she leaves is a game that looks a lot different than it did two decades ago. And when her record falls, if it does, it’ll happen under much different circumstances, in a new reality, at a raucous stadium in front of cameras from everywhere. If it stands, those changes will come anyway, and the page will still read, “International Goals, 185, Christine Sinclair, Canada.”

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