‘Fantastic experience’ for Manitoba

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/03/2019 (2125 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After two weeks of competition featuring more than 150 events across 19 different sports, the Canada Winter Games came to a close on Saturday night in Red Deer, Alta.

Team Manitoba sent 208 athletes to Red Deer to compete over the span of two weeks, with the group finishing in fifth place with 25 medals — nine gold, seven silver, and nine bronze. It was a big improvement from their performance at the 2015 Canada Winter Games in Prince George, B.C., where Team ‘Toba had 16 medals. Manitoba was the second most-improved team from 2015, as Alberta had 75 medals at the last Games, but finished this year with 100.

“We had a fantastic experience at the 2019 Canada Winter Games,” Team Manitoba’s chef de mission Marcie Halls-Stronciski said. “Our team really came together. They were supporting each other, watching other sports on their days off, got really into pin trading, cheering loud, and ringing their cow bells so everyone knew we were in the house.”

It’s impossible to know for sure what led to Manitoba’s increase in medals, but their state-of-the-art training facility that opened in the summer of 2017 — the Canada Games Sport for Life Centre’s Qualico Training Centre — might have a thing or two to do with it. Before the Qualico Training Centre was built, there was very limited space inside the Sport for Life Centre for provincial team training. The old gym could only accommodate one team at a time, but the facility now has the space for up to a dozen.

“I think definitely with our new facility…helps increase our results at the Canada Games compared to what we’ve seen in the past,” said Halls-Stronciski, who’s been with Team ‘Toba at seven different Canada Games.

“We now have a lot of the athletes training in-house with us, instead of us being unsure of what they’re doing pre-Games. I definitely think the performance centre has helped with that.”

Helping Manitoba get off to a strong start during week 1 of this year’s Games were two speedskaters — Winnipeg’s Tyson Langelaar and Clandeboye’s Alexa Scott. Langelaar and Scott combined for eight medals, seven gold and a silver, to lead the way for Manitoba. And if that didn’t make their performance memorable enough, Langelaar and Scott also now own a couple of Games records as well.

Langelaar, 20, who finished with four gold and a silver, had his finest moment in the 1,000-metre long track race, where he set a new record with a time of 1:12.79. For Scott, the 17-year-old claimed two Canada Games records to go with her three gold medals. Her 4:33.83 race time in the long track 3,000-metre race and a time of 1:22.26 in the 1,000-metre race put her name in the record book twice.

It was a tough act to follow for the week 2 athletes, but archer Austin Taylor was up to the task. The 18-year-old Winnipeg native won a gold in the individual male compound event, and a silver in the mixed team compound event with his partner Bryanne Lameg. The strong performance led to Taylor being named Manitoba’s flag-bearer at Saturday’s closing ceremony. Taylor, the reigning Canadian junior-aged outdoor target archery and field archery champion, will now prepare for the World Archery Senior Championship in the Netherlands in June and the World Archery Youth Championship in Madrid in August.

The next Canada Winter Games will take place in 2023 in Prince Edward Island.

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31