By Dan Plouffe
On top of the major awards, lifetime achievement honours and teams that won a provincial championship or higher, the Ottawa Sports Awards also recognized the city’s top athletes in over 60 individual sports at its 59th-annual banquet on Wednesday, Jan. 25 at Algonquin College.
Each athlete has their own tale of successes – each winner’s biography is posted on the Ottawa Sports Awards website – but here are a few snapshots of some unique storylines:
Young age doesn’t restrain diver
The youngest award winner of the evening earned one of the biggest ovations from the Ottawa Sports Awards crowd of 470 as 11-year-old Henry McKay collected the diving athlete of the year honour.
A member of the Canadian junior diving team, the Nepean-Ottawa Diving Club athlete is a two-time Quebec Champion, a three-time Ontario Champion, and a two-time junior national champion.
But his biggest exploit of 2011 was winning a bronze medal in the platform event at the Pan American junior diving championships in Colombia.
“I didn’t think I was going to win anything,” admits McKay, a Grade 6 Agincourt Public School student. “I was really nervous.”
Colombia provided a different setting since it was at an outdoor pool, McKay notes, highlighting that birds were chirping at the divers and wind also pushed against them.
“At first, I was worried, but as the week went on, I realized I was OK,” describes the young athlete who has ambitions of competing at world championships and Olympics. “I think I did really well. I was really excited.”
Nepean-Ottawa coach Fernando Henderson says that it really isn’t challenging working with a high-performance athlete as young as McKay.
“He’s a lot of fun,” notes Henderson, who often has McKay lead warm-ups and demonstrate to other team members. “He likes to play, he likes to dance, but any time I need him to focus, he changes right away.
“He’s very dedicated and he’s a hard worker.”
Progressing age doesn’t hold back judoka
Tony Walby was recognized as judo athlete of the year for the third time in his career, but it was the first time the Takahashi Dojo club member was honoured for his achievements in parasport.
Walby last won the judo athlete of the year award in 2008 when he earned his first national gold medal as an able-bodied competitor, which he considered a crowning achievement and decided to call it a career.
But when Judo Canada got wind that Walby is in fact legally blind, they encouraged the 38-year-old to return and compete in visually-impaired events and try to earn a place on the London 2012 Paralympic team.
“The hardest thing I’ve ever done is retire from competition. And the easiest thing I’ve done is come back into it,” smiles Walby, who is also a Level 4 national certified coach. “It’s very fulfilling to compete and represent your country and do it at a high level even after so many years. That’s what drives me – wearing that Canada jacket.”
A full-time Correctional Services Canada database administrator whose wife is expecting their first child in April, Walby admits that training over 20 hours a week for judo – plus international travel around half a dozen times per year for competitions – is not as easy as it once was.
“I’m not a young guy,” says the Connaught Public School grad whose Grade 3 teacher was Tina Takahashi, who now runs the Melrose Avenue dojo. “It does take something out of you, but if you love to do it, you do it. It’s very hard to quit.”
Despite missing the first of three events that count towards Paralympic qualification (the 2010 world championships), Walby is on the cusp of earning a London 2012 berth on the strength of his ninth-place performance at the 2011 worlds and a bronze medal win at the November Parapan American Games.
The top-10 athletes in the world rankings will receive berths in the London Paralympics, although many international athletes are currently disputing the rankings since some visually-impaired competitions were classified by B1, B2, and B3 levels (based on the amount of vision an athlete has) and others weren’t.
“My goal for this year is to qualify for London and give a good showing,” notes Walby, who has discussed the possibility of staying on board until the Rio 2016 with coaches and family as well. “I’ll be an old man then at 43, but I think I have the ability to do it. I want to show (my students) that judo is a lifetime sport and you can still be competitive for a long time at a very high level if you train hard and push yourself.
“The other part of my drive is it’s so hard to leave, to step back.”
Paguaga earns wrestling club’s first distinction
One floor below Walby at the Takahashi Dojo is the new training center for Alejandra Paguaga, the city’s wrestling athlete of the year.
The recognition was a sign of the rise of the Tsunami Academy wrestling program, which has built itself into a nationally-respected club, although it was recently forced to close its home St-Laurent Boulevard location in the face of a major rent increase.
“I was pretty honoured,” says Paguaga, a Grade 11 Samuel-Genest high school student. “I’ve never won a big award like that before. And it’s awesome for Tsunami because none of us have won that award either.”
2011 was a benchmark season for Paguaga as she won every Canadian title in her age group – club provincials, high school provincials, the national championships, and then the Team Canada trials for the cadet world championships.
“It was actually my goal at the start of the season to win all those competitions and to make Team Canada,” recounts Paguaga, who nonetheless couldn’t believe the moment was real when she earned the world’s berth. “All I could think of was, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to worlds. This is great.’”
Her first international event, Paguaga’s fifth-place finish in Hungary was “maybe not the result I wanted,” but she’s now driven to keep pushing in hopes of finishing higher in her last chance at the cadet level this year.
“It’s always difficult (to put in so much time training), and if you want to keep winning, you have to train harder every year,” Paguaga notes. “It’s something I love though, so I’ll keep doing it for sure.”