By Anne Duggan
It was maybe Canada’s most heartbreaking moment of the 2012 Olympics – the improbable bronze medal victory of the men’s 4×100-metre relay team suddenly taken away due to one step on the lane border line.
And make no mistake, Ottawa’s Seyi Smith felt the full weight of the heartbreak, but a month after the team’s disqualification in London, the 25-year-old former Brookfield High School student views the race as a sign of great things to come.
“Some people say we fired a warning shot, that we can now vie for the medals,” he notes. “Still, it would have been nice to have the hardware.”
A delay in displaying the correct results meant the team thought they had won bronze for the first moments after the race. The eventual DSQ designation was an abrupt and painful end to a full-swing celebration with hugs and maple leaf flags.
“My memory of how we felt for those 10 minutes that we thought we had won bronze, it is now becoming hazy,” says Smith.
Prior to the Games, Smith said his team’s main objective in London was to bring back the pride in Canada’s sprinters that existed when Ottawa’s Glenroy Gilbert, now the national relay coach, and company won 4×100 gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
“The important goal of making Canada proud: I think we got that,” Smith highlights, noting It’s now up to the team to return to the Olympic stage and re-win that medal.
Unexpected performance
Chemistry, says the Calgary-based former Ottawa Lion, is the answer to the puzzle of how four athletes who have never run under 10 seconds somehow managed to finish third against a field full of sub-10-second sprinters.
“The simple explanation is that we are perfect together,” Smith says, adding that the four Canadian runners also have maximum top speeds comparable to the world’s very best sprinters.
The team, which also included 21-year-old Ottawa Gee-Gees sprinter Segun Makinde as an alternate, may have been defeated by a few centimetres of white line, but Smith believes he’s come away from the experience a victor. He learned much from his first Olympics, he notes, and he’ll bring that knowledge with him each time he trains for Rio 2016.
“My goals for the next quadrant are to make the relay team and to qualify as an individual in the 100 metres,” Smith states.
The power of Usain Bolt
Smith is proud that the Canadian team was not cowed by the size of the venue or the volume of the crowd’s roars. In fact, it helped them to focus, he believes. Also assisting them to be ready and focused was the great Usain Bolt.
“We had just arrived in the stadium and the officials were rushing us while we were putting on our shoes,” Smith recounts. “We were definitely feeling the stress. “Then Usain Bolt held up his hand and said, ‘We need five minutes.’ And they listened to him like they would listen to nobody else.”
Other athletes with Ottawa connections who competed at the Olympics included: Courtnay Pilypaitis (basketball, fifth), Michael Tayler (canoe slalom, 20th), Sherraine Schalm (epee fencing, 17th), Melanie McCann (modern pentathlon, 11th), Nicolas Tritton (judo, 17th), Mo Zhang (table tennis, 33rd), Andre Ho (table tennis, 65th singles, ninth team), Pierre-Luc Hinse (table tennis, 33rd singles, ninth team), Eugene Wang (table tennis, ninth team), Cristy Nurse (rowing, alternate due to injury, silver), Morgan Jarvis (rowing, 14th), Melissa Bishop (athletics 800 m, 30th), and Sultana Frizell (athletics hammer throw, 26th).