By Brendan McConnell
Theresa El-Lati’s Canada Summer Games wrestling trials may have ended with a black eye, but the Louis-Riel high school student took home much more than that. She’d won the tournament nonetheless to earn a Canada Summer Games berth, which made her the first wrestler from east of Toronto to ever claim a spot on Team Ontario.
“I thought it was the black eye of a champ,” El-Lati smiles.
After taking home a gold medal at the Ontario provincial championships in juvenile girls’ 65 kg, El-Lati and her Tsunami Academy coach, Derek Kossatz, are looking to add to her hardware collection at the Summer Games, a competition both describe as a miniature Olympics.
“I think it’s an amazing opportunity,” says El-Lati, whose wrestling career started not far from home when she was a Grade 8 student at Samuel-Genest. “I was so happy when I found out that I was going to represent Ontario at a big event like this.”
In addition to the medal quest, the Games act as a learning experience, one that will allow the young wrestler to adapt to a larger national competition and add to her confidence in hopes of eventually transitioning to the international stage.
El-Lati predicts her biggest takeaway will be “finding a way to cope with that fact that I’m at such a big event.”
“In the past, one of my biggest weaknesses was that I get really nervous because it was a big event and then I’d wrestle badly,” the 17-year-old explains. “What I’m going to get the most out of these Games is being able to just completely forget where I am and just wrestle.”
For an athlete who Kossatz calls his “greatest success story,” El-Lati comes from relatively humble wrestling beginnings.
When she started wrestling, recalls Kossatz, El-Lati was out of shape, overweight and not someone who would typically stand out as having a high wrestling pedigree.
“I came close many times in practices to just patting her on the back and saying ‘this sport is just not for you,’” says Kossatz.
But with a lot of hard work, El-Lati has trudged her way to the top of Canada’s wrestling community.
“She’s come a long way from being someone who’s just trying it out for fun to being a very dominant provincial and national level wrestler,” highlights Kossatz, who runs his practices out of Takahashi Dojo in Hintonburg.
“What I’m really striving for is to get myself to the point where I can be a world-class athlete, competing at worlds and international tournaments,” El-Lati adds.
Sherbrooke swimmers & sailors
Also entering individual sports are Ottawa athletes Eli Wall and Aaron Wong-Sing. Wall is a breaststroke specialist for the GO Kingfish swim club, while Wong-Sing races in able-sail competitions out of the Nepean Sailing Club.