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Thank you very much to Ottawa Orienteering for presenting the Ottawa Sports Pages’ XC Week! Orienteering is like cross-country running, with a few extra exciting twists and turns. Find out about the adventure that awaits you here.
By Dan Plouffe
When Daniel Cova crossed the finish line at the 2024 OFSAA Cross-Country Running Championships Monday afternoon at Terry Fox Athletic Facility, he was emotional, exhausted, sick to his stomach, and… totally elated.
Competing in the last cross-country race of his high school career, the Grade 12 Louis-Riel Rebelles runner took the lead within the first kilometre of the senior boys’ 6 km provincial final and never gave it up, coming home in 19:32.02 to win by just over six seconds.
“I did not know that was going to happen. I was crying at the end,” huffed Cova following what he called “the hardest race of my life.”
“I’m very happy with my day,” he smiled. “I did not expect that.”
Cova’s previous best finish at OFSAA XC came in 2022 when he was ninth in a junior boys’ race won by Glebe’s Saul Taler, who was dissatisfied to finish 12th this year in 20:12.81 after winning the senior boys’ city title on Oct. 24 in Kanata.
“Saul pushes me every day. I would never be here without him,” Cova said of his Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club teammate. “I know he wasn’t happy with his race today, but I’m proud of him anyways.”
Cova was close to 30th place when he reached the top of Mount Mooney for the first time less than a half-kilometre into the race, but then a flash of Rebelle red fired to the front.
Conventional thinking says you want to get up the first hill as quickly as possible to avoid getting caught up in the crush of 273 converging bodies. Cova wisdom says nobody pushes hard on the way back down the hill, and that creates the perfect opportunity to strike.
“I kind of just went up the hill. I took it slow – as slow as I wanted to take it,” he recounted. “Then I was taking the downhills as fast as I could, just falling forward a bit and using the momentum to push me ahead.
“Then all of a sudden I was in the lead pack and I was like, ‘Holy crap. Well, now I’m here, I may as well keep going.’ So I just kept pushing and I made it to the end.
“I was really happy to front-run the entire thing.”
As he diligently maintained a healthy gap over his chasers, the hometown crowd’s excitement built and built. Cova said he heard people yelling his name throughout the course, and that he’d “never seen something like it” when so many people were cheering him on as he charged down the finishing chute to claim his first OFSAA XC title in his last try.
“That was crazy. It was life-changing,” smiled Cova, while underlining his appreciation for the support of his family and training partners. “I loved it. It was amazing. It really helped me get through this race.”
Another reward was awaiting Cova in the finishing area as he learned his Rebelles also hit the podium in the team event. Louis-Riel’s Mikel Fortier placed 37th, Evan James Rebane was 85th and Cohen Kaye finished 100th to earn the third-place team score of 223, followed by Olivier Young in 135th.
Whitby’s Brooklin High School won the senior boys’ team event with the lone sub-100-point score across the six novice, junior and senior boys’ and girls’ races.
“They were pretty happy with it, and for me, it’s a double-medal, so I’m really happy. It was a great race,” signalled Cova, noting that the big key to the Rebelles’ success was having many of his teammates join the Lions club to supplement their efforts with their school team.
“Everyone’s training hard,” added last season’s OFSAA track and field steeplechase bronze medallist. “There’s not one guy on our team that doesn’t train at least six times a week, so we’re all pushing each other to get through the week. It’s just great.”
Alexandra Harris closes giant gap to leap onto novice girls’ podium
They often say that fourth place is the worst spot you can finish, which is a terrible thing to say in the face of an exceptional accomplishment, particularly among a field of 268 of Ontario’s best runners.
That seemed like the position Alexandra Harris was destined to experience deep into her debut OFSAA cross-country championships, but the Grade 9 John McCrae Secondary School student instead earned nothing but joy as she made her first appearance inside the top-3 of the novice girls’ 4 km race in her final strides.
“I’m just shocked. Honestly, I can’t believe it,” highlighted Harris, who chased down a Toronto runner from way back to take the bronze medal by close to two seconds in 15:33.29.
“When we came out of the forest, 200 metres left, and I saw the girl, I didn’t know if I could catch her, but I just poured in everything that I had left to try to pass her, and I caught her at the last moment,” she recalled. “It was a really hard push, but I’m glad I did it.”
The split clock tracked Harris at 2.72 seconds back of the podium as she entered the stadium for the final stretch, and the gap was certainly two or three times larger a few hundred metres earlier in the wooded section.
“I didn’t think (I’d catch up),” Harris indicated. “I was like, ‘OK, I just gotta keep fourth,’ but then I heard someone yelling like, ‘You can catch her, you can catch her!’ so that surely helped me to push and try to keep up with her.”
The hometown fans were a help, and familiarity with the course offered another advantage.
“Just knowing coming out of the forest how much I had left” was beneficial, Harris added. “My first race I ran here, the Gryphon Open, I didn’t really know when to start pushing, but here I knew – my goal coming out of the forest was to catch the person in front of me, and that’s what I did.”
Harris was greeted by her overjoyed family and friends after she finished.
“It’s amazing. It’s just so special. That’s something I’ll always remember,” she reflected. “It was a really fun race too. I was so nervous before it started, but it’s an amazing experience. Going up the hill, especially, there’s so many people.”
Harris was proud to join her older brothers as an OFSAA participant after they’d represented John McCrae at past provincials for swimming and cross-country running.
“I always wanted to be like them, to go to OFSAA, and make my family proud,” she highlighted. “That’s been a goal of mine for a long time. They’re my inspiration for this, really.”
Harris underlined that her parents’ support was instrumental to her success.
“This morning we were watching videos of me from Grade 2 and my first race,” recounted the Ottawa Lions athlete. “I could hear [my parents] during the race: ‘Keep going, you’re doing great!’
“They’re just everything. They help me so much. I don’t know what I’d do without them. They’re the best.”
Mud materializes at Mooney’s following gentle cross-country conditions earlier in season
National capital athletes started and finished with a bang, but had a bit of a lull in the middle races. Harris and Taler recorded the lone top-15 finishes out of Ottawa’s city champions.
Colonel By’s Laila Lebel was next-best at 16th out of 266 junior girls, while Peak Centre’s Grace Streek was 24th among 277 senior girls.
Glebe and Colonel By were seventh and ninth in the senior boys’ team event, giving Ottawa three schools inside the top-10 alongside the bronze-medallist Rebelles.
Glebe and Colonel By made the top-10 in the first race as well, finishing seventh and 10th in novice girls.
In the para division, De La Salle’s William Dagher placed fourth out of 46 in the male intellectual category, Jacob Gauthier beat Jules-Leger teammate Shayden Bourgoin for the top of the two-runner male visual division, and Jules-Leger’s Lien Nhan was second out of three in female visual.
The individual race winners were Uxbridge’s Chloe Walker (novice girls), St. Joseph’s Anthony Cigan of Windsor (para), Michael Power’s Aidan Chan-Smith of Etobicoke (novice boys), Newmarket’s Kate Nagy (junior girls), Riverdale’s William Thomas of Toronto (junior boys), Kingston’s Athena Andrecyk (senior girls) and Cova.
It came down to the final event, but Cova continued the streak of Ottawa runners winning a race whenever the national capital has hosted OFSAA XC, following Mike Woods’ 2001 win and the 2011 victory by Yves Sikubwabo, who presented Cova with his gold medal.
A mix between rain and snow pellets started falling during the opening race, which eventually turned to a cold, steady rain. It made the day unpleasant for spectators, although Canadian cross-country purists were pleased to finally welcome some mud on a course this season (and anyone who experienced the battering of a freezing day at wind-swept Wesley Clover Parks for the 2021 club nationals knows this year’s weather was nothing worth complaining about).
“I don’t even feel it right now,” Cova said. “The only thing that’s bothering me right now is my stomach.”
Kind of gives new meaning to sponsor Nike’s slogan #FinishOnEmpty.
Read More: Ottawa Sports Pages XC Week coverage, presented by Orienteering Ottawa