By Ottawa Sports Pages
Following in the footsteps of Paralympic silver medallist Brianna Hennessy, the Ottawa Sports Pages has received a silver medal from the Canadian Online Publishing Awards for its Ottawa at the Paralympics series.
The honour for Best Continuing Coverage of a Story in 2024 was announced on Wednesday at a gala in Toronto, which was also webcast live on Zoom.
“This is a big moment for us, and I’m just so proud of our team’s work,” says Ottawa Sports Pages executive director Dan Plouffe. “We really had a dream team working together on this project and I think the key was that everyone was really committed to delivering stories that resonate beyond the field of play.”
Plouffe earned recognition as reporter/editor for the series alongside Adam Beauchemin and Jackson Starr as reporters, and Kaitlyn LeBoutillier, who crafted an interactive schedule for local athletes’ events and shared highlights on social media.
“Honestly, this award should go to our local Paralympians probably even more than us, because they’re the ones who created all these amazing stories to tell, right?” Plouffe underlines. “But it’s definitely really special to have our Paralympics coverage recognized, because for us, our motivation has always been to showcase underrepresented athletes and sports that don’t get the attention they deserve.
“Our Ottawa Paralympians are such an unbelievably resilient and dedicated group that’s worked so hard to represent our city and our country. They definitely inspire us and I know lots of people in our community feel the same.”
Among the Paralympians featured were the Canadian women’s goalball team that trained in elementary school gyms en route to the global stage, four-time Paralympian and Team Canada wheelchair rugby co-captain Patrice Dagenais, second-generation Paralympian Keegan Gaunt, world silver medallist Bianca Borgella who was hit by a hamstring injury, and Trinity Lowthian, who earned Canada’s best-ever wheelchair fencing result just two years after entering the sport.
And of course there was Hennessy, who was chosen as Closing Ceremonies flag bearer after capturing Canada’s first-ever canoe medal at the Paralympics, while inspiring a portable classroom’s worth of supporters to gather in the wee hours of the morning and watch her big win at the Ottawa River Canoe Club.
Alongside pre-Games profiles and daily recaps/previews throughout the Paralympics, the Ottawa Sports Pages’ coverage also included stories in the months that followed the Games. Among those were Borgella’s battle with the post-Games blues, Hennessy marking 10 years since her life-altering accident by continuing to live life full-tilt, and a recent story by High Achievers columnist Martin Cleary on Lowthian successfully returning to training following a hospital stay due to health issues she cast aside to participate in the Games.
The gold medal winner in the Best Continuing Coverage of a Story category was the Investigative Journalism Foundation of Canada’s series and database on government procurement.
The Ottawa Sports Pages was also a finalist for the Feel Good Story of the Year (with mother-of-three Geneviève Morrison’s pursuit of an Olympic wrestling berth) and Best Multicultural Story (on the BGC Thunderbolts’ impact in basketball and in players’ lives). Those categories were won by The Narwhal and CBC British Columbia respectively.
“It’s pretty neat to have our name mentioned alongside long-running news outlets like them, and also to get to discover a lot of great work being done by other smaller publishers across Canada,” Plouffe indicates. “Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thank you to the COPA organizers for providing a platform for online publishers to be recognized and to shine.”
Plouffe adds that there were many more individuals and organizations who contributed to making the award possible.
“We definitely want to salute them too,” Plouffe states. “Thank you to the Canadian Paralympic Committee and their team of media attachés for helping us coordinate calls from Paris and their photographers for bringing our coverage to life, thank you to our advertisers for your support and getting behind our mission and our local athletes, and to the Canada Periodical Fund and the Canada Summer Jobs program for providing funding to bolster our staff around the Games and helping develop some pretty awesome young journalists.
“Martin Cleary always deserves a big thank you for his role in everything that we do. Although our 51-year local sportswriting vet was on a well-deserved summer vacation around the Paralympics, none of this would happen without the groundwork he’s laid, not to mention all of his past and ongoing work that sets the standard for excellence in the field.
“And thank you so much to our devoted readers as well. Just after Facebook and Instagram shut down our accounts in their war with the government over sharing Canadian news, we had record numbers during our Ottawa at the Olympics and Paralympics coverage, so that definitely gives us some fuel for the fire to keep on telling stories on local amateur sport.”