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By Keiran Gorsky
Ottawa Olympian Toshka Besharah and Almonte’s Isabel Lowry had a lengthy layover en route to the 2025 ICF Junior and U23 Canoe-Kayak Sprint World Championships in Montemor-o-Velho, Portugal. Their flight out of Halifax left three hours late, and so, they missed their connecting plane from Frankfurt.
With little else to do, the canoe-kayak team took to wandering the streets. It was just a few steps out from the airport when they stumbled into Frankfurt’s Christopher Street Day, the annual German pride parade.
“People were wearing sparkly speedos,” laughs Lowry of Carleton Place Canoe Club. “It was pretty crazy.”
They were caught in the city for around seven hours in what Besharah, now 22, describes as an extended impromptu bonding session. They didn’t get to their hotel in Portugal until 2 a.m. the next morning.
It was a frolicking start to an immensely successful competition for Ottawa paddlers, in which 17-year-old Lowry won three gold medals in junior under-18 events and Besharah came out on top in the K1 U23 women’s 200-metre race.
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Though it isn’t an Olympic class event, the 200 m still holds a special place in Besharah’s heart. It was the first for which she donned the maple leaf at age 15, forever a shining testament to the breakneck pace of these paddles over short distances.
She proudly recalls every moment leading up to her mad dash out of the gate. She was stuck with the biggest, goofiest smile on the bus ride to the Centro de Alto Rendimento.
“I probably looked ridiculous,” Besharah recalls. “It’s the first time I ever raced an international race knowing that the goal was to win.”
Canoe and kayak courses can vary dramatically from day to day and place to place. Those four days in Portugal were nothing if not brutally windy. In the 500 m solo race, just a day after Besharah had recorded her best ever time in the semi-finals, she was hit with a stroke of bad luck.
She drew unlucky lane seven on the far left to be met with a harsh headwind from upstream. Fatigue set in after about 250 m as she gradually fell to the back. Her final time was almost 10 seconds slower than it had been the day before. But Besharah didn’t let any of it get to her head in this, her trademark event.
“It’s just part of racing,” says Besharah, who is pleased to have improved almost four seconds on her 500 m time this season.
Square in the middle of the 200 m, in the blue boat, she flew out the gate and never relinquished her lead. She finished the race in 41.76 seconds, 0.69 ahead of Italy’s Lucrezia Zironi.
You might think the Portuguese commentators in these events would be sitting in a comfy broadcast booth, commentary being for the viewers’ benefit only. In actuality, their voices were booming over the water in full earshot of the competitors. It’s pretty unusual at sprint races, Lowry says.
“It was kind of cool to hear them calling out ‘Gold for Canada!’ before we even finished the race,” Lowry reflects.
She heard that particular phrase a whole lot during those four days, winning all her events – the C4 500 m as well as the C1 and C2 200 m races. The C1 200 was far and away her closest final. Lowry finished just a fifth of a second ahead of Ukraine’s Yelyzaveta Vozniuk, but she maintains the C4 was the most intense.
It was a startlingly short 38-minute turnaround between her win at the solo event and her four-person race, alongside Amelie Lalibert, Grace Theunissen and Madeleine Beauregard of Ottawa’s Rideau Canoe Club.
The commentators kindly alerted her to the Hungarian team drawing ahead.
“Even watching the YouTube videos back now… I’m like ‘Oh my god, guys, up the rate, up the power!” Lowry recounts. “And then I’m like, ‘Wait, I already know what happens.’”
It was at the 90-second mark when the Canadian quartet steamed ahead, winning their final contest by more than a second and a half.
Back at home, it’s business as usual for these two who might very well be part of the future of Canadian paddling. After a warm reception from supporters at the airport, Lowry returned to her club in the days after her return, coaching the young children who were screaming their lungs out for her back at home.
If that’s not enough, she’ll be volunteering at the Glengarry Highland Games this weekend in Maxwell. And then Lowry will be one of the athletes the Ottawa Sports Pages will be following closely at the upcoming Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland.
Besharah, meanwhile, remains in the translational and molecular medicine program at the University of Ottawa.
Read More: Biomed student Toshka Besharah back in class after making Olympic debut
She’ll be preparing for the 2025 ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships in Milan. Besharah will be joined by fellow local paddlers Zoe Wojtyk (canoe, Rideau), Callie Loch (kayak, Rideau), Sophia Jensen (canoe, Cascades), Gabriel Ferron-Bouius (para, Rideau) and 2024 Paralympic silver medallist Brianna Hennessy (Ottawa River) for the Aug. 20-24 event in Italy.
Ottawa had many more paddlers competing at the world junior/U23 championships.
Rideau’s Evie McDonald and Ruby Muhl formed half of the women’s U23 C4 boat, which was fifth over 500 m. As a double, they were eighth in the C2 200 m and ninth in the C2 500 m.
Muhl ended her championships with Rideau’s Peter Bradley in the C1 U23 mixed relay over 5,000 m, placing sixth.
Carleton Place’s Dyllan Redwood-Wheeler and Frederick Brais of Rideau were fifth in the men’s K4 junior 500 m and eighth in the K2 500 m in 1:39.67.
In other A finals, Loch placed fifth in the women’s K2 U23 500 m and Kate Osborne of Rideau was eighth in the women’s K4 junior 500 m.
Rideau’s Wesley Bartlett was sixth in the men’s C1 500 m B final.