A huge team of 46 Ottawa athletes are set to compete at the St. John’s 2025 Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland. The Ottawa Sports Pages will be sending out a free daily email newsletter with recaps, previews and profiles throughout the Aug. 9-24 national youth multi-sport event.
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By Keiran Gorsky
For the longest time, Isabel Lowry was convinced she would be an Olympian – she just thought she’d be a little closer to the water. It wasn’t long ago that the water around her was covered and chlorinated and sheltered from spontaneous sidewind.
“I was like up there with Summer McIntosh,” she casually dropped in an interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages last week. “I used to race Summer all the time.”
It was during the COVID pandemic that her schedule was thrown into flux. The facilities she frequented began to close down. It was a special kind of torture, she recalls, throwing herself into the pool following a 4 a.m. wakeup for competitions that might or might not be taking place.
“I wasn’t really enjoying it anymore,” Lowry recounts. “There wasn’t anything to be motivated by.”
The saving grace for a young girl starved for competitive sport became outdoor activity. Lowry had paddled at summer camps growing up, but with the comparative lack of restrictions, canoeing became her everything. The Carleton Place Canoe Club paddler, now one of the world’s rising stars in sprint canoe, has never since reversed course.
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It did take some time for things to fall pleasantly into place. In the intervening years, Lowry was always on the cusp of something great before hitting a snag at some diabolical, climactic juncture. Two occasions stick out in particular. At her first-ever international event at the 2023 Olympic Hopes International Regatta in Poland, she was winning a race before hitting a patch of wash and falling behind.
She was winning another at last year’s Olympic Hopes Regatta in Hungary before shooting her boat early and falling down to third place. Repeatedly, exasperatingly, things seemed to go a little wrong.
This year, she decided, it would be different. This year, she opted not to leave anything to chance.
“I really just locked in,” signals the 17-year-old. “I did what needed to be done.”
That meant going to bed every night at 7:30, regular weight training and diligently tracking her calories. In retrospect, she feels those little mistakes and ripples of bad luck motivated her to do better.
It’s been the busiest year yet for the now junior world champion. After two gold medal wins in the u18 category at this year’s national team trials in July, Lowry traveled to Montemor-o-Velho, Portugal to compete in the ICF Canoe Sprint Junior and u23 World Championships.
It was brutal out there, even for Olympians. Water between sprawling farmfields, the wind was unrelenting in Portugal, bad enough to pile ten seconds onto Ottawa’s Toshka Beshara’s time in the K1 500-metre final. Years of training have a way of falling to the wayside against a heavy gust.
Lowry didn’t let it affect her. The wind certainly didn’t make the racing any easier, Lowry acknowledges, but for the daughter of a farmer in Almonte (and a Team Canada beach volleyball player), the venue had this strangely soothing quality.
“Every morning I would be looking at all the farmers’ fields and I’d see how the corn is,” Lowry recalls. “It was kind of almost comforting to be where we were, even though it was a little tricky with the wind.”
There was no shelter from spontaneous sidewinds, though perhaps she didn’t need it. She went on to win all three of her events. She was involved in all but one of Canada’s gold medals at the competition.
In every way, though she doesn’t want to linger on it, Lowry certainly seems the spitting image of a soon-to-be Olympian. Before Portugal, Lowry had the opportunity to attend a training camp in Halifax with members of Canada’s senior canoe/kayak national team. Among them was Paris 2024 Olympic gold medalist Katie Vincent. It was a wonderful learning experience, Lowry describes, but what really struck her was just how weird they were. She had expected something of a stern, disciplined bunch. What she encountered was very different.
“I was actually really afraid of a lot of them because I was like ‘Oh my God, they’re Olympians, you know?'” Lowry explains. “But then on my second day, a whole bunch of the men’s canoe team showed up in these Baby Yoda muscle t-shirts.”
No matter what level you get to, it turns out, everyone is delightfully strange. They proceeded to drift out into the water on little inflatable floaties, munching on Dr. Pepper freezies. They stayed there for a whole half-hour.
“I was like, ‘Wow, these guys are real people,’” she realized.
There will be so much else on her plate in these three years. But she might well be among them soon enough.
Ontario’s Canada Summer Games canoe-kayak team full of Ottawa flavour
Lowry will be one member of an Ontario canoe-kayak team dominated by paddlers from Carleton Place Canoe Club and Ottawa’s Rideau Canoe Club heading to St. John’s, Newfoundland to take part in the 2025 Canada Summer Games.
More than half of Team Ontario’s 18-member contingent will be represented by Ottawa-area canoeists and kayakers. Eight paddlers – Wesley Barlett, Madeleine Beauregard, Frederic Brais-Miklosi, Ruby Muhl, Ryan Naroditsky, Cole Norman, Kate Osborne and Julia Price – all come from Rideau, while Lowry, Abbigail Haines and Roenn Hodgins hail from Carleton Place. All but two of the above have represented Canada in international competition.
Even if the competition doesn’t have the international notoriety of prestige regattas, the prospect of participating in a multi-sport event is something special, and the team is buzzing with excitement.
“I think this is going to be an event [I’ll] remember for the rest of my life,” says Beauregard, who describes her time at the 2024 Ontario Summer Games in London as one of her favourite regattas ever.
It’s also hard to ignore Canada Games paddlers who went on to great success at the Olympics. Katie Vincent and kayaker Adam van Koeverden, both Canada Games alumni, went on to become Olympic gold medalists.
Beauregard, who won the C4 500 junior race alongside Lowry, maintains that any prospective spot at the Olympics is too far in the future to consider, even if it’s always lingering in the back of her mind.
The women’s canoe team, all based in the nation’s capital, held their training camp at Carleton Place ahead of the competition. The rest of Team Ontario is practicing at canoe clubs in and around the Greater Toronto Area.
Races will take place during the first week of the Games, from Aug. 11-14, with additional days reserved in case of weather delay. Who will be in what event and paired with whom in team races is not yet solidified.
Ottawa at the Canada Games Daily Newsletter
A huge team of 46 Ottawa athletes are set to compete at the St. John’s 2025 Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland. The Ottawa Sports Pages will be sending out a free daily email newsletter with recaps, previews and profiles throughout the Aug. 9-24 national youth multi-sport event.
By clicking on the submit button, you consent to receive the above newsletter from the Ottawa Sports Pages. You may unsubscribe by clicking on the link at the bottom of our emails. Ottawa Sports Pages | 21 Kolo Dr., Ashton, Ont., K0A 1B0 | 613-261-5838
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