Thank you very much to Orienteering Ottawa 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 Isabella Disley
Graeme Siderius has been running his whole life with his family, ski club, and cross-country skiing team. This year, he finally got to experience being on the same team as his older brother, Owen.
It is the only high school year the Siderius brothers will share, since Owen is in Grade 12. Owen competed in the first race of the day at the national capital high school cross-country running championships at the Hornets Nest in Blackburn Hamlet, placing second in the senior boys’ six-kilometre to qualify for OFSAA.
Graeme topped the novice boys’ field of 125 runners, completing the 4 km course in 12:33.2. After the race, the Colonel By Cougars novice boys jumped up and down together in a huddle, celebrating the fact that they’re heading to the provincial championships.
“It feels really great. I’m really excited that our whole team gets to go, ’cause we were just hoping that we could squeeze it out as a team,” highlighted Siderius. “Going into this race was probably just to make sure I’m working my absolute hardest because I want to make sure that I’m getting as high as I possibly can so that my team can get those points.”
While they missed out on the by city title by tiebreaker behind Glebe, the Cougars safely secured one of the two OFSAA team berths with their total of 56 placement points – 19 ahead of third-place Paul-Desmarais, which was almost 100 points better than any of the other 12 teams entered.
Three out of four Cougars finished in the top five, with their fourth runner, Luca Abi Chahine, finishing in 47th. Siderius, Kaï Lebel (third), and Robert Ross (fifth) all stood at the finish line, shouting and cheering on Abi Chahine as they realized that they were OFSAA-bound. Henry McGhie (84th) will join their team as its fifth runner.
In his first year of high school, Siderius expressed his pride in representing Colonel By.
“I really like the school,” he noted. “It feels really great, actually being able to represent them as a school, as a person too.”
Siderius was very happy to follow in his brother’s footsteps and become a city champ in his novice year, and is now looking forward to his first OFSAA, where Owen won a pair of 2022 provincial silver medals as an individual and a team in his Grade 9 year.
“My race went really great, actually,” reflected Siderius, who won the city title by 13.5 seconds. “I was a little bit worried about going to that last forest, but I just knew that if I kept pushing, I would be able to do it, and I did.
“(The OFSAA mentality) is to stay as high as I possibly can. Make sure I’m actually working as hard as I can and staying with people that I know are about my speed.”
As the higher-ranked fourth runner, Samuel Lewchuk scored the decisive points for the Glebe Gryphons to earn the city crown ahead of Colonel By with his 20th-place performance. Glebe also totalled 56 placement points, with Oliver Vyvey leading the way in sixth place, followed by Adrian Wells (14th) and Oliver Maxwell-Swinburne (16th). Willem Shelswell De Vlieger (24th) gives Glebe a solid fifth team member for OFSAA.
Also representing the national capital at the Nov. 1 provincial championships in Brampton will be John McCrae’s Jake Claydon-St. John (second), A.Y. Jackson’s Jaiden Taft (fourth), Hillcrest’s Tyler Mitchell (seventh), Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Patrick Badgley (eighth) and St. Joseph’s Alex Yang (ninth).
The Ottawa Sports Pages will be posting race-by-race recaps and photo galleries each weekday leading into the Nov. 1 OFSAA XC Championships. Find them all on our XC Week webpage, presented by Orienteering Ottawa.
NCXC25 Novice Boys’ Photo Gallery
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