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Newsletter by Martin Cleary, Dan Plouffe & Keiran Gorsky
Athletic dreams don’t always come to fruition. As much as the athlete focuses on a certain objective over an extended period, sometimes it just doesn’t materialize for whatever reason.
That dream may just evaporate or sometimes it goes into hibernation, waiting for an unexpected opportunity to develop from a completely different angle.
Former Ottawa Curling Club member Craig Savill, 47, was a competitive curler for more than 30 years. His intensity to win was his driving force and he wanted to experience as many Winter Olympic Games as possible.
But despite his full effort as a lead, a third and even an alternate with talented skips like Glenn Howard, John Morris and Reid Carruthers, his Olympic dream remained just that. He participated in five Canadian men’s Olympic curling trials from 2001 to 2017 and only once came close to calling himself an Olympian.
Two years after celebrating a World Men’s Curling Championships title, at the 2009 Canadian Olympic trials in Edmonton, he was the lead for the Howard rink, which reached the final game. One more win would have allowed Savill and his teammates to represent Canada at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
But Kevin Martin of the Saville Sports Centre in Edmonton stood firmly in the way, posting a 7-3 win over nine ends. Martin’s rink, which included Morris, who was Savill’s skip for two world junior championships, went undefeated at the Vancouver Olympics at 11-0 for the gold medal.
In his four other appearances at the Canadian Olympic trials, Savill’s teams were also-rans – fourth place while playing third in 2001 with a 5-4 record under Morris, fourth as the lead in 2005 at 5-4 under Howard, sixth as the lead in 2013 at 2-5 under Howard, and fourth as an alternate at 4-4 under Carruthers.
Two years after his final Canadian Olympic trials, Savill was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in August, 2015. He put curling on the back burner for the 2015-16 season, but made an emotional return to the game, when he was allowed to deliver two stones for the Howard rink at the 2016 Canadian men’s Brier championship at Ottawa’s TD Place.
Savill was in recovery mode. Returning to curling with his second family around him was an uplifting dose of energy and support. But the Olympic dream remained silent.
On the recommendation of the Czech Republic national coach six years ago, Savill, who lives in Kensington, P.E.I., returned to elite level curling in another role and in another country. But a year after he accepted the job as coach for the Lukas Klima team in Czech Republic (now known as Czechia), he discovered Hodgkin lymphoma cancer had returned in 2021.
As Savill worked his way through his second bout of cancer, he continued to coach Team Klima. At the 2021 Olympic qualification event in The Netherlands, Czech Republic placed third at 5-3 in the round-robin. But he needed to win one of his two playoff matches to reach the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. But Klima and his Czech Republic team lost 6-5 to Italy and 8-5 to Denmark to miss the Olympics.
Team Klima and coach Savill, however, finally had reason to celebrate, when they qualified for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games based on their qualification points from the 2024 (ninth place) and 2025 (seventh) world championships.
“It’s pretty emotional,” Savill said in a phone interview with High Achievers columnist Martin Cleary from his first Olympics on Friday. “I’ve been trying to get to the Olympics for 25-plus years. And to finally get to experience it, I love every minute.”
There may be the daily chaos of long lines, constant security checks and having to show your Games accreditation “400 times a day,” he teased, but he’s energized to be around his athletes and their peers at the highest level of curling and sport.
“There are certainly times as a coach on the bench I’d wish I could put on my shoes and play,” he added. “But when I look back on my career and health challenges and see how I’ve taken this team ranked 60-plus in the world to the Olympics, I’m proud of that fact.
“I pinch myself sometimes because I thought my Olympic dream was dead years ago. It’s neat to see this after all we’ve gone through.”
Savill’s first Winter Olympics has been an eye-opener and he’s proud how his Czechia team has dealt with all the elements, despite losing its first three games – 7-4 to Norway’s Magnus Ramsfjell and 7-3 to Switzerland’s Benoit Schwarz-van Berkel on Friday and 8-7 to the United States’ Daniel Casper on Wednesday. Schwarz-van Berkel had a perfect game, scoring 100 per cent on his 16 shots as the skip, while Howard is serving as the Swiss men’s coach.
“The guys have handled it (pressure and crowd noise) really well, being our first Olympics,” Savill said. “They’ve done extremely well. They missed a couple of late shots against the United States, but they controlled the game. It was really positive.
“The Olympics … is a gigantic beast that’s hard to prepare for.”
In his half dozen years with Team Klima, Savill has made the most of his time and limited team funding to qualify Czechia as one of the 10 Olympic teams for men’s curling. Savill doesn’t travel with Team Klima throughout the curling season, but has picked his spots to stage training camps, attend major competitions and improve the players’ technical games and strategy.
The 2025-26 season has been busy for Team Klima with a training camp and tournament in Switzerland in August, two visits to Canada for a total of five weeks, a camp and tournament last month in Switzerland and a camp in early February in Prague.
“Growing up, I had hoped to get to the Olympics,” Savill reflected. “Deep down, I thought I’ll get there. But with my diagnosis of cancer and my career ending, maybe it wasn’t in the cards anymore.
“But being involved with this season, it has become more and more a reality. If you work hard, you can get to the Olympics. I’ll try to soak it all in. But my job is to make them play to their potential. I’m a coach first. The focus is completely on them. I’ll pinch myself in the room.”
Team Homan falls one final point short in loss to USA
Ottawa Curling Club’s Rachel Homan saw her women’s curling record drop to 1-1, after losing a high-scoring, see-saw 9-8 battle to Tabitha Peterson of the United States.
Homan held slim leads of 2-0 and 3-2 after the second and fifth ends respectively before the Americans counted four in the sixth end for a 6-3 advantage.
But Homan rallied for five points over the next three ends with two in the seventh and three in the ninth to move ahead 8-7. But Peterson used the hammer in the 10th end for a decisive two points and the victory.
It was only the second time in 14 career matches that Peterson had defeated Homan, who had won their last six meetings.
In biathlon, 24-year-old Olympic rookie Zach Connelly flashed his potential to contend in the future before his second trip to the shooting range proved costly in the men’s 10-kilometre sprint.
Following perfect shooting at his first station in the prone position, Connelly posted the 12th-best arrival time at the standing shooting station. But four missed targets sent the Louis-Riel high school grad for four trips around the 150-metre penalty loop en route to a finishing time of 25:33.5 for 48th place.
If Connelly had made all 10 shots like the three medallists, he could have challenged for a top-10 finish. France’s Quentin Fillon Maillet placed first in 22:53.1 for his third career Olympic gold to go with his three silver medals.
Nonetheless, Connelly has only twice finished a few places higher in individual World Cup races than his second career Olympic event.
In men’s hockey: Ottawa Senators defenceman Nikolas Matinpalo doesn’t often score a goal, but he did in his Olympic debut. He opened the scoring for Finland, which proceeded to beat Sweden 4-1.
Matinpalo, who has counted only one goal in 75 games over three seasons for Ottawa and two goals in 19 international games for Finland, also had two shots on the Swedish net, was a plus-one and recorded five minutes and 57 seconds of ice time in 17 shifts.
Fourth-pair defenceman Jason Seed of Ottawa played 16 shifts, which accounted for 11:20 of ice time, as Italy lost 3-2 to Slovakia. Seed also was a minus-one.
Former Senators forward Stephane Da Costa picked up one assist and had two shots on goal, but was a minus-two as France fell 6-3 to Czechia in men’s hockey.
There will be no medal for Czechia’s women’s hockey team as it lost 2-0 to Sweden in the quarter-final round. Ottawa Charge head coach Carla MacLeod is the head coach for Czechia. In her first season with Czechia, MacLeod guided her new team to the bronze medal at the world women’s championships.
Charge goalkeeper Gwyneth Philips stopped six shots to earn the shutout as the United States turned back Italy 6-0. Philips also was assessed a two-minute minor penalty in the first period for delay of game.
Gatineau’s Antoine Cyr of Skinouk wasn’t entered in the men’s 10-kilometre interval start free race Friday so he could prepare for the upcoming men’s team sprint with Xavier McKeever.
Pilot Jay Dearborn, a former Carleton University football player, and Ottawa’s Mike Evelyn O’Higgins are scheduled to complete their final two training runs in two-man bobsleigh on Saturday. They ranked 22nd and 25th on Friday in respective times of 57.05 seconds and 28.43 seconds in training.
Ottawa Olympians in action on Feb. 14:
Day 8 Preview: Cédrick Brunet’s 35 seconds of fame nears as Gatineau speed skater carries on family’s Olympic tradition
The action heats up for capital region athletes as the weekend arrives, with seven of them set to compete Saturday.
Rachel Homan and Emma Miskew will be first to start and last to end on the busy day, with about 13 hours between the start of their first match against Great Britain and the finish of their second match of the day against Switzerland. Martin Cleary gives a full rundown on each of Canada’s opponents in this feature.
No word yet on whether Miskew will sneak in some birthday cake between matches. She turns 37 on Feb. 14.
For Cédrick Brunet, in contrast, his life’s work will come to about 35 seconds in the men’s 500 metres speed skating event.
That is the lone competition on the 25-year-old’s schedule at his debut Olympics, and while that may sound like a stressful proposition, it may not match the nervousness he had to endure to qualify to represent Canada at the Games.
Brunet had finished third in his trademark 500 m event at January’s final Canadian Olympic team trials in Quebec City, leaving him just off a guaranteed trip to Milano.
Qualification was, at this point, wrenched out from his hands. The Gatineau-raised skater who’s now based in Quebec City needed either 2022 Olympic silver medalist Laurent Dubreuil or a relative newcomer in Anders Johnson to win the 1,000 m competition to open up an extra qualification slot.
Agonizingly, that 1,000 m race that would decide his fate was not until the next day. Brunet didn’t sleep much that night.
“I was so stressed and waking up like every hour,” Brunet recalled in a pre-Games interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky. “It’s just the worst feeling… you don’t have any control.”
It wouldn’t be the first time a berth at a major event slipped through his fingers. Back in 2021, a 20-year-old Brunet burst onto the scene with a shock third-place finish in the 500 m at Canadian Long Track Championships, qualifying him for the ISU World Cup that winter. Or so he thought.
But a challenge of Speed Skating Canada’s selection process at the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada ultimately gave his racing spot to a veteran athlete who’d finished behind him at the team trials but had posted superior times in past competitions.
Two days before he was set to fly to Poland, Brunet had lost his spot on the team. And then he was denied a chance to improve on his time and to stage an Olympic bid a few months later when the Canadian Olympic trials were cancelled due to COVID.
“It was difficult mentally. I wanted the opportunity to prove that I could make it,” reflected Brunet, who’d been training on the outdoor natural ice at Ottawa’s Brewer Park oval during the pandemic. “But, I had to tell myself that next time [2026] will be the right time.”
Things have had a way of falling into place for Brunet, though, even as life seems intent on spoiling his sleep. He went on to qualify for the later stages of the 2021-22 World Cup that season.
This time, when the 1,000 m finally came at the Olympic trials, Dubreuil and Johnson finished first and second to cement the Gatineau speed skating club product’s place in Italy, Brunet hooting and hollering all the while from the viewing gallery.
It isn’t technically his first time attending the Olympics, mind you – Brunet’s family is chock full of Olympic pedigree. You can read more about Brunet’s parents’, aunt’s and uncle’s Olympic traditions and see the moment he shared with them upon securing his Olympic ticket in this full feature on OttawaSportsPages.ca.
Also in action Saturday: Kayle Osborne and the Canadian women’s hockey team will play in their first playoff round game against Germany.
While the Canadian women have never met Germany in Olympic competition, they’ll of course be heavy favourites to advance to the medal round against an opponent that has just three (little-known) PWHLers in its lineup.
In her second season out of college at Colgate University, cracking the Canadian Olympic team lineup at age 23 was the chief accomplishment for the Ottawa Lady Sens product who is unlikely to appear in the elimination round as Canada’s #3 netminder.
Two-time University of Ottawa Gee-Gees athlete of the year Shilo Rousseau was honoured to officially become an Olympian Wednesday, although the 25-year-old biathlete didn’t have the race she was looking for, finishing 78th with six targets missed on the range.
“Shooting didn’t go my way,” Rousseau, who will compete in the women’s 7.5 km sprint Saturday, noted in a social media post. “On a positive note, I was able to hit all my targets on my last visit at the range in standing position!! Now time to just refocus for Saturday’s race!”
And two-time Olympic medallist Ivanie Blondin will make her first appearance of the Olympics on Saturday, joining fellow Gloucester Concordes Speed Skating Club product Isabelle Weidemann for her third event of the 2026 Games in the quarterfinals of the women’s team pursuit.
The Olympic team pursuit competition follows a different format than the usual World Cup circuit.
In the quarterfinal round, teams will seek one of the four fastest finishing times overall out of the eight entries to move on to the semi-final round.
In the semis and finals (on Tuesday), it’s a head-to-head matchup in each pair, with the fastest team from the quarters facing the fourth-fastest and the second-fastest facing the third-fastest.
Semifinal winners will then compete for the gold medal, while semifinal losers will skate for bronze.
Alongside Valérie Maltais, Weidemann and Blondin are the reigning Olympic champions, and they also completed the 2025-26 World Cup season as the top-ranked team overall with two silver medals and a gold in three races.
Martin Cleary wins national gold award for Best Patriotic Story
And we finish today’s newsletter with a golden moment of our own – amid all of his work on our Ottawa at the Olympics coverage, Ottawa Sports Pages High Achievers columnist Martin Cleary has won a competition of his own.
Last evening at the 17th annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards gala in Toronto, Cleary’s article on Wendy Alexis’ experience at the World Masters Athletics Championships in Florida was chosen as the Best Patriotic Story of 2025.
“I’m shocked. I never expected this honour,” Cleary shared. “The other four entries also were strong and worthy candidates in the category.”
Cleary’s story was a patriotic story in the sense that Alexis won gold medals for Canada and set world records on U.S. soil, but it was about much more than that. It was about how the best Canadian character traits – humility, compassion and friendliness – triumphed over division.
The article came out just as the country was getting its most amped up about the first assault of tariffs and astounding White House actions. It was a time when many victorious athletes might have turned to chest-pumping and waving the flag as a weapon of sorts, but Alexis was instead kind and generous, offering little Canadian flags to the women who joined her on the podium, which brought them to tears.
In turn, she received great warmth and affection from her American hosts. Event organizers in Florida were nervous no one would show up to the championships because of their president’s actions – and this story did highlight the conflicted feelings Alexis had about attending an event in the U.S. – but she met Americans who were welcoming and sympathetic to others outside of their own country, and they connected by focusing on what they shared in common instead of what might divide them.
Sport can most definitely stoke rivalries, but it can also be a force to unite, and Cleary illustrated a little-known story of positive Canada-U.S. relations when so many other headlines were negative.
“Wendy Alexis deserves a major thanks for being so open and honest about telling her story and sharing how her American counterparts and friends felt about the changing political climate between our two countries. Masters track and field has a way of bringing our two nations together,” Cleary added.
“Thank you also to the organizers of the Canadian Online Publishing Awards for recognizing the hard work of journalists and writers throughout our country. Whether in the academic, business, consumer or media categories, these stories are extremely important for the development of our country and keeping our citizens informed.”
Alexis’s performances were certainly a great source of national pride as well. Crowned best in the world multiple times, the Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club sprinter is an inspirational figure who shows it’s possible to pursue world-class competitive sport into your 70s. And Alexis is not only best in the world, but also the best ever, having set world-record times for her age group in the most celebrated sprint events.
Cleary’s article could have stuck to the sports accomplishment and avoided the political noise, but on top of capturing this exceptional sports feat, the veteran scribe captured a greater story beyond the field of play, showcasing why Canada truly is the best.
“Congratulations Martin on this well-deserved honour and for continuing to set such an inspiring standard of dedication and excellence in Canadian sportswriting,” saluted Ottawa Sports Pages executive director Dan Plouffe. “And happy anniversary too! This year makes 50 years since Martin covered his first Olympics in 1976, so what better way could there be to mark a golden anniversary than with a gold medal?”
The Ottawa Sports Pages was also a finalist for Feel Good Story of the year for Plouffe’s article on how soccer provided a “bridge to a new life” for four refugee families who never knew each other in Ukraine but all ended up with boys on the same U12 soccer team with the Ottawa South United Force. Radio-Canada took top prize in that category among fellow finalists The Narwhal, Toronto Today and the Toronto Star.
Last year, the Ottawa Sports Pages received a COPA silver award for Best Continuing Coverage of a Story for its Paris 2024 Ottawa at the Paralympics series.
