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Newsletter by Keiran Gorsky, Dan Plouffe & Martin Cleary
As Mikaël Kingsbury claimed Canada’s first gold medal at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, Ottawa athletes experienced something of their own redemption day.
On a windy afternoon in Tesero, Gatineau’s Antoine Cyr, Xavier McKeever, Rémi Drolet and Tom Stephen achieved Canada’s best-ever result in Olympic cross-country relay with a fifth-place finish; 27-year-old Cyr was the eldest of the youthful quartet.
“We had no idea that this was the best result Canada’s ever had in an Olympic relay,” McKeever said afterwards. “So getting to know that was pretty crazy at the finish line.”
The 30 km-long relay is divided among four skiers, the first two competing in the classic technique, the latter two in freestyle.
The 10 skiers in the first leg stayed in a remarkably close cluster over their two laps. McKeever was in fourth place when he handed off to Cyr. The Club Shinouk skier crept into medal position and stayed there until the final stretch of the classic portion, where he fell to sixth just before handing off to Drolet. Cyr’s time accounted for 16:45.7 of Canada’s total 1:05:36.8.
“Xav put me in an amazing spot,” said Cyr after the race. “I wanted the pace to be hard, and I think I did that… I would have loved to place the team in a bit of a better spot for the exchange to Rem. But I did my best and I was stoked to put the team up there.”
Drolet fought back to fifth place and 23-year-old Stephen stuck the landing in the freestyle. Norwegian star Johannes Høsflot Klæbo glided away into the distance in the final portion to collect the ninth Olympic gold of his career.
“It’s kind of crazy to think I’m competing in this era with a guy, who will probably go down as the greatest of all time,” noted McKeever.
The result marked a major improvement over the men’s relay in Beijing 2022, which Cyr and Drolet were also a part of, when Canada finished in 11th. Cyr had also been disappointed at his previous event, when he failed to make the cut for the heats in the men’s sprint.
Cyr will likely race in the team sprint free on Wednesday. He finished fifth in that event in 2022 alongside Graham Ritchie.
Valérie Grenier achieves best individual result of Games in her final event
After a disappointing showing in super-G when she slipped off the track on Thursday, St. Isidore, ON’s Valérie Grenier left her Olympic village in Fiames and spent the following day with her family.
Together, on a comfortingly flat trail, they went cross-country skiing and enjoyed a hearty lunch at Grenier’s favourite pizzeria in nearby Toblach – an establishment the Canadian alpine team frequents whenever they compete in Italy. It wasn’t the sort of luxury Grenier was afforded four years ago in Beijing, where she surely could have used a morale boost after recording a DNF in her only event.
“It’s definitely nice this year that we can actually have our family here and get to spend time with them and be a little more free to do whatever we want,” Grenier noted in an interview over the phone with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky on Saturday.
People were equally keen to lift her spirits back at home. At the aptly named École secondaire publique Le Sommet in Hawkesbury that Grenier graduated from in 2014, dozens of students gathered in the auditorium to watch her Thursday event projected onto a big screen. Grenier wasn’t aware she had such a loyal contingent supporting her from her old high school.
“That’s so sweet. That makes me feel really happy and really, really touched and supported,” she smiled. “It’s nice to know that people are watching and I’m trying my best to also inspire the next generation.”
It was the kind of off-day Grenier needed to force her mind off an Olympics that had not treated her particularly well. She was also disqualified from her opening downhill event on Tuesday for starting after her allotted window due to an equipment blunder.
“It’s hard to accept. At first, I was pretty down on myself… almost ashamed in a way because I really didn’t ski the way I wanted to,” she said. “Just spending time with my family and trying to think of other things was helpful. And now moving on to the giant slalom, I just want to focus on that, keep my focus there.”
In giant slalom today, Grenier had her individual showing at these Olympics in what has historically been her strongest event – one for which she made headlines in December when she claimed the bronze on her home hill at Mont-Tremblant in a FIS World Cup.
The event consists of two runs, the latter with markedly sharper turns than the former at these Olympics. Skiers weave between gates farther apart than in slalom, but closer than the super-G race Grenier failed to finish – a failure she attributed to the quantity of blind gates on the slope as opposed to the thick fog emphasized on broadcast that day.
“You just had to know exactly where to go,” Grenier explained. “But even if you knew exactly where to go, you didn’t necessarily know how it was going to run or how much speed you were going to have when you got there.”
She appeared substantially more prepared for her first run today, even as an early stumble left her in the red the rest of the way downhill. Grenier took a more direct path down the slope than most of her peers, hugging close to the inside for an eight-place finish with a time of 1:14.05.
The result left her with an outside shot to win Canada’s first skiing medal in a technical event in 50 years. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be on the sinuous 49-gate course that followed. Grenier lost much of her momentum winding down the middle portion of the slope to a 16th-place finish – her combined time left her 13th out of 76 competitors.
“I’m disappointed with myself. I had high hopes for the giant slalom, and it just didn’t go as planned,” Grenier admitted after the event. “For the second run, I just tried to move up as much as possible, but it was a very turny course and I struggled to find my rhythm. I was behind every turn at a top and could not get the speed going.”
You might sympathize if Grenier developed some superstitious vendetta against this slope that has given her so much trouble – from the disqualifications, to the equipment malfunctions, to the injury she suffered here in 2024. Grenier desperately wanted to podium at these Olympics, but she still rejected that framing.
“I’d say it’s actually a slope that I love,” she affirmed in her interview on Friday. “I wouldn’t say it’s bad luck. I think it’s normal to have good results and bad results in places. It just happens that way. But it’s a place I love and I’m going to keep loving my whole life.”
On Sunday, Grenier added: “Deep down, I might have been putting too much pressure on myself. I don’t usually get nervous in the start but now I was a bit because of being at the Olympics. Even though my results are disappointing, it was very nice to have my family here at the Games, compared to what we experienced in Beijing. It was precious to have their support in the finish. I also enjoyed the life in the Olympic Village.”
In biathlon, Zach Connelly was the top Canadian finisher in the men’s 12.5 km pursuit, finishing in 41st out of 60 competitors. Although he missed three of his first five prone shots, Connelly went on to hit 13 of his remaining 15. His 75% hit rate was his best at these Olympics.
Ottawa’s Shilo Rousseau was not entered in Sunday’s women’s 10 km pursuit, which featured just one Canadian who placed 58th of 60. The women’s 4×6 km relay takes place Wednesday.
Ottawa Olympians in action on Feb. 16:
Day 10 Preview: Jay Dearborn ready for second Olympics, first as bobsleigh pilot
There is an impossible quiet as you hurtle down a bobsled track. Not the sled, mind you, that scrapes and screeches over the ice, gradually sucking you to the floor of the contraption as it picks up speed. Quiet is the scattered crowd that strains to be heard above it all.
It is this eerie silence that gets to pilot and former Carleton University Ravens football player Jay Dearborn, who played three seasons in the CFL before his bobsled days. Dearborn used to thrive on the cheers and jeers of a raucous crowd.
“As a football player in a big stadium, you can kind of lean on the home crowd to get you excited and get you going,” Dearborn recalled in a pre-Games interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky. “It’s different… I’ve learned to find that energy elsewhere, a little bit more internally.”
Dearborn is one of three bobsledders with Ottawa roots in the sport competing in Cortina d’Ampezzo. The 31-year-old competed in the Beijing 2022 Olympics as a brakeman but will be in the pilot’s seat this time, while Mike Evelyn O’Higgins will provide horsepower for the push-off at the back of the sled for the two-man competition, which will have its first two of four heats Monday.
Like Evelyn O’Higgins, Dearborn works an engineer, which can serve as a gift to have so many creative thinkers on the team, though, at times, it becomes a little too tempting to splice their worlds together.
An inordinate amount of time can be invested in unknowable minutiae. Maybe things would have turned out different if only they had turned differently past that corner of the track. When every hundredth of a second matters, you can find yourself losing sight of the big picture.
“It’s great because it’s cool to have like-minded people around you who are kind of interested in the physics of the sport and how this all works and how to optimize our efficiency,” Dearborn highlighted. “But at the same time, you can get down a rabbit hole pretty quickly.”
Working simultaneously while trying to be the best in the world is also a bit of necessity for Canadian bobsledders, with athletes having to pay tens of thousands in team fees. Dearborn sports a Township of Stone Mills logo on his Canadian kit to recognize the contributions of individuals and businesses from his tiny hometown of Yarker (northwest of Kingston).
In his hour of need, small business owners and nonprofits came to help. The owner of Mike’s Pizza, a family-run pizzeria in Sydenham where Dearborn attended high school, helped organize a series of fundraisers throughout the summer.
Dearborn isn’t sure whether crowdfunding campaigns will be sustainable in the long-term. Their help means everything, he maintained, but in the midst of economic uncertainty, it should hardly be expected. As it so often is in elite amateur sport, future sources of funding remain uncertain.
“It’s tough when you go to your small community, right? You know they’re facing economic struggles as well,” Dearborn outlined. “And I think that’s what makes it so special, in them supporting me.”
The expectations for the Canadian men’s bobsleigh team are very low for the Olympics, particularly in the two-man event where Canadian sleds have finished outside the top-20 more often than not.
Dearborn, who collected one gold, four silver and seven bronze medals in 14 North American Cup races this season, ranked inside the top-20 just once in six official training runs, despite recording the fastest start time in the first two.
The four-man event offers better prospects for the Canadians, but a competition inside the competition that will surely bring a lot of pride will be to see if the Canadians can get on an unofficial podium for the best start times in the two-man event.
Dearborn established the Canadian push record for a pilot at the Calgary Ice House this season and Evelyn O’Higgins has been Canada’s top pusher for several years.
Also in action on Monday will be Rachel Homan and Emma Miskew, who are facing pretty much a must-win scenario after losing three consecutive matches by one point in women’s curling. The Ottawa Curling Club rink are currently 1-3 and will face China in the morning and then Japan in the afternoon.
And the Canadian women’s hockey team will have the chance to guarantee their place on the podium in the semifinals when they meet Switzerland, which topped Finland 1-0 in the quarterfinals. Ottawa’s Kayle Osborne was the backup goalie as Canada topped Germany 5-1 in their quarters.
