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About a hundred young athletes hoping to someday make it big showed off their skills to talent scouts at a Winnipeg event Saturday morning.
RBC Training Ground participants were put through a series of tests that displayed their power, speed, strength and endurance to representatives of more than a dozen national sports organizations looking for future Olympians — with a chance to receive financial backing.
“It can be the start of their journey,” said Olympian Marion Thénault, a freestyle skier from Sherbrooke, Que., who won a bronze medal in the Beijing 2022 Games.
She should know, since she’s among several Olympic athletes who have been recruited at RBC Training Ground events over the years.
“For me personally, it changed my life,” Thénault said.
“I moved out of my parents and started to train full-time in this new sport that I didn’t know much about. And being selected to receive the funding allowed me to do that, allowed me to pour everything I had into that new sport and get to the national team quite quickly.”
The event held at the University of Winnipeg’s Duckworth Centre was among a series of qualifiers ahead of a national final which will be held in the fall.
The top 100 athletes in the qualifying stage will be invited to participate. Thirty-five out of the top 100 will then be selected to receive funding assistance to be used for travel, competition, coaching, nutrition and other sports-related costs.
‘It’s inspiring’
Colin Klessens hopes to make it all the way to the top 35.
“That’d be awesome because I know I can, like, keep on pushing and get better,” he said.
At 14, Colin was among the youngest participants at the Winnipeg event. He was “a little nervous because they’re all so tall.”
Still, he did pretty well on the “beep test,” in which participants ran 20 metres back and forth to gauge their endurance.
“I had a chat with one of the [coaches] to do some rock climbing or something,” the boy said.
Colin came to the Winnipeg qualifier from Altona with his friend, Ryder Loewen, who’s also 14.
Ryder, who hopes to someday be a top-level skier, said it was “awesome” to meet athletes who made it all the way to the Olympics at the event.
“It’s inspiring to see … that you can get better,” Ryder said, adding that to follow your dreams, you’ve got to “put the work in.”
Leanne Taylor, a paratriathlete from Oak Bluff, Man., who won a bronze medal in the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, said it was exciting to see “the hunger and energy and enthusiasm” young athletes showed at the event.
“I just want them to be super open-minded,” Taylor said, adding that she only discovered paratriathlon after the cycling accident that paralyzed her from the waist down.
The athletes “may fall in love with bobsleigh or skeleton or archery or something that’s really different from what they originally were exposed to in school.”
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