It was a quiet Sunday night in quarantine in Jacksonville when Andre De Grasse’s phone began buzzing.
There was one text message, then another, then another after that.
“Did you hear the news?” he was asked over and over again.
“What news?” was his reply.
And he went thumbing through his emails and there it was, the bold and stunning news from Team Canada. And suddenly, Canada’s greatest sprinter had been stopped cold. Just like that. They will not be sending a representative to the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, assuming there is a Summer Olympics in July.
“You don’t know what to feel,” said De Grasse, Canada’s most famous summer Olympian, still digesting the Canadian pullout in an interview on Monday afternoon. “At first, it’s oh wow, this is surprising. And at first, you haven’t really had a chance to process it. You need time. I have mixed emotions right now. I didn’t get much sleep last night. In the back of my mind, I was hoping that somehow it wasn’t real. But yea, I understand it, I have to respect the decision. And hopefully the Games get postponed.”
Hopefully Canadian IOC member Dick Pound is correct and the 2020 Summer Olympics will be moved to 2021.
All Olympic athletes have their own journeys and stories to tell and in their own ways each of them are remarkable. But maybe none are more remarkable than the sprinters. They spend four years preparing for a 10 second race. A gun goes off and it’s all a blaze. Everything comes down to that day, that moment in time, the signature event of every Summer Games. No time for error. No time for do-overs.
De Grasse doesn’t just run the 100. He runs the 200 metres, probably his best event. He is part of the Canadian 4 X 100 relay team. When he left Rio four summers ago, he left with three medals from his three events, all three of them raced against the most decorated sprinter in history, Usain Bolt. If anything has been learned about De Grasse through Pan American Games in Toronto, through world championships, through the Olympics in Rio, it’s that he has that special gift, the rare ability to be at his absolute best on the day it matters the most.
Life for him and so many athletes has been all about preparing for Tokyo, peaking in July, gearing everything to be prepared to run the races the whole world tunes in for. Then a few weeks back, his training was altered. His facility was closed down. And still as athletes, forever optimistic by nature, he shifted to Plan B. There was a park near his house. He started running on the soccer field there. Then that field got shut down – and he got shut down and he started running around his house, in his house, doing pushups and pullups and core work, just to keep training in some way.
“Not everything always goes your way,” said De Grasse. 25. “I’m pretty good at adjusting. Things change along the journey. I’m used to that.”
But in the back of your mind you start thinking. Your mind starts racing. You think: This is what you do, this is who you are.
And then it’s being taken from you the way the coronavirus has stolen so much from so many of us.
And De Grasse started thinking. Are the Olympics safe? Will the Games take place? How safe is the world right now? Four months to go seemed like a long time away to him. And then it was over in a Sunday night email.
“I have to admit I was anxious about what was going on,” he said. “I did get nervous. “I just tried to stay focused and not let it get to me. But we live in a social media world and your phone is blowing up every second. At the end of day I was hopeful the Olympics would go on, I think a lot of us were, if it could. I was hoping that. I think we all were.”
Canada doesn’t often lead the world in sports other than hockey, but it led the world with its Olympic determination on Sunday night. It started a wave of common sense that seemed to take over Olympic thinking around the globe. Most of the time, we’re a small voice in a large sporting world. But the Canadian Olympic Committee, led by president Trisha Smith, became internationally important with their first-in-line determination to pull out of Tokyo. The decision must have been particularly heartbreaking for Smith, who as a 1980 rower was a member of the Canadian team that boycotted the Moscow Summer Games. She knows better than anyone what it’s like to lose a Games. These won’t be a Games lost, just one pushed to a later date. But some athletes won’t survive another year either because of age or financial constraints or an inability to qualify.
“We’re humans first,” said Andre De Grasse. part pragmatic, part philosophical, part disappointed. “I understand they don’t want to put the athletes or anybody else in jeopardy. I respect that.”
He respects that, understands that, accepts that, but it still stings. Your world has been shut down. You can’t help but have mixed emotions.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
