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Newsletter By Jackson Starr, Martin Cleary, Adam Beauchemin, Dan Plouffe & Kaitlyn LeBoutillier
The Olympic artistic gymnastics competition officially wrapped up on Monday at the Paris 2024 Games, but Ottawa’s Sam Zakutney hopes his team’s performance will have a lasting impact that fuels future Canadian gymnasts.
Competing at the Olympics was a dream come true for Zakutney, who had just started getting into competitive gymnastics as a young boy when Canada had last qualified a full men’s gymnastics team for an Olympics at Beijing 2008.
The 25-year-old made his Olympic debut last week and helped the Canadian men’s team to appearance in the final, where they finished eighth.
“The main goal of heading into these Olympic Games that me and my team decided on was to try to qualify for the team final, which is something that we had never accomplished ever,” Zakutney said in conversation with Ottawa Sports Pages reporter Jackson Starr. “Having come fourth at the world championships last year, we knew that was definitely a possibility, and we were ready to really make history in that sense.”
Zakutney noted that his mentality entering the first competition, needing to qualify for the final, versus the second one was very different at the Games.
“During qualification, I was extremely nervous,” recalled the National Capital/Ottawa Gymnastics Centre product. “Butterflies galore, nothing could prepare me for that level of stress, because it was very much the day to really make it and it was the moment that I had been working for for so many years.
“But then once we did qualify for the team final, the second day of competition was just absolute enjoyment, relief, happiness, and I just relished the moment of being able to wear the maple leaf and do some great gymnastics in front of a huge crowd.”
On the first day in qualification, Canada scored 247.794 points to finish eighth, which secured the last available position in the team final. For his part, Zakutney’s highest score of the day came on the high bar, with 14.033 points.
“I was definitely pleased with my high bar on both days,” Zakutney indicated. “I hit really good routines and I stuck the dismount cold both days, so that’s always a nice plus, a nice little last impression. But I think every other routine on the first day was pretty decent for myself. I had hit six for six, but I wouldn’t say it was to the calibre that I was hoping it would be.”
In the team final, Zakutney scored a 14.333 on the parallel bars, a 13.500 on the high bar, a 13.400 on the floor exercise, a 13.266 on the pommel horse. On the parallel bars and the high bars specifically, the emotion was evident for Zakutney as he let out a big cheer after landing the dismounts.
“During the team final, the high bar routine specifically was, I don’t know, it felt like I couldn’t have done it any better than that in that moment,” Zakutney explained. “Then to stick it again, and hearing the uproar afterwards, you could see me. I just swung my arms down, a big smile on my face, just looked around, and that’s when I realized, wow, I pulled off exactly what I wanted to in the moment, and now I’m just listening to all these people cheer. It was like a pure dream come true.”
A big key to excelling in the big moment was trusting in the years of practice and training he’d put in, Zakutney added.
“I’m definitely very aware of everything that’s going on and what my body is feeling during every single skill that I’m doing,” outlined the Franco-Cité high school grad. “I’m just so present. I’m so in the moment. I’m just completely honed in mentally and physically speaking. I know every single detail of my body, where it is and what it’s supposed to do and what I’m supposed to feel during every move.
“I just go off of that feeling. I don’t really think, ‘okay, this skill is coming up. I have to do it well, or else I’m gonna choke, and then it’s gonna screw me up to the next one.’ My mind kind of goes blank, but I just go by feel. It’s a little more autopilot, I suppose.”
It has been a long and sometimes arduous journey to the Olympics for Zakutney. Having shown his talent for the sport since he was young and rising up the ranks to the NCAA level at Penn State University, Zakutney had dealt with multiple major injuries ahead of the Games.
“I’m definitely going to appreciate the journey a lot more,” he indicated. “There were definitely a lot of rough patches, a lot of bad days leading up to these Games. Over the last few years, it’s been a very challenging road for me, physically, personally.
“But the fact that I was able to persevere with a great support system behind me and to make this dream a reality and just leave a great impression on the largest sports stage in the entire world, it’s just so validating and so reassuring that all the hard work that I put out finally paid off.
“It kind of gets me a little excited to see how the next few years could really play out, if I follow the same mindset and maybe make a few adjustments where I think I need to. But it gets me excited for what else I could accomplish.”
Zakutney was thrilled to perform on the big stage alongside teammates with whom he shares a strong connection.
“This accomplishment was years and years in the making,” the Penn State engineering graduate underlined. “I’ve known every one of these guys on this team for as long as I can remember. We’ve really strengthened that bond amongst each other, and we’ve really honed in on where our vision will lie, where our vision lies, and where we need to place our efforts for the collective, the team.”
Looking ahead, Zakutney plans to continue competing, while also helping to build a strong foundation for the sport in Canada.
“I hope this just inspires the young generation that Canada has now, for the second time, proven itself that it can be one of the best countries in the world in the sport of men’s gymnastics,” Zakutney highlighted. “I really hope it gets them all fired up and ready to keep working hard to continue that legacy forward.
“I’ll still be around to keep doing my part to make sure we keep meeting the standard that we now set this year, but I’m excited to see how they’re going to follow.”
Ariane Bonhomme takes 8th in team pursuit
Track cyclist Ariane Bonhomme was the only Ottawa athlete competing at the Paris Olympics on Wednesday.
After finishing eighth on Tuesday and qualifying for the heat round Wednesday, the Canadian women’s pursuit team of Bonhomme, Erin Attwell, Maggie Coles-Lyster and Sarah van Dam collected an improved time of 4:10.471, which was better than their previous day’s time of 4:12.205 in the qualifiers.
It still wasn’t as fast as other nations, however, and sent the Canadians on to a head-to-head ride against Australia to determine seventh place.
In that final race, Canada came out with a slower start, falling behind the Australians by just over a second in the early laps.
Canada did fight back closer at the finish, but it was not enough to edge past the Aussies. The Canadians finished with a time of 4:12.097, 0.549 seconds back of Australia’s 4:11.548 to place eighth.
Bonhomme noted yesterday that she had to take antibiotics after she and a few teammates had become ill the day before their first race.
Bonhomme is slated to race once more at the Olympics in the women’s madison on Friday, though that event has not been a key focus of the Canadian team’s preparations.
Ottawa Olympians in action on August 8:
Preview: ‘Late bloomer’ Eliezer Adjibi ready to stand beside world’s best at debut Olympics
For a brief period of time and confusion, a disbelieving and celebratory Eliezer Adjibi thought he was the Canadian men’s 100-metre sprint champion at the 2024 national championships.
Three or four minutes later, he learned that the scoreboard was wrong and Andre De Grasse had beaten him by .03 seconds.
“Nobody likes to lose, but I’m still OK with it,” Adjibi reflected in a pre-Games interview with High Achievers columnist Martin Cleary. “(Being three one-hundredths of a second back) gives me more confidence. I can compete with these guys. I’m excited for that.”
On top of a silver medal, there was an even better silver lining coming: the 23-year-old was selected for the Canadian Olympic team as a potential runner for the men’s 4×100 m relay.
It was a moment of “immense pride” for Adjibi’s coach Lyndon George, a former 400 m runner for his native St. Lucia in the eighties, as his C.A.N.I. Athletics club officially had its first Olympian. George said Adjibi is “very meticulous with a work ethic of the highest level.”
“Eliezer started training the summer after Grade 11,” George recalled by email. “In Grade 10, he was not good enough to make his school’s relay team. In his fifth year (of sprinting), with a sense of self confidence and commitment, he has made himself a world-class athlete and Olympian. He is the epitome of the late bloomer. He is just scratching the surface of his potential.”
Adjibi moved to Ottawa from Benin in Grade 7. For his first three years in high school at Louis-Riel, he showed potential to be a speedster as he casually trained with his friends. But he was reluctant to leave soccer with the Cumberland United organization as he was learning so much about the sport.
Adjibi enjoyed training with his school friends, who were on the Louis-Riel track and field team. On occasion, he would test his speed in a challenge race against them and saw he could keep pace.
Lotfi Khaida, a two-time Olympian (1988 and 1992) for Algeria in long jump and triple jump, noticed Adjibi when he was a coach at the Louis-Riel Dome. Khaida encouraged Adjibi to try sprinting.
When Adjibi was in Grade 12, he decided to give track a try and his curiosity, drive and dedication delivered him a new sport.
“I’ve become a lot stronger at C.A.N.I.,” noted Adjibi, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Ottawa. “For sprinting, you need to be strong. I didn’t have a big background in the sport, but I’m starting now.”
Adjibi was hampered by a number of injuries since he ventured into the sport seriously over the past five years, but a strong 2024 season has vaulted him high enough to be considered to run the relay for Canada at the Olympics (though the four athletes who won gold for Canada at the 2022 world championships – De Grasse, Aaron Brown, Brandon Rodney and Jerome Blake – are all back in Paris and are eligible to run too).
“He’s a talented young man and has been for two to three years,” said Athletics Canada head coach Glenroy Gilbert. “But injuries have kept him from performing. I’m happy he made the team and demonstrated he’s among the best in the country.”
You can read Cleary’s full pre-Games feature on Adjibi here.
Relays are Glenroy Gilbert’s time to shine as a coach
Amid his 11th Olympic Games appearance – five as an athlete, six as a coach – Ottawa’s Glenroy Gilbert has already seen Canadian athletes win two gold medals as a bronze midway through the track and field competition, and Athletics Canada’s head coach would love to see a few more podium performances in the upcoming relays.
The 4×100 m relay semifinals are tomorrow, and Canadian teams will need a top-3 performance in their heat or have one of the two next-fastest times to reach Friday’s final.
Without a finalist in any of the men’s or women’s 100 or 200 m, Canada will likely be disregarded by many as a medal threat. But the Canadian men have hit the Olympic podium before without any athletes who ran under 10 seconds individually in the 100 m. They made up for a lack of pure speed with impeccable technical execution in their exchanges, and that’s where Gilbert’s role as a national team coach can perhaps be most crucial.
“As a coach, you do impact the athletes, who make it happen by bringing to bear all they have learned in practice,” the Atlanta 1996 4×100 relay Olympic champion noted in a pre-Games interview with Cleary.
Gilbert, who’s been Athletics Canada’s head coach since 2017, said that confidence and belief are other essential tools for underdogs to rise to the top.
“When I started, we were lucky to win one medal (across all athletics events). I see a shift in the athletes and a shift in the coaching to inspire the athletes to go after more,” he highlighted. “At times, I struggled to build the relay team to get more medals and to get the athletes to feel at the same level that we can compete with the USA and Jamaica. To get that mentality has taken a while. We are all in lock step now with our system.”
Jacqueline Madogo looks to carry momentum forth for relays
Ottawa’s Jacqueline Madogo is expected to be part of the Canadian women’s 4×100 m relay entry, along with Gatineau’s Audrey Leduc. The 24-year-old Olympic rookie is coming off two big personal-bests from the 200 m competition.
“It’s clicking at the right time, which I’m happy about,” Madogo said via the Canadian Olympic Committee after her semifinal race. “The season has been going great, so this is just continuing to build and progressing.”
Also in action on Thursday will be Toshka Besharah-Hrebacka and Natalie Davison. The Rideau Canoe Club kayakers made their Olympic debuts together in the same boat on Tuesday for the Canadian women’s kayak four team, while Davison paddled again in the double competition.
The semi-finals and finals for the K-4 event are both tomorrow. Canada will need to be among the top-4 in their four-boat semi to reach the A final.
And though water polo goalkeeper Jessica Gaudreault has been eliminated from medal contention, she and the Canadian women’s team still have a chance to match Canada’s best-ever Olympic result in the sport.
After falling in the quarterfinals to a very strong Spain team, Canada faces Italy tomorrow in the 5-8 classification semifinal. The program’s previous best finish was fifth at the Sydney 2000 Games when another former Ottawa resident, Rachel Riddell, was in goal for Canada.
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