Canadian Sport Institute-Pacific proudly keeps an Olympic medal count online. It showed that four of sa国际传媒鈥檚 seven gold medals from the just-completed 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics came from CSI-Pacific-affiliated athletes, along with one of sa国际传媒鈥檚 six silvers and five of sa国际传媒鈥檚 11 bronzes for a total of 10 of sa国际传媒鈥檚 24 medals.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a banner day for us with 57 per cent of sa国际传媒鈥檚 golds and 42 per cent of overall 颅medals,鈥� said Noah Wheelock of Victoria, general manager of CSI-Pacific, which is funded 颅federally, provincially and by the national and provincial sports federations.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a tribute to sa国际传媒 as a training base and as a centre for sports science. We call ourselves the team behind the team.鈥�
With campuses in Victoria, UBC and Whistler, and regional centres in Nanaimo-North Island and the Okanagan, CSI-Pacific has helped turn sa国际传媒 into an Olympic powerhouse 鈥� one of the engine rooms for Team 颅sa国际传媒 at the Games.
鈥淭here were also many personal bests set by CSI-Pacific-affiliated athletes, and we are as thrilled about that as we are about the medallists,鈥� said Wheelock.
The specially built heat-dome system, on CSI-Pacific鈥檚 Camosun College Interurban campus, helped prepare 182 of the 370 Canadian Olympic athletes for the searing temperatures and humidity they faced in Tokyo.
鈥渟a国际传媒鈥檚 performance amid the Tokyo weather conditions was not by accident, but by design,鈥� said Wheelock.
CSI-Pacific is part of the matrix of support systems in place on the Island for Olympians. It includes 94 Forward, the legacy fund from the Victoria Commonwealth Games which has targeted support for Triathlon sa国际传媒 and the the Athletics sa国际传媒 Western Hub Middle Distance Centre, both based in Victoria, and a new initiative with Cycling sa国际传媒. It鈥檚 a mesh system.
鈥淲e are one piece of the puzzle,鈥� said Wheelock.
The system offers athletes the choice of centralizing, or using the facilities on a drop-in basis, as 800-metre runner Melissa Bishop did over the winter in the middle-distance Western Hub at PISE.
鈥淲e felt your support all the way over in Japan,鈥� said Bishop, of her Tokyo Olympic journey, and all the people from Victoria to Windsor, Ont., who made it possible for her to have it.
鈥淚t was odd not to have fans in the stands, but everyone did a really great job staying connected and supportive at home.鈥�
Notable Island-centralized national teams are Langford-based Rugby sa国际传媒, with the men eighth and the 2016 Rio bronze-medallist women ninth at the Tokyo Games in sevens, and Rowing sa国际传媒, which produced Olympic gold and bronze in Tokyo. Rowing sa国际传媒 will depart its decades-long home on Elk Lake but will remain on the Island based at Quamichan Lake in North Cowichan.
Also notably, the Canadian Olympic canoe-kayak team that produced silver and bronze in Japan trained for Tokyo on Shawnigan Lake when it was unable to access its usual winter base in Florida due to the closed border. The sixth-place Canadian artistic swim team trained at Saanich Commonwealth Place before departing for Japan, showing that situational drop-ins can be as important as full-time centralization.
