In early January, when COVID-19 numbers were rising again and Ontario had just settled in a different order, Melissa Bishop-Nriagu, husband Osi, and their daughter Corinne from Windsor, Ontario, moved to Victoria.
With its Olympic participation on the route, the city on the west coast offered fairer weather for training and fewer COVID-19 restrictions.
Even so, the world 800-meter silver medalist faces an uphill battle to secure a place on the Tokyo Olympic team. Bishop Nriagu, who finished fourth at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, should be one of Canada’s greatest hopes for a medal on the Tokyo track – if she only gets there.
“It’s (brutal),” said Bishop Nriagu. “And even more brutal in view of the pandemic… Conclusion: I need races. And I need them to be quick. “
Athletics isn’t the only sport that qualifies under the Canadian COVID-19 protocols. Canada promised to send what is perhaps the strongest men’s basketball team to Tokyo last year when the Olympics were originally supposed to take place. Now the condensed NBA season is in contradiction to the Olympic qualifying tournament in Victoria in June.
Canada’s boxing team is in quarantine less than three months after a qualifying tournament in Argentina after a team member tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this week.
Athletics Canada was hoping to send a team of 60+ athletes to Tokyo, but only 24 have achieved qualifying standards, largely due to the inability to compete.
Before the pandemic, World Athletics had introduced new qualifying rules that required athletes to either reach a very difficult standard – a quick time, a long throw, etc. – to earn an automatic berth, or make it into the top 48 on complicated points System calculated over the five best main competitions of an athlete.
The default auto-entry for 32-year-old Bishop Nriagu is one minute and 59.50 seconds.
She has the Canadian record of 1: 57.01, but with the 2020 season virtually wiped out by the pandemic, her fastest time is the 2: 00.98 she ran indoors in Boston last February.
“The easiest route is to just ride the Standard and get it over with,” said Bishop Nriagu. “But it’s not easy given our travel circumstances.”
Due to Canada’s international travel protocols, leaving the country to race means two weeks of quarantine on return.
“We took these steps to improve everyone’s health, but it just makes it difficult to qualify,” said Bishop Nriagu, who began planning the temporary move to Victoria back in October.
The Montreal Olympic Trials, June 24-27, are both a chance to hit that standard or earn ranking points to get into the top 48.
“Nationals is actually in the best interests of anyone who does standards because you could go there and win and get enough points to get into the top 48 and be on your plane to Tokyo,” she said.
The reigning Olympic high jump champion, Derek Drouin, is facing an even tougher path than Bishop Nriagu. Drouin has suffered injuries over the past two seasons and is not listed. Since he lives in Toronto, he cannot travel to international meetings.
In the meantime, Athletics Canada is campaigning for a change in the strict qualification rules to allow for a more even playing field in Tokyo.
“It’s just so unfair for Canadians right now, it’s awful,” said Simon Nathan, Senior Performance Director of Athletics Canada. “The concern is: if I don’t travel, I won’t qualify. When I travel there are places that are riskier (for the pandemic) than Canada. And then I come home and have to sit on my bum, for two weeks I literally can’t do anything while my rivals are still training, they’re still competing.
“So it’s stress from all directions.”
Nathan said that between half and two-thirds of the national team’s athletes live in Canada. Athletics Canada recently removed the requirement that every athlete must take the exams. Therefore, runners Andre De Grasse, Moh Ahmed, Gabriela DeBues-Stafford and others who train abroad don’t have to cross the border to race here.
Nathan noted that Canada’s 4 × 100 relay team that won bronze in Rio did not qualify. You could qualify at the World Relays in Poland in early May, but it’s difficult to bring together sprinters from training bases in Canada, the US, and the Caribbean.
The registration deadline for an athlete in any sport for the Tokyo Olympics ends July 5, less than five months away. And the pandemic is severely hampering international and domestic competitions that will ultimately determine the expected 400-450 athletes representing Canada in Tokyo.
“We’re going to see a lot of last minute qualifications in Tokyo,” said Eric Myles, chief sports officer of the Canadian Olympic Committee.
“There will be tough stories, heartbreaking stories for sure. There are so many moving parts. We try as much as we can to avoid injustice, but it is not easy. The virus doesn’t make it easy. “
Canada as a country has received 99 event entries in Tokyo, which corresponds to 239 athletes, according to Myles.
Of Canada’s 35 national summer sports organizations, 28 are still in the process of selecting their Olympic athletes.
“The challenges are enormous,” said Mark Hahto, Summer Sports Director of Own The Podium.
“It is primarily due to the cancellations, uncertainties and postponement of so many events on the summer calendar.”
Entering other countries for events, the situation in the pandemic, Canada’s quarantine requirements, the physical preparation for a qualifying tournament that is rescheduled over and over again and at the same time reaches its climax for Tokyo, are just some of the top athletes, their coaches and their associations juggle .
“The emotional weight of the athletes, the employees and the people they work closely with is not negligible,” said Myles.
Canada is expected to be strong in the new women’s sport of sprint canoeing but has yet to qualify for a C-2 boat.
A continental qualifier in Brazil in April is your chance to do so if it’s not canceled.
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Canoe Kayak Canada must decide whether it is safe for athletes to travel there and how to combat a drop in fitness during a two-week quarantine on their return.
Canada’s Paralympic athletes face an additional level of complexity. In order to compete against other athletes with similar abilities in Tokyo, they must be classified before the games.
“Because of all the cancellations, we have so many athletes who are unclassified that they are unable to compete,” said Hahto.
“Some of them are podium athletes so they cannot compete in the Paralympic Games unless we can take them to a classification event, which in most cases is linked to a world championship or something similar or some type of qualification. “
“I don’t want to say it’s chaos because it’s probably a little too dramatic, but it’s awful.”
Former Olympic medalists, world champions and other proven international top performers could expect to be hand-selected for the 2021 Canadian team if the qualification process goes completely sideways.
Swimming Canada recently appointed six swimmers, including freestyle champion Penny Oleksiak and world champion backstroker Kylie Masse, to the Olympic team.
The remainder of the swimming team will be determined based on exams postponed from April to May and a qualifier for June.
For athletes like Bishop-Nriagu and Drouin, Athletics Canada is bound by the rules of World Athletics.
“We can only choose people who are qualified within the system, we cannot go beyond,” said Nathan. “We will send as many as possible. If there is no flexibility, if they don’t change the system and the borders in Canada remain closed, then we will likely have a smaller team than we would have had. “
There are athletics meetings in the US, Australia and other countries while Canada is currently unable to do anything. Nathan noted that Toronto has excellent interiors at York University – but only allows 10 people at a time, including athletes, coaches, and civil servants.
“And people make a huge sacrifice to get to the Games, they park all kinds of things, they park their lives, they have families, their education, their careers to get that. And because the games were postponed, they had to extend it for another year, ”said Nathan.
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“Then to go through all of that and be in this dilemma: I can’t even get in enough competitions because things are out of my control and I can see other people doing things that I literally can’t do … it’s a lot very difficult.
There are also athletes who are not yet in the prime of their careers and for whom a first Olympics is a second valuable experience, who run the risk of falling through the cracks if they don’t get a fair chance to prove themselves.
“If we don’t get some of these NextGen athletes, these new athletes who are really showing up, who are in the bladder, and they’re actually missing out on their opportunity to get their feet wet in their first Olympics that we know they are Have a huge impact If you just look at the data, it’s really critical, ”said Hahto.
OlympicsTokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games
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