PARIS — Taking a page from the nightly parade of medallists in the Inner Harbour during the 1994 Commonwealth Games, more than 35,000 people gather at Champions Park here daily, at Trocadéro Gardens with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop, to cheer on and honour the 2024 Olympic medallists from all nations. It’s another touch in what has been a magnificently staged Games. The golden Canadian 4x100 men’s relay team will be up on the stage today after their stunning bolt around the track Friday at the Stade de France.
Meanwhile, the gold medal by hammer-thrower Ethan Katzberg of Nanaimo and silver medals by the Langford-based women’s rugby sevens team and the North Cowichan-based women’s rowing eight kept alive the Island’s record of producing medallists for every Summer Olympics since 1984 at Los Angeles, with the exception of Seoul in 1988.
But most athletes competing here will, of course, go home empty-handed. Their ceremonial moments are more modest — quiet hugs with family and friends away from the limelight once their competition ends. Not all Olympic stories conclude on the podium. Most of them are relative because the overwhelming majority of the 10,714 athletes here competing in the 2024 Summer Games are not medallists. But they can forever call themselves Olympians and tell their children and grandchildren they are part of a very select group to be able to do so. They have also earned the right to place the five-ring tattoo, as many of them do, on the body part of their choice. Despite the Games’ up and downs, and their many travails, the Olympic rings remain the most recognized non-religious symbol in the world.
As such, the Olympics provide an intense, and often overwhelming emotional stage, whether an athlete ends up on the podium or not. Island athletes Adam Keenan, a hammer thrower, and Jeremy Bagshaw, a swimmer, finally became Olympians in Paris in their 30s after years of striving to become just that but just missing in their attempts to qualify for Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020.
Keenan’s mother Patti and aunt Cindy held pictures of family members who have passed on, including Adam’s dad Brian Keenan and grandmother Patsy Stewart, during Adam Keenan’s Olympic moment at the Stade de France. It is not always the podium moments that sear in the memory at an Olympics. Keenan’s dad died when Adam was just 10 and his grandmother, who never missed a meet in which Adam competed, died last year before he finally became an Olympian. Keenan was thinking about all that in what was both his Olympic debut and swan song. The Lambrick Park Secondary-graduate was among the 32 best hammer throwers in the world here, including fellow-Islander and John Barsby Secondary graduate and Olympic gold-medallist Katzberg, and Keenan placed just one spot out of the 12-man final in 13th place. It was heartbreak, something he is used to after fourth and fifth placings in the 2018 Gold Coast and 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, but he was finally on the greatest stage afforded any athlete. And that counts for a lot.
“It was the last throw of my career in a 15-year journey, and I can say it was in the Olympics, and that I left it all out there,” said the 30-year old, who will now begin training for a career in the physiotherapy field.
Meanwhile, to show the respect the Canadian swim team has for Bagshaw, he was named one of four team captains for the Paris Olympics. This is a powerhouse team that won eight swim medals here in Paris. Bagshaw didn’t win one of them but he was a team leader all the stars, including Summer McIntosh, looked up to with an admiration that went beyond making the podium or not. His Canada teammates were happy that he finally got to call himself an Olympian.
“It was a big relief just to make the team,” said the 32-year-old Bagshaw, who has been trying since the trials for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
While fellow Island Club swimmers Ryan Cochrane went on to win Olympic medals at Beijing 2008 and London 2012, and Hilary Caldwell in Rio 2016, Bagshaw bagged Commonwealth and Pan Am Games medals, but making the Olympics kept eluding him by the narrowest of margins. Until now. Until Paris.
“I grew up in Victoria, which has a history of athletes who have competed in the Olympics,” said Bagshaw, who is fluent in English, French and Mandarin.
“I saw what athletes like [triathlete] Simon Whitfield and other swimmers did at the Olympic Games and hopefully I too can [act as inspiration] for the next generation.”
The St. Michaels University School graduate did all this while completing his master’s degree at UVic followed by medical school in Limerick, Ireland — he will begin his internship at Royal London Hospital this month — and that certainly places him at an inspirational level. Before becoming a doctor, he went out an Olympian, proving once again not all Olympic champions are on the podium.
