Final 12 months was some of the profitable years for Canadian athletes. Canada gained a file 5 gold medals on the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest–the very best tally at a world championship so far–and 15 Canadian data had been damaged on the roads and the monitor (indoor and out of doors).
The 2024 athletics schedule is a busy one, with World Indoors, World Cross and the Olympic Video games in the identical calendar 12 months. Will athletes come near the 15 nationwide data damaged final 12 months? Listed here are 5 data we expect will go down this 12 months.
Girls’s 400mH
Sage Watson’s Canadian 400m hurdles file of 54.32 seconds will probably be damaged in 2024. The reigning NCAA 400mH champion, Savannah Sutherland, got here near breaking it in 2023, working a private better of 54.45 seconds on the 2023 NCAA Championships. Sutherland additionally bought the chance to characterize Canada for the primary time at a senior stage on the 2023 World Championships, the place she reached the semi-final within the girls’s 400mH.
At solely 20, Sutherland is one in every of Canada’s prime rising stars within the sport, and he or she is simply getting sooner.
Girls’s 3,000m steeplechase
After watching Vancouver’s Ceili McCabe dominate the 2023 Canadian XC Championships, profitable her first Canadian senior XC title, it was clear that she was blossoming into her potential. It would solely be a matter of time till she smashes the Canadian 3,000m steeplechase file of 9:22.40 held by Genevieve Lalonde. McCabe is at present ranked thirty fourth on this planet within the occasion and holds a private better of 9:25.98, solely three seconds off the file.
The 22-year-old already has some nationwide staff expertise, representing Canada at two world championships (Eugene 2022 and Budapest 2023). She simply missed out on the ladies’s 3,000m steeplechase closing in Budapest, ending sixth within the heats, with solely the highest 5 advancing. It’s solely logical that she is going to make that leap this season.
Males’s 100m
That is an especially scorching take, and I do know many will disagree. Andre De Grasse desires nothing greater than the Canadian 100m file (besides perhaps a number of extra gold medals). He has run below 9.84 on a number of events, however all of the performances have been wind-aided. With De Grasse within the final 12 months of his 20s, is that this the 12 months we lastly see him break by means of and shatter Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin’s Canadian file of 9.84 seconds?
Bailey and Surin’s mark has now stood for greater than twenty years, and if De Grasse can add the celebrated title of Canada’s quickest man to his resume, he would solidify himself as Canada’s biggest sprinter. Though De Grasse’s quickest authorized mark is 9.89 seconds from the Tokyo Olympic 100m closing in 2021, and he concluded his 2023 season with his quickest efficiency since almost the final Olympics. If there’s a time for De Grasse to problem the file in his profession, it’s now.
Males’s half-marathon
There was a lot hypothesis whether or not we’d see Cam Levins’s Canadian half-marathon mark of 60:18 damaged ultimately weekend’s Houston Half Marathon, however with the pre-race dropout of Moh Ahmed on account of harm, who was anticipated to make his half-marathon debut, mixed with the chilly and windy circumstances in Houston, Levins’s file survived one other day.
With how briskly the world’s greatest distance athletes are at present working, this file will probably be damaged this 12 months, and it’s only a matter of when. When Levins initially set the file on the Vancouver First Half, it was a really moist and windy day in the midst of February. Though Levins was completely in file health, if he ran that race once more on the identical day, he would have damaged one hour (solo). We’re not saying that 60 minutes and 18 seconds isn’t quick, however with the unimaginable depth in Canadian males’s distance working proper now, it’s solely a matter of time till Ahmed, Ben Flanagan, Rory Linkletter, and even Levins himself lowers it even additional.
Girls’s marathon
There are quite a lot of marathons on the calendar this 12 months, and our Canadian women are solely getting sooner. Natasha Wodak’s file mark of two:23:12 has stood because the Berlin Marathon in 2022, however the earlier file holder, Malindi Elmore, got here near it on the similar race in 2023, working 2:23:30.
Hearsay has it that a number of Canadian Olympians from 5,000m and 10,000m are transferring as much as the marathon distance in 2024. So Wodak’s mark will probably be challenged. A type of athletes is 10,000m Olympic finalist Andrea Seccafien, who at present holds the Canadian half-marathon file of 69:38. Seccafien is scheduled to make her debut on the 2024 Tokyo Marathon on March 3, and says her purpose is to earn Olympic qualification or 2:26:50—a mark solely two Canadian girls have ever surpassed.
With two girls’s spots nonetheless open on the Canadian Olympic staff in Paris, it is going to solely be a matter of time till we see a feminine Canadian marathoner throw down a breakthrough efficiency.
