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ALTON SSION| ete 559 SPEERS RD., #UNIT 3 www. insidehalton.com | OAKVILLE BEAVER | Thursday, August 31, 2017 |32 orts Editor, urtingtonpost com onnected to your Community” Burloak Canoe Club paddlers. (from left) Mitchell Barran, Lucy Pennyfather, Kate Pennyfather, Sam Pennyfather and Jillian Perrone made up one-quarter of ‘the Ontario canoe kayak team for the Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg. They combined to eam 15 medals — four gold, five silver and six bronze — over the four days of competition. Oakville's Sam Djurfeldt (inset), who paddles. for the Mississauga Canoe Club earned a pair of bronze medals. | photo submitted Oakville paddlers earn 17 medals at Canada Games Unsure if he would even make the Ontario team, Barran adds surprising gold to provincial canoe kayak tally Herb Garbutt Oakville Beaver staff Mitchell Barran acknowledges he might have been a bit of an underdog when it came to the Canada Games. Not to win a medal — just to be there. “To be honest, 1 wasn’t even rece to make the team,” the 19-year-old said. “ to school full-time and I don’t paddle ae ing the school year, except for maybe two or three weekends in tl While many of he Burloak Canoe Club compatriots spend at least a month training in Florida during the winter, Barran works a couple of part-time jobs while studying ki- nesiology at McMaster University. He was still finishing off a couple of sum- mer-school courses when the trials were held that would determine the team that would compete in Winnipeg, When word came that he made the On- tario team, “I was ecstatic,” he said. So you can imagine the thrill in the final hours of the canoe kayak competition when he crossed the line four seconds ahead of Nova Scotia's Mark Marschalko to win the K-1 5,000-metre race. “It was pretty awesome,” Barran said. “I had never even won a kayaking medal at na- tionals.” Just like the manner in which he secured his spot on the team, Barran also took a less conventional route to his Canada Games gold medal. “I didn’t have a very good race tactically,” he said. The race was contested on a 350m loop, meaning there were a lot of turns. Five paddlers, including Barran, formed a lead group. Though the strategy in that scenar- io is to ride the wash of the leader, Barran continually found himself on the outside of the group, taking the long route around the markers and then having to sprint to remain part of the pa: Barran has always thought longer races suited him. thons and he ran cross- veountyy in high school, twice qualifying for the provincial championships. So with 800m remaining in the race he felt he could summon a strong final push. He began sprinting and one-by-one his ri- vals fell off the pace until it was just himself and Marschalko, who would not be able to match Barran over the final 100m. The gold was Barran’s third medal of the competition, having won bronze medals as a member of Ontario’s K-2 and K-4 1,000m crews earlier in the week. Despite his Canada Games success, Bar- ran won't be altering his training schedule — school will remain his priority for at least the next couple of years. After that, he’s open to see where he can go with paddling. “Til definitely try to finish (school) in four years. That will give me a year or two to make the (national) under-23 team,” he said. “I think that’s a realistic goal.” Barran’s three medals were among 15 won by Burloak paddlers, plus two more from akville’s Sam Djurfeldt, who paddles for the Mississauga Canoe Club. Lucy Pennyfather was the youngest mem- ber of the Ontario crew that won the K-4 500m. “I knew we were fast, but we also knew that Nova Scotia had strong teams,” the 18-year-old said. They would not be fast enough to catch tario, which built an early lead and held than two sec- onds. “Tt was pretty exciting,” she id. id. The gold medal came NM just 90 minutes rr after Ontario Sam Djurfeldt had been edged by less than a garter of a second by Nova Scotia in the K-4 The following rie she would add a sec- ond silver medal as Nova Scotia again nar- rowly edged Pennyfather and Ottawa's Au- gust Sibthorpe in the K-2 500m. “The 200 is such a short race,” Pennyfa- ther said. “You have to be 100 per cent fo- cused on every stroke. It’s pretty intense.” Jillian Perrone, competing in her second nada Games, doubled her medal count from 2013 when she won a gold and silver in Sherbrooke, Que. In Winnipeg, Perrone earned four medals — two gold, a silver and a bronze. She began the competition with a silver in C-1 500m, a highly competitive race in which the three medallists were separated by just 0.73 seconds. She added a bronze in the IC-4 500m with a crew that included Burloak teammate Kate Pennyfather. Pennyfather, 15, was the youngest mem- ber of the 20-member Ontario paddling team by two years. Last month, she became the third member of her family to compete at the world junior championships. ne wrapped up her medal haul on the second-last day of competitition. She teamed up with Ottawa's Rowan Hardy- Kavanagh two win the C-2 200m by almost two full seconds and then repeated their gold-medal performance in the C-2 500m. Sam Pennyfather also returned from Win- nipeg with four medals. The 20-year-old earned a silver in the C-1 1,000m on the opening day. added bronze medals in the 1C-4 200m and 1,000m races. That crew includ- ed Djurfeldt, who earned a fourth-place fin- ish in the latter event at last year’s Olympic Hopes Regatta in Polan Pennyfather added a second silver medal in the final race of the competition, the C-1 5,000m.