The four athletes representing Sudbury at the 2024 Summer Olympics / Paralympics in France are about as diverse as they come.
Spanning a wide variety of ages, the foursome who maintain the Nickel City as their hometown of choice have experienced Games trajectories that contrast sharply from one individual to the next.
They are, however, all bound by the fact that this Northern Ontario crew in Paris will rank among the best ever showings (simply in terms of numbers) at the Summer Games for Sudbury and area athletes.
Cloé Lacasse — Women’s soccer
Few would have blamed the 31-year-old graduate of École secondaire Macdonald-Cartier for believing her window of opportunity had passed her by.
Despite demonstrating an uncanny ability for putting the ball in the net over the course of her four-year NCAA career with the Iowa Hawkeyes and the ensuing four years she spent competing professionally in Iceland, there appeared to be precious little interest on a national team scale for the speedy attacker.
In fact, Lacasse was two years into making a name for herself with a very talented Benfica side in Portugal when Soccer Canada eventually came calling.
Invited to be part of a training camp and series of friendlies with the Canucks in Britain, the Sudbury Canadians product uttered what would become a highly prophetic albeit quite abbreviated eight word sentence.
“I just need to be given the chance,” said Lacasse in April 2021.
By the time the World Cup of Women’s Soccer arrived in 2023, Lacasse had risen to earn a role as a key contributor on Team Canada, given a starting spot in several matches leading up the 2024 Summer Olympics. And despite all of the chaos in France over events in which the athletes had little control, Lacasse still managed to score a goal in her very first Olympic Games experience last week.
Syla Swords — Women’s basketball
The story of Syla Swords could not possibly contrast more sharply than is does with the road travelled by Cloé Lacasse. The one similarity lies in the fact that just a couple of years ago, few would have suggested these two were destined for the 2024 Olympics.
Sure, there had been some signs, most notably the ability of the daughter of 2000 Olympian Shawn Swords to raise the level of her game when competing against increasingly more talented opponents. The summer of 2022 signalled the beginning of several breakthroughs as the Sudbury teenager was selected to take part in the Bio-Steel All-Canadian games.
With the family move to New Jersey to join Shawn (hired by the Brooklyn Nets organization) and her subsequent enrollment at Long Island Lutheran (a top five high school team in the entire United States), Swords would see her skill-set develop at an even more frenetic pace. Earning a scholarship to attend Michigan University this fall, the eldest of two supremely talented basketball girls in the family was poised to continue her development towards an Olympic berth at some point. Now set to become the youngest woman ever to suit up with Team Canada women’s basketball at the Olympics, Swords
just came a lot earlier than expected.
Jill Gougeon-Irving — Equestrian
At 61 years of age, Jill Gougeon-Irving proudly recognizes her slot as the elder statesman of the local quartet, named to the Canadian team after being selected to the Reserve Squad in 2021 in Tokyo.
Though she has called the Maritimes home (specifically Moncton, NB) for the past forty years approximately, Gougeon-Irving was born in Sudbury and learned to ride through the Sudbury Pony Club. She took up the sport again in her mid-forties.
Working closely with coach and fellow Olympian Ashley Holzer (1988, Seoul bronze medal winner), Gougeon-Irving enters the competition this summer with her current horse, Delacroix 11, as well as what is expected to be bragging rights as the oldest member of the Canadian contingent in Paris.
Lance Cryderman — Para boccia
Currently 43 years of age, Lance Cryderman will make a second appearance at the Paralympics, having also competed in 2000 in Sydney. That said, even within this singular athlete, the discrepancies between his two sets of Games will be stark.
“My maturity for this set of Games is much higher,” noted Cryderman last week, practicing at the McClelland Arena in Copper Cliff as city staffers pulled out all stops to facilitate some last minute workouts for the athlete, his coach (Ed Richardson) as well as sport assistant / performance partner Nick Dunham.
“I feel like I am in a much better position, strategically and tactically speaking,” added Cryderman. “I had a lot of nerves in Sydney. I think I will be able to manage a lot better now.”
While that may be true, it is a different form of boccia in which the Laurentain University employee makes his return to the Games, looking to crack the top half of the field in the individual BC1 12 athlete competition.
“When I was first playing in Sydney, we all used competition balls. Everybody was using the same equipment, essentially. Now, the game has evolved to the point where every athlete has a custom set of boccia balls, tailored to their own strengths.
“The fundamentals obviously are the same: you still want to get your ball as close to your target as possible,” Cryderman said. “But tactically speaking, because of the customized sets, I have to recognize when to be more aggressive, which ball to use for those shots and different things like that.”
And for as much as replicating the exact motion for any individual sport isn’t easy, Cryderman faces challenges few can fully understand.
“We are dealing with a lot of specificity with arm movement – but because of the cerebral palsy, it’s trying to keep the throw consistent,” he said.
“Every practice, there are going to be times where the arm just fails me and there’s nothing I can do about that. I have to roll with the punches and accept that some throws are going to go nowhere near where I want them to go.
“It’s totally different, for sure.”
While there are many differences between Lacasse, Swords, Gougeon-Irving and Cryderman, they are all Olympians – all Sudbury Olympians, as a matter of fact.
Randy Pascal is a sportswriter in Greater Sudbury. Pursuit is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.
