Brooke Henderson makes strong case for year’s top Canadian athlete, with four months left to boost resumé
An novice athlete with a gold medal normally wins at some stage in an Olympic year, and candidates in 2022 consist of speedskater Isabelle Weidemann and Captain Clutch herself, Marie-Philip Poulin.
The debate, if it became nevertheless going, is settled until in addition word. Brooke Henderson is the greatest golfer Canada has produced.
She’s been the winningest Canadian seasoned for some time, of route, ever considering that her ninth career victory at the LPGA Tour in 2019 inched her beforehand of the career totals of greats like Sandra Post, Mike Weir and George Knudson. But in case you’re a few of the golf observers who measure elite gamers through their overall performance in main championships, Henderson’s win on the Amundi Evian Championship, her 12th LPGA Tour victory, positioned her in a Canadian club of 1. It changed into her second principal identify to go together with her 2016 victory at the Women’s PGA Championship. At age 24, she is Canada’s only winner of a couple of professional majors. Now the simplest query is how excessive the a couple of will cross.
Actually, there’s any other pertinent question: Specifically, whether or not Henderson’s win Sunday will finally catapult her to one of the uncommon accomplishments which have thus far eluded her. For all Henderson’s achievements as a popular groundbreaker, in spite of everything, she has by no means received the Lou Marsh Award as Canada’s athlete of the year. A little beyond the midpoint of the annum, this is searching like her nice risk but.
That’s announcing something, considering we’re within the midst of an Olympic 12 months. In years beyond, while Henderson has made some of her fine instances for Lou Marsh consideration, an Olympic gold medallist has ultimately won the specified votes from the panel of Canadian media sorts who determine the winner.
In 2016, whilst Henderson won LPGA Tour occasions, along with her first main at the women’s PGA Championship, the Lou Marsh went to Penny Oleksiak, who gained gold, silver and two bronze at the Rio Olympics, the richest haul via a Canadian at a single Summer Games. Henderson was additionally an Olympian that yr, and perhaps matters might were distinctive if she had traded her 7th-location end in Rio for a medal.
In 2018, whilst Henderson again won LPGA Tour occasions — becoming the primary Canadian to win the home-soil CP Women’s Open in forty five years — it turned into Mikaël Kingsbury, the moguls skier, who received the favour of the Lou Marsh balloting panel. As proper as Henderson had been — and he or she turned into among the finalists for the award — Kingsbury had been nearly unbeatable, prevailing seven World Cup races and finishing second in two others, this inside the same yr that saw him win gold on the Pyeongchang Olympics.
In other phrases, it’s by no means clean to win the Lou Marsh as a non-Olympian in an Olympic yr. But it does show up. Back in 2010, while Canada had a watershed overall performance because the Vancouver Games, it turned into baseball’s Joey Votto who ended up with the trophy for his turn as National League MVP.
And there’s a chance Henderson’s 2022 resumé tops that of any Canadian athlete who competed within the Beijing bubble, from which Canada emerged with an outstanding haul of 26 medals, the fourth-maximum tally behind Norway, Russia and Germany.
The leader risk to win the Lou Marsh from Canada’s five-ringed contingent is probably Isabelle Weidemann, who gained three medals in speedskating — gold, silver and bronze. Certainly there are others. Still, Canada received just 3 other gold medals at the Games. One got here from Max Parrot, whose gold in guys’s slopestyle skiing got here connected to a judging controversy. The different have been received by using teams — the fast-song men’s 5,000-metre relay and the ladies’s countrywide hockey squad.
Teams, of path, can’t win the award. That also regulations out Canada’s men’s 4×100-metre relay crew anchored via Andre De Grasse, which received gold at the sector tune-and-subject championships on Saturday.
Elite group contributors, mind you, are usually a component in the Marsh deliberations. There could be a strong argument to be made for Marie-Philip Poulin, who scored dreams, which includes the game-winner, in Canada’s gold-medal win over the US in Olympic girls’s hockey. Poulin has in no way been named Canada’s athlete of the yr — no girls’s hockey participant has been so honoured — but she can make the case as considered one of its athletes of the last decade.
“Captain Clutch,” as she’s now known, has scored in every gold-medal recreation she has played in at the Olympics. And she’s scored the gold-medal clincher in four essential activities, together with the 2010, 2014 and 2022 Olympics, plus the 2021 international championships.
There are lots of other worth candidates beyond the Games, too many to say right here. This is the 12 months that noticed Andrew Wiggins make a case because the fine Canadian participant to play a enormous function on an NBA championship crew as a member of the Golden State Warriors.
This is the 12 months Cale Makar, the great defenceman for the Colorado Avalanche, joined Bobby Orr and Nicklas Lidstrom as the handiest gamers to win the Stanley Cup, the Norris Trophy, as the NHL’s fine defenceman, and the Conn Smythe Trophy, as playoff MVP, within the same season.
This has been the summer of Summer McIntosh, the Toronto swimmer, who received 4 medals at ultimate month’s world championships in Budapest, along with golds.
And the year is a protracted manner from over. Canada’s extraordinarily expected go back to the guys’s FIFA World Cup, which doesn’t even begin till November, offers the promise of a player like Alphonso Davies inserting himself into the communique at the 11th hour.
And Henderson, for her element, has a warm hand at an amazing time. There’s one greater women’s golf fundamental to play, the Open championship, plus the CP Women’s Open in Ottawa subsequent month. In other phrases, there’s nonetheless lots of time for Canada’s greatest golfer to do some thing else she’s by no means performed — win a 3rd LPGA Tour event in a calendar yr, and beef up her case for her first Lou Marsh.