Looking to make waves
Women's water polo team thumps Brazil 12-4 for starters
By TERRY JONES -- Edmonton Sun
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- They're our best Olympic team.
Which is to say, they're our best-bet team to win a medal in Athens 2004.
If they get there.
They're our waterpolo women, who you may remember from Sydney 2000 for Waneek Horn-Miller who posed nude on the cover of Time behind an appropriately placed waterpolo ball, from the swimsuits ripped during the incredibly rough and tough competition and/or finishing fifth when they believed, really believed, they should have won a medal.
If you don't count synchronized swimming, and most people don't, Canada hasn't won a team sport medal at the summer Olympics since the men's basketball team claimed silver in 1934.
Canada's best-bet team for Athens?
"I think so,'' said captain Johanne Begin after Canada climbed out of the hot tub that is the Pan-Am Pool, 12-4 winners over the Brazilian bunch ranked third to the U.S. and Canada in this competition which will send the gold-medal winner to the Olympics.
There's something about this team and women's waterpolo which came close to making them catch on at the last Olympics.
CRACK CANADIAN CONSCIOUSNESS
All they need is the success to go with it and maybe they can crack the Canadian consciousness like Christine Sinclair, Kara Lang and those teenage girls soccer players at the FIFA U-19 World Championships last year.
Maybe it's the skin. Maybe it's the discovery these girls are in a game as physical as hockey, just minus the sticks.
"If you don't like to be touched and if you don't like to, er, show, this is not going to be your sport,'' said veteran Cora Campbell of Calgary.
"What you saw with the ripped swimsuits in Sydney was nothing. At the world championships they showed all the underwater shots on the VideoTron. In the stands you see what is happening on top of the water but you don't see what is happening under the water. It's a whole other world under there.''
You get the idea. These girls and this game could go somewhere if they ever managed to win an Olympic medal.
After the win in their Pan-Am Games opener, there is every expectation that it'll come down to a gold-medal game against the Americans Sunday with the Canadians needing to upset the U.S. team which just captured the world championship in Barcelona a week ago, to secure a spot in Athens.
Canada, which finished a frustrated fourth in the Barcelona world championships after having been third the year before, needs to repeat the feat of the Winnipeg 1999 Pan-Ams when they beat the U.S. to punch their ticket to Sydney.
They needed what happened here yesterday to rebuild some confidence and proceed to their game of Games.
"We came here from Barcelona disappointed with finishing fourth,'' said coach Pat Oaten of Dllar des-Ormeaux, Que., of this team which believes it's so close to being clearly of a calibre to put itself on an Olympic podium and even to go for the gold.
And what a story they'd be if they did it.
"The Americans, because of the NCAA, have an athletes pool at least 30 times greater than ours,'' said Oaten.
"We are the underdogs because they have such a strong feeder system, but we can play with them. We know we can play with them. There is no doubt.
"We are a real team. That's the key.''
More than they were in 2000.
"Half the girls are back from Sydney,'' said Campbell, who scored four goals to lead the way for Canada against the Brazilians.
"This team is very much a team. We believe we can win a medal if we get to the Olympics. Getting back to the Olympics, that's the hard part.
AN EXPERIENCED CREW NOW
"In Sydney, well, none of us had gone through it before. It was hard to stay in the moment. Sydney was very disappointing. But it's the reason some of us stayed around,'' added the 29 year-old who has been with the national team since 1992 of her even more experienced teammates, Begin, 32, and Ann Dowe, 31.
"We've got experience. We have youth. It's a good mix.''
If Canada doesn't win gold here, they'd have to do it the hard way next year.
Only eight teams go to the Olympics including host Greece, Oceana's Australia and Kazakhstan, teams which Canada has beaten.
"If we don't, life is not finished, but we all know a one-time, one-game final here is much easier than going to Europe in February to qualify against all those tough European teams for the final spots,'' said Begin.
They believe they can do it here and now.
"We really want it bad,'' said Marie-Luc Arpin of St. Lambert, Que.
"We want to go back to the Olympics and do it the right way. It was our first time. It was hard to grasp everything because it was so big. If we get back, we really believe we could make it different.''
