Canadian canoeist Laurence Vincent-Lapointe has a silver lining for her twisting Olympic tale

Opinion

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This article was published 04/08/2021 (1522 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TOKYO—The path was long and dark and winding, but Canadian paddler Laurence Vincent-Lapointe eventually found a way to arrive where she always hoped she would be: the start line of the first Olympic final in the C-1 200 metres.

It’s a good thing she got to the finish line a little more efficiently. In a triumphant return to competition, Vincent-Lapointe, the 29-year-old from Trois-Rivières, Que., won silver in Thursday’s final at the Sea Forest Waterway, outraced to the line by 19-year-old Nevin Harrison of the United States by 0.85 seconds. Liudmyla Luzan of Ukraine won bronze. Mississauga’s Katie Vincent finished eighth.

If Vincent-Lapointe occasionally doubted her Olympic moment would come, you could understand the feeling.

Not that Vincent-Lapointe is a pessimist by nature. As a 13-time canoe world champion, she’s nobody’s naysayer. But sprint canoeing doesn’t have a record of being particularly welcoming to women. While the sport has been a regular fixture on the Olympic program going back to 1936, it’s been the exclusive domain of men until as recently as the 2016 Olympics. So when it was announced in 2017 that women’s C-1 and C-2 would be included in the 2020 Tokyo Games, Vincent-Lapointe was as close as she’s ever been to believing she would get a chance to shine on the five-ringed stage.

Until disaster struck. Her life essentially capsized in 2019, when an out-of-competition drug test detected trace amounts of the muscle builder ligandrol in her system. She was suspended and barred from the 2019 world championships, which doubled as an Olympic qualifier. Though she maintained her innocence, insisting she had never knowingly ingested the substance, she was aware such denials are standard procedure for actual drug cheats. It seemed there was scant prospect of a change of fate.

“I found myself in a kind of nothingness,” she has said. “It’s nice if I worked out once a week, without a goal. I was completely discouraged, lost.”

Still, she mounted a legal defence. And in a twist that made headlines around the world, her legal team was able to eventually prove that the traces of ligandrol in Vincent-Lapointe’s system were transferred to her via the bodily fluids of her ex-boyfriend.

Even after she was cleared of the doping accusation in January 2020, it wasn’t a sure thing she would be here. There was the pandemic, of course, and the fact she missed her chance to qualify at the Canadian championships in March. At that competition she lost in the final to Vincent, then missed the C-2 500 metres on account of a fever. Canada’s canoe federation had to apply for Vincent-Lapointe’s inclusion on the Olympic start list. She got the OK less than a month ago.

Not that aspersions aren’t still being cast in her direction. Harrison, the reigning world champion in the event, said Vincent-Lapointe’s 11th-hour addition to the program “definitely added pressure and stress.

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“I know we didn’t think she was going to be here until a couple of weeks ago, so it was strange to find out,” Harrison said of Vincent-Lapointe. “I know it could be frustrating for some girls, but I’m here to race. I don’t want to speak too much on it.”

Said Vincent-Lapointe, speaking of the skepticism of her competitors: “Honestly, most of them seem to be fine. I had a lot of people tell me they are happy that I am here. For sure there are some people who are frustrated or maybe so focused on themselves that they don’t want to talk to people who might do well. I have proved that I could be here and I have done everything in the past two years to make it here and I deserve to be here. If someone is still mad, there is nothing I can do. I will just do my best.”

It’s not over yet. Vincent-Lapointe and Vincent hope to be contenders together in the C-2 500, which begins Friday.

“It has been crazy and there could have been moments where I thought I couldn’t make it,” Vincent-Lapointe said in the lead-up to Thursday’s final. “But I have always had it within myself to be here. I have always felt it. Even three years ago, when I first learned that the Olympics would be for women’s canoe, I said I was going to be there and since then, even through everything that happened, it just felt like I was going to be there.”

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk