City of gold: London, Ont., produces Olympic champs in Warner, Mac Neil and others

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This article was published 06/08/2021 (1543 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Damian Warner sat in a press room in Tokyo talking about the sense of “community” in his hometown of London, Ont., and the warm, small-town feel he gets from the mid-size city where he still trains for the world’s toughest competitions.

When the 31-year-old returns to London in the coming days with his decathlon gold medal, he won’t be the only Olympic champion the city welcomes home.

London-born athletes won or were part of four of Canada’s six gold medals heading into the final weekend of competition at the Tokyo Games.

Swimmer Maggie Mac Neil’s gold in the 100-metre butterfly kicked things off last week, and the championship run continued days later when rower Susanne Grainger took first-place as part of the women’s eight team. Soccer players Jessie Fleming and Shelina Zadorsky added to London’s gold medal haul Friday when Canada beat Sweden in the women’s final.

“We’ve had a lot of success and there’s a lot of great athletes in London that are at these Games,” Warner said Friday in a virtual call with media roughly 24 hours after his decathlon championship. “But (there’s also) a lot of great athletes that are up-and-coming that will be at future Games and I’m sure winning medals for London and for Canada.

“It’s just a great city and it’s somewhere I’m happy to call home.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic closed most training facilities last year, Warner was forced to take his reps in the less-than-ideal conditions of an old hockey arena in London.

There were times, he said, he didn’t feel the environment was “conducive to high performance.” But he lauded Londoners for their support over that stretch.

“It turns out that you can win gold medals like that,” Warner said. “It’s not necessarily the facilities but it’s the people and the mindset around that.”

“If we needed something, somebody stepped up and helped us,” he added.

Andrew Craven, a former swimming coach of Mac Neil’s at the London Aquatic Club, said it was thrilling to see so much high-level talent from London at the Tokyo Games, and not just in the pool.

He said performances like Warner’s and Fleming’s — the 23-year-old scored Canada’s tying goal in the soccer final and added another in the penalty kicks en route to victory — will help inspire a new crop of London athletes.

Craven said he’s already seeing that with swimming, adding that since Mac Neil’s gold medal — and subsequent silver and bronze in relay events — his colleagues have barely been able to keep up with the number of inquiries from parents asking how their kids can join the club.

“Every Canadian town can call itself a hockey town, but (London), with the soccer, track and field, rowing and the swimming, it’s really a culture of excellence,” Craven said. “There’s a great high-performance pedigree in the city across multiple sports.

“But we’re also at a fortunate time when we have some tremendous athletes coming up, and that can happen in any small, medium or large city in the country.”

Craven said Mac Neil spent last summer training with him in London at one of the city’s two full-size Olympic pools before she joined the rest of her teammates in Toronto.

Mac Neil visited the club this week with medals in tow, Craven said. And he’s planning to have her back soon so she can showcase her trio of prizes to some of the city’s younger swimmers.

Chris Loucks, a former technical director at NorWest Soccer where Fleming played as an adolescent, said London has a strong “sporting culture.”

Loucks suspects the city’s central geographic location — two hours from Toronto and two hours from Windsor — makes it “a happy spot in the middle” for athletes traversing southwestern Ontario for competitions. Athletic programs at London’s Western University also offer allure, he added.

“We’ve got universities, we’ve got performance programs with basketball and the London Knights (the city’s OHL team),” said Loucks, now with the London TFC Academy. “So it’s a pretty big sports city.

“And now (with) people from London looking at Damian Warner and Jessie Fleming and other London athletes, it reinforces that message that every young kid has a reason for joining sports.”

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While Warner wasn’t sure Friday when he’d fly back to London, he said he was looking forward to returning to the city and showing friends and family his gold medal.

“You know how hard all those people have worked and how dedicated they have been to get me to this point,” Warner said.

“It will be really special to go home and hug them and let them hold this medal and know that it’s theirs as much as it is mine.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 6, 2021.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version misstated the name of the London Aquatic Club.