Day 1 – Tuesday

Day 1 kicked off with all of our Team Toba athletes running in the 100m heats, advancing through to their respective finals. It was a great way to start with the week! Brian Lewis even managed to kick things off with a personal best in his heat, as did Max Speiser in his decathlon heat.

Sarah Smith had a rough 400m Hurdle heat, but managed to fight her way through it and still achieved a season’s best time and advanced to the A final, proving that there was WAY more in the tank.

Madisson Lawrence, and Rofiat Agboola put in strong performances in the women’s Long Jump qualifying rounds, easily advancing into the Finals later in the week. Rofi’s jump of 5.63m was season’s best jump and actually her best in competition jump since her gold medal winning performance at Legion Nationals in 2019.

Daxx Turner and Robbie Gerstner also advanced through into the men’s Triple Jump final. Robbie gave everyone (including himself) a bit of a scare on his last attempt slipping on the wet runway midway through his jump, but thankfully all was well, and he was through to the final without any further drama.

Andrew Simard and Quincy Telus had strong runs in the 400m, advancing into the 400m A finals.

Zoe Nonato and Amira Lawrence took their heats out hard and fast, and unfortunately suffered the consequences a little bit in the last 150m of race. But both athletes still advanced to the B finals in their first ever appearance at the Canada Games!

The distance group put together strong performances, Justin Kroeker set a new personal best and both he and Calvin Reimer advanced to the 1500m final. Marina Gross also set a new 7 second personal best with her run in the heats, securing herself a spot in the 1500m final as well.

Over in the throws areas, Alex Buhler may not have advanced to the Javelin final but she did throw a new personal best distance in Javelin, in this her first season competing in the event!

Bailey Purse threw a solid 41.28m to finish 7^th in the women’s Hammer final, and Josh Suelze threw 38.64m in Discus to advance to the final.

The men’s 4x100m relay crew had an epic and yet also frightening race. Strong runs from their lead off runner Tyrell Davis and Brian Lewis had them in a great position coming into the second exchange. Brian and Sébastien Régnier had a great hand off and things were starting to look like an easy auto-Q when unfortunately, Seb started to pull up with an injury. Somehow he managed to gut it out through the last half of his leg and get the baton over to Jordan Soufi who ran a blistering final leg to ensure the team was safely through into the final.

On the women’s side of things, all four members of the team ran incredible legs with solid handoffs, easily earning themselves a spot in the A final. Unfortunately, a few too many steps on the inside line meant that the team would eventually go on to be disqualified.

It was a stressful few moments near the end of the day but the team was able to finish things off on a positive note with Max Speiser and Michael Bachmier in the Decathlon. Both Max and Michael had overall strong first days in the Decathlon. While both guys were a bit disappointed by not quite hitting their best Long Jump performances, they rallied throughout the rest of day with strong High Jumps and managed to finish things off on a high, both hitting personal best runs in the 400m.