REFLECTIONS
Kristen Kit
CANADA
EVENT W8+
PLACING GOLD
Owing to Canada’s federal quarantine restrictions our high-performance staff decided we would not travel to the world cups this year. Our main opposition didn’t go either but the Romanians and the Chinese raced really well at Tokyo and they came through the last chance qualifiers. So, having the Olympics as your first race in two years probably isn’t the best.
We were lucky to have the men's four to train with. Our coach, Michelle Darvill, worked well with the men's four coach, Terry Paul, and those guys were fun to train with. A men’s four is faster than a women's eight so we got beat a lot; when you get beat, you get faster.
It was a huge advantage for us and we trained alongside them most days.
As a consequence of the pandemic the Canadian team trained in separate nodes. I haven't seen many of my teammates from the small boat node, even during the Olympics we were kept quite separate for contact tracing purposes.
Our team doctor, Dr. Mike Wilkinson, did a good job of managing the situation.
He was very strict with us but it helped. Since Canada’s lockdown lifted, we haven’t had any breaks in our training and that's hard to do in a centralised system with over 50 people training out of one boathouse.