CHARLOTTETOWN: It came down to the final stretch inside the stadium, but Emma Archibald couldn’t hold off Ontario’s Madison Mullin in the Para Nordic Stand Female race at the 2023 Canada Games to settle for silver.
Archibald started the race with a 20 second lead based on the Sprint time set earlier in the day over Mullin (led by her Guide Faith Goudie).
While Archibald led for the bulk until the final stretch when Goudie and Mullin pushed hard and passed the uOttawa Nordiq skier just at the top of a hill on the 1.2 km course and held on as Archibald put all her might into it to get the position back but just ran out of race track.
Mullin won the race by approximately three seconds.
Denyse Dawe of Alberta finished third, however because there was under four skiiers in the competition just the gold and silver medal are awarded.
It was the same thing a day early when Dawe was also third.
It marked the second medal for Archibald after a gold on the opening day of competition on Feb. 28 at the Brookvale Nordic course.
Archibald will get a chance to medal twice more with competition events on March 3 and March 4 to wrap up this years Canada Games.
The athletes—for the most part—will be off on March 2 and only have training (weather permitting).
Meanwhile, in the other races, Nova Scotia placed three men into the quarterfinal of the male sprint race with Milo Sircom-Brown qualifying in 20th place; Cohen Norman was in 27th place; and Lynden Doyon qualified in 28th place. Jack MacMillan finished outside the top 30.
None of them advanced past the quarterfinals further into action.
Ry Prior was the eventual winner in the class.
For the women, none of the four women advanced to quarterfinals, despite putting in respectable results and times during the qualifying round.
Fiona McClure was 32nd in a time of 3:21.08; Fall River’s Grace McIntyre, also a skier from uOttawa Nordiq, was 46th of the 62 skiiers registered; and Paige Nekila was 55.
We snapped a few photos of the action on the course involving our local athletes and those we were watching in several sports.
Here is a look at some of those photos:
A NB athlete skiis hard out of the final dip onto the final stretch. (Healey photo)
Meanwhile over at Crabbe Mountain, it was Giant Slalom competition day.
The athletes saw them do two runs with the best time taking the top spots.
Caroline Hilton of Fall River came home in 28th place of the 43 that took time in the two runs.
In girls hockey, N.S. finished second in the pool with a shutout victory of 3-0 over Manitoba.
Sam Morrison had both goals, while it was Rhyah Stewart with the big saves for the win in goal.
In boxing, Beaver Bank’s Saierra Eshouzadeh will fight at 6 pm card against an opponent to be announced.
Faith Murphy is scheduled to also fight during the 6 pm bouts at Credit Union Place in Summerside.
