By the BC Winter Games
With the first full day of Penticton 2016 BC Winter Games action wrapped up, the competition is heating up throughout Penticton sport venues.
At the ripe old age of 14, West Vancouver (Zone 5) diver Alison Komlos is looking to get her career back on track. After going to nationals each year from 2011 to 2014 – her best finish was second on the three-metre board in 2012—she swam away from the sport in 2015.
“I needed a rest and a break,” Komlos said Friday, just prior to the first day of competition at the Games.
She earned two golds at the Mission 2014 BC Winter Games and is hoping for a top-two finish in the one-metre, three-metre and synchronized events in which she’s competing in Penticton, where the venue has impressed her. “The boards are good,” added Komlos.
Maybe it’s genetics or sport immersion at an early age, but several BC Games athletes could boast some impressive lineage in sport.
Despite his high-profile career on the ice that includes an upcoming appearance at the national men’s curling championship, Jim Cotter doesn’t want his daughter’s competition at the Games to take him too seriously.
“I’m just another coach here like anyone else, just trying to best prepare our team for the championship,” said the Vernon man, who’s guiding daughter Jaelyn (Zone 2) and her rink in the Games.
While he competed at the highest levels of the sport, he still managed to coach his daughter – and maintain a fine line between dad and coach, a skill he learned from his own father, who was his junior coach.
“There were no favourites – definitely not – and he treated me just like everyone else on the team, which is the way it should be, and I try to do the same,” Cotter recalled.
Janie and Annabelle Green, competing for Zone 3 at the 2014 Games, can also call sport a family affair. Their parents, Eden Donatelli Green and Julian Green, met at a world championship event, and went on to both become Olympians. Donatelli became the youngest athlete to make the Canadian national team at 15. She won an Olympic silver medal in the 500-metre distance and bronze in the 3,000-m relay in Calgary in 1988.
