Canada's best athletes promise sizzling summer in 2019

Canada's Andre De Grasse, right, sprints during the men's 200m heats during the athletics at the Pan Am Games in Toronto on July 23, 2015. The summer of 2015 was jam-packed with thrilling Canadian sports performances. In an Olympic quadrennial, Year 3 is perhaps the most important. And this sizzling summer promises more of the same. (Mark Blinch/The Canadian Press)

The summer of 2015 was jam-packed with thrilling Canadian sports performances.

Sprinter Andre De Grasse was becoming a household name, racing to two victories at the Pan American Games in Toronto. High jumper Derek Drouin was soaring to a world gold medal. Canada's women's rugby team was thumping the competition en route to winning the Pan Am Games. And the national men's field hockey team was securing its ticket to the Rio Olympics.

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In an Olympic quadrennial, Year 3 is perhaps the most important. And this sizzling summer promises more of the same.

From the FIFA women's World Cup to the Pan Am Games in Lima, Peru, 2019 marks a chance for athletes to gauge their performances against the best on the planet, get some big Games experience, and even punch their ticket to Tokyo.

"Year 3 of any Olympic or Paralympic quad is always essential," said Mark Hahto, the director of summer sport for Own The Podium. "It's a critical benchmark year. It's typically the performances of that year that best indicate how are we going to do in the Olympic or Paralympic Games.

"The relevance of the number of top threes, top fives, top eights that we as a nation are able to acquire in 2019 really gives us a pretty good litmus test on how are we going to perform in 2020 in Tokyo in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Coupled with that there are the intricacies of all of the qualification processes that are happening, particularly in the team sports."

De Grasse and Drouin helped Canada to eight medals at the 2015 world track and field championships in Beijing, a year before the team captured six at the Rio Olympics.

"[This summer] is very important," said Athletics Canada's head coach Glenroy Gilbert. "We operate on the importance of a world championship as well as an Olympic Games, so those two benchmark events are always key for us, within the quad. So, it's important that we get more athletes in the top eight, more athletes getting into finals as well as on the podium."

The Canadian Olympic Committee, which in conjunction with OTP will carefully track Canadian athletes this summer, is projecting a large team — some 540 strong — at this summer's Pan American Games, which will serve as a direct Olympic qualifier for as many as a dozen sports.

"In Tokyo [2020], we can look at north of 400 [athletes], where in Rio we were 313," said Eric Myles, the COC's chief sport officer.

Canada can clinch Olympic berths in numerous team sports, including men's basketball this summer. Myles said Canada could field as many as 10 teams in Tokyo, which would top its record of nine in 1976 in Montreal. Canada had five in Rio (women's soccer, rugby and basketball, and men's volleyball and field hockey).

"That's quite exciting actually," Myles said. "The impact of the teams in Rio, the team is so close but when there are team sports, there's a little something special that everybody gets behind and it just drives the synergy in the village and around the team, and I would say back home in the country, too."

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