Camryn Rogers wins Olympic gold in hammer throw for Canada, which is now an official ‘throwing nation’

PARIS — On her second-last throw of the night, Camryn Rogers found another gear.

Sitting in second place on the leaderboard, the 25-year-old from Richmond, B.C., spun and released the hammer down the middle of the field. It flew over the 75-metre mark and landed with a thud: 76.97 metres. In a tight field where Rogers had been trailing first China’s Zhao Jie and later America’s Annette Echikunwoke, she had finally muscled herself into the gold-medal position.

No other throwers in the field could match it. As Rogers stepped into the cage for her final throw, she had already locked down gold. She released the hammer (“the throw didn’t go super well, I was a little bit excited”) then knelt to the ground and raised her hands to her face, not quite able to mask the tears.

“I didn’t really know what to do, I just felt like I just had to take a moment and process while I was in the cage,” Rogers recalled moments after making that final throw, then ringing the champion’s bell and watching the Canadian flag raised during the medal ceremony. “I heard everyone cheering and I heard my coach screaming from the stands and I looked over and saw my family just losing their minds. And I think that was when it was very clear to me: ‘Oh my God, this is it. It’s over, I did it. We did this thing.’”

Then came the hugs. First with her competitors, the best women hammer throwers in the world, whom she describes as “incredible freaking athletes and even better people.” Then she sprinted to her coach, Mo Saatara: “Just hitting him like he was a brick wall — sorry, Coach Mo — and just wrapping my arms around him, because we’ve been in this together now for seven years, preparing for this moment.”

She then sprinted to the stands to her mom, the woman she describes as her best friend, a person who sacrificed so much to give her the best life possible and gives hugs that wrap around her very soul: “I ran up and also jumped on her — sorry mom.”

Echikunwoke — the only other competitor to surpass the 75-metre mark — took silver with a 75.48m throw while Zhao finished third with a best throw of 74.27m.

With her gold medal, Rogers has etched her name in history. She’s the first Canadian woman to win Olympic gold in a track and field event since 1928 — a fact she learned minutes after her medal ceremony — and the first North American woman to win Olympic hammer throw gold since it debuted at the Games in 2000.

It’s a lot to take in.

“To be an Olympic champion — which sounds even weird coming out of my mouth right now — I mean, that’s something that you get to keep with you for your whole life,” she said. “And it’s something that doesn’t just change your career, but can change the trajectory of everything you do moving forward.”

When Rogers made her Olympic debut in Tokyo, she was a 22-year-old college student at the University of California, Berkeley, and finished fifth. Since then, she’s become a professional athlete at the top of her sport and came into these Games as the reigning world champion with a season’s best throw of 77.76 metres, which was the second-farthest throw in the world this year behind American Brooke Andersen’s 79.92 metres. Andersen, the 2022 world champion, fouled all her attempts at the U.S. Olympic trials and was not named to the American Olympic team.

“Camryn is one of the most talented athletes in the world,” her coach told Postmedia this spring. “She won the worlds at age 24. The sky is the limit.”

Rogers’ throw comes two days after Canada’s Ethan Katzberg won the men’s hammer competition with a whopping 84.12-metre throw. Both throwers are from British Columbia, which has become a hotbed of the country’s greatest hammer throw coaches and athletes and is the only province in Canada where high school students compete in hammer throw. Rowan Hamilton, a 24-year-old from Chilliwack who finished ninth in Sunday’s men’s final, is also coached by Saatara.

“Watching how much the throwing community has grown just in my 12 years of being a part of it, in Canada alone, I think is pretty beautiful,” Rogers said. “There are so many people who have dedicated their lives to building the sport and this event for so many kids such as myself.

“When I was 12 years old and took that first throw and I was like: ‘Wow, I’ve never felt this empowered in my life and this is something I want to be able to pursue for as long as I can.’ And so now to see us have so much experience and be so strong, I think, as a throwing nation is pretty incredible.”