The Victoria Boardworks Club is giving every indication it will be represented, in Canadian red, on the platform and springboards of Paris next summer.
Boardworks athletes have three medals and four top-four placings after the first two days of the Canadian diving championships taking place at the Pan Am Pool in Toronto.
Bryden Hattie, 22, of Boardworks added the men’s one-metre silver medal Saturday to his three-metre gold medal from Friday night. Hattie recorded a 408.45 in the one-metre final to Victor Povzner’s 412.65. That flipped the result from the three metre where Hattie took gold and Povzner the silver. Bjorn Markentin took the one-metre bronze with 379.30.
Hattie is a Claremont Secondary graduate and the 2022 NCAA Division 1 bronze medallist on men’s platform last year with the University of Tennessee Volunteers. Hattie represented Canada at the 2018 Gold Coast and 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, and will be looking to make the jump to the Olympics next year at Paris. The big event this year is the FINA world aquatics championships in July at Fukuoka, Japan.
Olympian Celina Toth of Boardworks captured the silver medal in the women’s platform event at nationals Saturday with a 302.95 score behind winner Caeli McKay of Calgary (374.50). Elaena Dick was bronze medallist with 299.80 and Renée Batalla of Victoria Boardworks fourth with 289.25.
At 31 and 16, Toth and Batalla represent the age bookends of the Boardworks team. Batalla was the youngest Canadian competitor last summer in the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
“It would be amazing to make the Paris 2024 Olympics at 17 years old. But if I miss them, I believe I will make Los Angeles 2028,” she told the Times Colonist.
Toth has been to the Olympics and made headlines in Tokyo outside the pool when her boyfriend, B.C. Transit driver Stephen Bains, lined up five buses in the Langford yard with the messages on the electronic front boards: “TOKYO 2020NE | FLY | HIGH | CELINA | #TOKYO 2020NE.”
Toth is in her 13th season with Boardworks since relocating from London, Ont., in 2010.
She graduated in 2019 from UVic with a degree in psychology and has won three international medals, including gold in the 2015 and 2017 World University Games. She also competed in the 2018 and 2022 Commonwealth Games.
It continues the legacy of Mitch Geller, now the chief technical officer of Diving Canada, who founded the Island club in 1995 at Saanich Place following the 1994 Commonwealth Games.
Boardworks divers Carson Paul, 18, in men’s platform, and Keira Lu, 16, in the women’s three metre, compete on the last day of nationals today. Paul is the son of Terry Paul, the Olympic gold medallist coxswain of the Elk Lake-based Canadian rowing eight at Barcelona in 1992.
