Canada’s female swimming team has won The Canadian Press team of the year award.
The team won six medals at the Rio Olympics in August and seven more at the short-course event in Windsor, Ontario earlier this month. Their bronze in the 4×100-metre freestyle relay in Rio ended a 20-year women’s Olympic swimming drought.
It’s only the third time in a half-century that a women’s team has earned the team of the year award. The women’s soccer team won in 2012, the Sandra Schmirler curling rink won in 1998.
In a vote by writers and broadcasters across the country, the women swimmers received 15 votes (23 per cent). The runner-up Toronto Raptors won 11 votes (17 per cent) and the Toronto Blue Jays, last year’s winners, won nine votes (14 per cent).
Others receiving votes were the women’s soccer team, the Grey Cup Champion Ottawa Redblacks, the men’s World Cup hockey team and the Toronto FC soccer team that lost in the MLS final to Seattle.
The women swimmers were led by 16-year-old Toronto high school student Penny Oleksiak who won gold and silver medals and helped Canada win a pair of relay bronze in Rio.
Oleksiak won the CP female athlete of the year on Tuesday. Earlier this month, she won the Toronto Star’s Lou Marsh Trophy as the top athlete–male or female–in Canada.
Sprinter Andre De Grasse, who won three medals in Rio, was named male athlete of the year on Monday.
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