Nova Scotia Olympian sisters making waves on journey to 2028 L.A. Games
A pair of Olympian sisters from Nova Scotia who competed in sailing together at last year's Summer Games in Paris are making waves on the international stage again.
Antonia and Georgia Lewin-LaFrance are briefly back on home soil after winning a bronze medal last month at the Semaine Olympique Française in Hyères, France.
The sisters, who are from Chester, N.S., said they're happy with the podium finish, but they feel they're still shaking off some rust after a short break from being on the water.
"Our focus and goal is to be on the podium at the Olympics. So yes, it's a nice feeling, but at the same time we have a lot of work to do," Antonia, 27, said in an interview.
The duo is trying to get in form to qualify for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
They said it's still early in the four-year training cycle between Summer Games, so at this point they are just trying to continue to get better.
"At the end of the day, it doesn't mean a lot to us other than like a pat on the back," Georgia, 25, said. "We really just need to keep pushing and keep building our foundation."
'That experience is everything to us'
The sisters made their Olympic debut at the Paris Summer Games last year. They finished 11th in the women's 49er FX event.
Sailing is a sport that requires a lot of experience to be successful, Georgia said, so it was a major step for them to compete on the biggest international stage.
"Most of the people who have medals have been to two to three Olympic Games before, so that experience is everything to us," she said.
Both sisters said representing their country is a big honour for them.
Antonia said she still gets emotional thinking about the first time they launched their sailboat into the water with their Olympic gear on while thousands of people cheered.
The siblings said travelling around the world has shown them how other people perceive Canada and it's made them appreciate the opportunity to represent their country even more.
"Canada has this reputation across the world for being quite a phenomenal country and a country with really strong morals and values. So, I'm personally very, very proud to be representing Canada," said Antonia.
Antonia and Georgia are leaving for Thessaloniki, Greece, this week to represent their country again at the 2025 European Championship, which starts the first week of June.
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They're also making people very angry. The xenon-fueled expedition was organized by an Austrian guide named Lukas Furtenbach, who is known for his tech-focused approach to expeditions. He has previously had clients sleep in altitude tents at home for weeks to pre-acclimatize them to the thin mountain air. What made the new ascent different is that, in addition to sleeping in altitude tents, the four British climbers visited a clinic in Germany where they inhaled xenon gas, whose oxygen-boosting potential has been rumored for years. The World Anti-Doping Agency banned xenon in 2014 after allegations that Russian athletes used it for that year's Winter Olympics. But subsequent studies on its athletic effects have produced mixed results. Other research in animals has hinted at the possibility that it could offer protection from potentially fatal forms of altitude illness, which can occur when climbers ascend too rapidly. 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This form of pacing remained highly controversial, but because none of the pacemakers had deliberately allowed himself to be lapped, the record was allowed to stand. These days, such pacing is so routine that there are runners who make a living doing nothing but pacing races for others, always dropping out before the finish. The full-race pacing that Kipyegon will likely use in Breaking4 remains verboten; the slightly different pacing that leads runners almost all the way through the race but forces them to run the last lap alone is simply business as usual. Oxygen in a can is good; xenon in a can is bad. These are subtle distinctions. Sports are, in at least some respects, a zero-sum game: When one person wins a race or sets a record, it unavoidably means that someone else doesn't. 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The same ethos seems to color the way we see dating, leisure travel, hobbies, and so on: There's no escape from the zero-sum dichotomy of winners and losers. Kalwij's smoking gun is a phenomenon that sociologists call the 'SES-health gradient,' which refers to the disparities in health between people of high and low socioeconomic status. Despite the rise of welfare supports such as pensions and health care, the SES-health gradient has been widening around the world—even, Kalwij has found, among Olympic athletes. There used to be no difference in longevity among Dutch Olympians based on their occupation. But among the most recent cohort, born between 1920 and 1947, athletes in high-SES jobs, such as lawyers, tend to outlive athletes in low-SES jobs by an average of 11 years. As Kalwij interprets it, making an Olympic team is a life-defining win, but getting stuck in a poorly paying dead-end job is a loss that begets an endless series of other losses: driving a beater, living in a lousy apartment, flying economy. These losses have cumulative psychological and physiological consequences. Some things in life really are competitions, of course. Track and field is one of them, and so we should police attempts to bend its rules with vigilance. Other things, such as being guided up Everest, are not—or at least they shouldn't be. The people who seem most upset about the idea of rich bros crushing Everest in a week are those who have climbed it in six or eight or 12 weeks, whose place in the cosmic pecking order has been downgraded by an infinitesimal notch. But I, too, was annoyed when I read about it, despite the fact that I've never strapped on a crampon. Their win, in some convoluted way, felt like my loss. Another detail in Kalwij's research sticks in my mind. Among American Olympians, silver medalists tend to die a few years earlier than either gold or bronze medalists. Kalwij theorizes that these results, too, are related to people's outlook. Gold medalists are thrilled to win, and bronze medalists are thrilled to make the podium; silver medalists see themselves as 'the No. 1 loser,' as Jerry Seinfeld once put it. With that in mind, I've tried to reframe my attitude about the xenon controversy. Let the annual Everest frenzy continue, with or without xenon, and let its allure continue to draw the most hard-edged and deep-pocketed summit baggers. Meanwhile, leave the other, lesser-known mountains for the rest of us to enjoy in tranquility. I'd call that a win.
