{"id":658976,"date":"2026-05-09T21:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T21:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/658976\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T21:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T21:46:09","slug":"young-manitoba-athletes-show-off-skills-for-a-chance-to-get-financial-backing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/658976\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Manitoba athletes show off skills for a chance to get financial backing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Text<\/p>\n

Listen to this article<\/p>\n

Estimated 3 minutes<\/p>\n

The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.<\/p>\n

About a hundred young athletes hoping to someday make it big showed off their skills to talent scouts at a Winnipeg event Saturday morning.<\/p>\n

RBC Training Ground participants were put through a series of tests that displayed their power, speed, strength and endurance to representatives of more than a dozen national sports organizations looking for future Olympians \u2014 with a chance to receive financial backing.<\/p>\n

“It can be the start of their journey,” said Olympian Marion Th\u00e9nault, a freestyle skier from Sherbrooke, Que., who won a bronze medal in the Beijing 2022 Games.<\/p>\n

She should know, since she’s among several Olympic athletes who have been recruited at RBC Training Ground events over the years.<\/p>\n

“For me personally it changed my life,” Th\u00e9nault said. <\/p>\n

“I moved out of my parents and started to train full-time in this new sport that I didn’t know much about. And being selected to receive the funding allowed me to do that, allowed me to pour everything I had into that new sport and get to the national team quite quickly.”<\/p>\n

The event held at the University of Winnipeg’s Duckworth Centre was among a series of qualifiers held ahead of a national final which will be held in the fall. <\/p>\n

The top 100 athletes in the qualifying stage will be invited to participate. Thirty-five out of the top 100 will then be selected to receive funding assistance to be used for travel, competition, coaching, nutrition and other sports-related costs.<\/p>\n

‘It’s inspiring’<\/p>\n

Colin Klassen hopes to make it all the way to the top 35.<\/p>\n

“That’d be awesome because I know I can, like, keep on pushing and get better,” he said.<\/p>\n

At 14, Colin was among the youngest participants at the Winnipeg event. He was “a little nervous because they’re all so tall.” <\/p>\n

Still, he did pretty good on the “beep test,” in which participants ran 20 metres back and forth to gauge their endurance.<\/p>\n

“I had a chat with one of the [coaches] to do some rock climbing or something,” the boy said.<\/p>\n

Colin came to the Winnipeg qualifier from Altona with his friend, Ryder Loewen, who’s also 14. <\/p>\n

Ryder, who hopes to someday be a top-level skier, said it was “awesome” to meet athletes who made it all the way to the Olympics at the event.<\/p>\n

“It’s inspiring to see \u2026 that you can get better,” Ryder said, adding that to follow your dreams, you’ve got to “put the work in.”<\/p>\n

\"AParalympian Leanne Taylor says she was excited to see the young athletes participating at the RBC Training Ground event. (Trevor Brine\/CBC)<\/p>\n

Leanne Taylor, a paratriathlete from Oak Bluff, Man., who won a bronze medal in the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, said it was exciting to see “the hunger and energy and enthusiasm” young athletes showed at the event.<\/p>\n

“I just want them to be super open-minded,” Taylor said, adding that she only discovered paratriathlon after the cycling accident that paralyzed her from the waist down. <\/p>\n

The athletes “may fall in love with bobsleigh or skeleton or archery or something that’s really different from what they originally were exposed to in school.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,22073],"class_list":["post-658976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}