![\"Paralympian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/f0bf0963da29779fa82f129d4f011e24.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\nAbout 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
<\/p>\n
(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":"About a hundred young athletes hoping to someday make it big showed off their skills to talent scouts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,243837,194196,243834,78008,243836,201683,22073,243835],"class_list":["post-659150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-leanne-taylor","tag-marion-thenault","tag-olympic-athletes","tag-participants","tag-rbc-training-ground","tag-university-of-winnipeg","tag-winnipeg","tag-young-athletes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659150","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=659150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}