Special Olympics athletes bring home medals

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/03/2024 (714 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon’s Special Olympians celebrated their medal wins in Calgary with a Westman bonspiel, which also served as a memorial curling match to honour longtime coach Linda Laminman, who passed away last year.

The Saturday morning curling tournament was the homecoming for the special Olympics athletes after competing at the Special Olympics Canada Winter Games in Calgary last week.

The four-person curling team brought home bronze metals, while Shannon Ivey won silver and bronze in snowshoeing, and Chris Jones snagged a bronze medal while playing floor hockey with a Winnipeg team.

The bonspiel at Riverview Curling Club was an emotional one because Special Olympics curling and golf coach Linda Laminman, who passed away last fall after a battle with cancer, wasn’t there.

“Loss has been big this year,” coach Jodee Webster told the Sun. “We just know that she’s in Calgary, we were playing for her. We said, ‘Let’s play for Linda,’ just go out and have fun and do our best. That’s all you can ask.”

“It’s not about winning or losing; it’s about going out and having fun and trying your best.”

And that’s exactly what the athletes did — and their best efforts were rewarded with medals.

“[It] was pretty big that everybody came back with a medal, and I think that this was the best showing at the nationals for Manitoba,” Webster said. “We came back with 60 medals.”

Webster has been coaching the Special Olympics team for six years after Laminman, who was in the curling league as Webster, invited her to come and try coaching the athletes.

She said that the games in Calgary were a great experience for the athletes beyond bringing back medals — it was the independence and experience that helped give them more life skills.

“Knowing that they can do well, I think is a real confidence booster for them,” Webster said. “As a coach, you’re just proud of them no matter what.”

Devin Leadbeater, a skip on the curling team, described the feeling on the ice in Calgary as “amazing.”

At the team’s bronze medal game in Calgary, they were down three in the last end, when teammate Tyler Yurchuk drew two rocks and secured the team’s win.

He told the Sun that he credits the team’s win to the hard work.

“We just trained our butts off, I think as best we could,” he said.

At Saturday’s tournament, Leadbeater said that it was an emotional day, not only coming off of Olympic success last week but also because of missing Laminman at the club.

“We’re just doing it in memory of Linda, and she will just be looking down on every single person here today,” he said.

The Special Olympics team members, many wearing their medals that morning, made their way with other teams from the province onto the ice to the sound of bagpipes. All of the teams sang the national anthem together and Webster announced that the bonspiel would be named in memory of Laminman. Everyone cheered and Yurchuk threw the first rock.

Everyone cheered again, and then got right back into the game.

» gmortfield@brandonsun.com

» X: @geena_mortfield