As Canada prepares to play for an Olympic women's soccer gold medal, it’s worth remembering how it started, and that means going back to 1986. Read: The history of the Canadian women's soccer team: From men's hand-me-downs to gold-medal game:
The headline over a Canadian Press story a few weeks later read: ‘National women’s soccer team long on potential, short on cash’ and so it was that players tried to find a fit with those man-sized jerseys.
L-R: Janet Lemieux, Sue Simon and Tracy David pose after Canada beat the United States 2-1 in a 1986 women’s soccer game, at the North America Cup, 9 July 1986 in Blaine, MN, USA. Photo courtesy of Canada Soccer. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world,” Donnelly says. “Even today — would I rather play now? No. What we went through as a team … we’re still friends now. You bond with people when you go through adversity. And we fought. We fought for our program.”
Budgets were tight — Donnelly remembers each player raising funds and contributing $1,500 apiece towards travel costs when the team made its first international trip to Taiwan in 1987 — and the program was sometimes wobbly.“This is a story not very many people know,” Donnelly says. “We were told going into the that we had to get a result in order for our program to continue. And when we lost the first game two-nil, that was just not acceptable.
It was “put on the back-burner for 2 1/2 years,” she says. “ Sylvie Beliveau said she was coaching ghosts, because we didn’t play for two years. I often think about that — how much better could we be today, if we had continued through those two years of training and playing.Article content Players fought for more money — it was an incremental gain, but they were losing jobs and cash while pursuing the national-team dream — and Donnelly says a successful women’s World Cup in 1999, hosted by the USA, elevated the sport.Article content
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