Calgary cyclist Sarah Orban ‘super proud’ of taking different path to Olympic Games
Soccer was Sarah Orban’s passion — her only route to the Olympic Games.
Or so she thought.
Then came a new path for the Calgarian to reach the summer sporting showcase.
Cycling, courtesy of RBC Training Ground — a motivator for many Canadian Olympians over the years.
And now after just a few short years in a different sport, she’s in Paris set to wheel around the track in pursuit of Games glory.
“Yeah, it’s been a crazy journey,” said Orban, her words filled with emotion over her past, present and future adventures on the cycling track.
“I think coming into the sport pretty late, too, I didn’t really know it possible to go to the Olympics,” continued the 28-year-old first-time Olympian. “It was kind of just jumping feet-first into something that almost seemed kind of crazy to think that I could learn and become one of the best in the world at a sport I’d never done growing up.”
Indeed, it was all about soccer for Orban when she was young.
The E.P. Scarlett High School grad did make her way to varsity soccer with the U SPORTS’ Lethbridge Pronghorns.
“But I just didn’t make it to the next level,” Orban said. “As a kid, it was always my dream to represent Canada and to be repping the maple leaf on my back, but that was in soccer. That was my sport.
“That’s kind of all I knew.”
However, the Olympic dream didn’t die — thanks mostly to her dad, Scott, who is known locally as the chief operating officer at McKenzie Meadows Golf Club.
“Growing up, my dad always was in my ear telling me that I could go to the Olympics,” said Orban, of her dad’s suggestions of trying speed skating, bobsleigh and skeleton. “I think just having his belief in me growing up really was kind of the biggest inspiration for me.”
And so fresh out of the University of Lethbridge, she found the time — and the will — to check out other Olympic avenues.
The road she discovered has eventually led her to these Games and the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Velodrome in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France.
“I’ve turned into one of the best starters in the world,” said Orban, who teams up with fellow Albertan Kelsey Mitchell — an RBC Training Ground gold-medal success story herself — and Quebec’s Lauriane Genest in track cycling Monday for qualifying (9:30 a.m. MT) and Tuesday for first-round heats (5:52 a.m. MT) and finals (10:57 a.m. MT).
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“We know what we’re capable of — all of us,” continued Orban. “And we’ve been competing together for the last three years. Actually, women’s team sprint with three women is relatively new. And we’re all individually very strong. But when you put us together, we’re just such a great combination. Anytime we get on the line together, it’s just really just go out and do our best to see what happens. We’ve prepared very well. So really, I think we just see what see what we can do together.
“But I think we have it pretty dialled in.”
They have to be given the sheer quickness of each race — described by Orban as “being done in the blink of an eye, like it’s less than a minute.”
And it often comes down to a thousandth of a second separating the combatants.
“Everything has to go perfect,” continued Orban, who counts the Germans, the Chinese and the British as strong rivals in track cycling’s podium push. “But I think anything can happen.
“I think I’m just really excited to kind of see what my best can be. There’s a lot of different emotions. Super proud to be representing the Maple Leaf. Probably one of the biggest honours I’ll ever have. And I’m super proud to be going my first Olympics.”
And super proud of how she got there so swiftly.
She joined the RBC Training Ground in 2017 and, one year later, was on her way to the highest levels of cycle.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to just be discovered in a completely new sport,” added Orban. “For me, I seized the opportunity of that. I thought this is my only path to maybe going to the Olympics one day, so I was just completely all over that, attending the event and kind of seeing what could come of it.
“The process of it after it was all done — after I was identified by Cycling Canada — I was very much like 100 per cent just committed to trying to make the national team. So it took about a year-and-a-half to make the national team. And at that point, I was done at university. So I was fully, fully committed to training into just really trying to learn the sport, just being an absolute sponge and trying to kind of fast-track myself as quick as possible. And yeah, like I would just see progression almost every month. So I was starting to get the feeling like it was possible.
“It’s been a long two years of qualifying to the Olympics, so kind of see it come full circle, It’s pretty incredible.”
LOCALS ON DAY 7
Okotoks swimmer Finlay Knox finished eighth in the 200-metre men’s individual medley, falling back over the final two legs of the multi-stroke swim.
Knox’s time was 1:57.26.
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