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New Brunswick’s speed skating high-performance hub started with a dream and a little bit of funding.
For a while, a group of about a dozen fast skaters trained in the province’s capital of Fredericton five days a week.
“It was kind of a labour of love at first,” said Derrick MacLeod, who was the high-performance coach for the group, and is now the provincial technical director and coach for Speed Skate New Brunswick.
The goal was to produce one Canada Games medallist, and most of all, to make sure kids were training in the best environment. But the success to come from that has been more than MacLeod could have imagined.
Three of those skaters are now competing in short track speed skating at Milano Cortina 2026, a massive feat for a province that’s often overlooked and in a sport that’s long seen its best athletes come out of Quebec.
When one of those skaters, Moncton, N.B.’s Courtney Sarault, crossed the finish line in the women’s 500 metres on Thursday, she became the first person on the Canadian team from outside Quebec to win an individual short track speed skating medal. She took home bronze in a time of 42.427 seconds. She followed that performance up with a silver medal in the women’s 1,000m on Monday in 1:28.523.
“I hope that this inspires people that maybe are from smaller towns that they can also dream big and you’re not limited to your smaller town,” Sarault told CBC’s Devin Heroux after the race.
This story was brought to Nouzie by RSS. The original post can be found on https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/winter/short-track-speed-skating/speed-skating-nb-sarault-medal-history-2026-9.7091568?cmp=rss
