Lucie Guay

From 1975 to 1984, Lucie Guay was a dominant figure in her sport and one of the best kayakers in Canada. Over those 10 years, she competed in 10 Canadian championships and seven world championships.

Guay’s Olympic adventures began in 1976, when she took part in the trials to select the Canadian national team that would be going to the Montréal Olympics that summer. She made the team, but was designated an alternate and remained on the sidelines at the Games—an especially bitter pill to swallow in her own home town.

A lesser woman might have given up then and there, but Guay dug deep and found the motivation to keep practicing her support and become one of the best at it. She trained hard over the following years and was selected for the Canadian national team that was supposed to attend the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. But her streak of bad luck continued: like all of the other Canadian athletes, she was a collateral victim of the Canadian government’s decision to boycott those games to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Since plans for the training program leading up to the Olympics had already been in place for some time, the Canadian team went to Poland to keep training anyway. Her three weeks in Poland were another challenge for Guay, because she and her team were training beside Polish kayakers who knew they were going to the Olympics. In 1983, Guay competed in racquetball at the Canada Games in Chicoutimi. That same year, she made her mark at the Commonwealth Cup in Scotland, where she took three gold medals in kayaking.

In the qualifying trials for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, Guay came down with tonsillitis and finished eighth. But in a second race a few days later, she did better, managed to qualify, and so at last got to compete in the Olympics. At Los Angeles, members of the Canadian canoeing and kayaking team, including kayakers Alwyn Morris and Hugh Fisher, nabbed six gold medals. But Guay did not come home empty-handed: after a seventh-place finish in the K-1 500 metres, she took a bronze in the K-4 500 metres.

After the Los Angeles Olympics, Guay retired from kayaking. With a bachelor’s degree in physical education from the University of Ottawa, she served as a television commentator for the kayaking events at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and the 1996 world championships in Montréal.

Guay has made it her lifelong mission to promote physical activity. She was inducted into the Québec Sports Hall of Fame in 1998.