The Canadian women's football team played and won their first Olympic final. This already says a lot about how incredible what Sinclair and her teammates is, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Or at least it doesn't for the Canadian fans, specify Calli Mingopoulos.
In Toronto it’s 3.30 pm of the day before the final and Calli, a Canadian fan, former footballer and illustrator, wants to start from the beginning to explain the extent of what happened in Tokyo until that moment. “How much do you know about the history of women's football in Canada over the past decade? Because it would help to understand why this final counts ".
Before London 2012, indeed, there was not much talking about women's football in Canada. The historic sport rivalry against the United States took place mainly on hockey and basketball fields, and Canadians have never been very interested in football in general, and women's football in particular. "Actually, before the Germany World Cup in 2011, not even I, who have always played football, knew of the existence of a women's football team" says Calli, echoing stories that also here in Italy sound familiar to many. It was during that World Cup that she fell in love with her national team and that, for the first time, she realized that a future for women in sport was possible.
However, in addition to personal revelations like this, football is able to give moments that become history, reasons of pride for an entire nation and source of decades of resentment, as well as requests for the return of paintings, like Gioconda, in the case of Italy. Generally though, those episodes are related to the men's teams. For Canada, instead, it is the women's national team and the London 2012 Olympics semifinal everyone thinks about.
Canada, at the Olympic Games hosted in England, closed the group stage after Sweden and Japan. Qualified to the quarter-finals as the best third, the Canadians faced Great Britain, first of their group. Surprisingly, the North Americans won and advanced towards the semifinal. Waiting for them, at Old Trafford, they found the United States.
To clarify the precedents between the two teams, Calli relies on numbers. Of the last 36 matches between the two teams, the United States have won 30 and drawn 6. The last time Canada beat the USA, before the semi-final in Tokyo, dated back to 2001 when Christine Sinclair was the only player, of both teams, on the pitch.
In the London semi-final, however, Canada was finally changing the ending of a well-known story. Sinclair opened the scoring, but the Americans responded back with Rapinoe. Yet Sinclair was in a state of grace that day and regained the advantage. Rapinoe tried again to bring her teammates back to the surface, but Sinclair fixed the result at 3-2 with a hat-trick.
At that point, on Canadian social media the surname of Sinclair started to become familiar and no one wanted to miss the end of a last shot challenge. Calli was in a bar of a small village that day, on vacation, and at each goal of the captain, more and more people approached the screen.
But then, things took a bad turn. Abby Wambach, appealing to the Canadian goalkeeper's violation of the six-second rule, convinced the referee to assign a free kick. The ball landed on a defender's arm, the referee gave USA a penalty and Wambach made no mistake: it’s 3-3 on regular time.
At the 123th minute, Alex Morgan headed the goal of the final 4-3, which still holds the record for the latest goal in the history of Olympic and FIFA tournaments. That US victory remained in the memory of Canadians as a theft of a gold medal their team deserved. So sensational that in 2020, eight years later, in a pub during a Liverpool game, Calli says she overheard two middle-aged men at the table behind her still discussing that result.
Almost a decade after that match, a showdown has arrived for Canada. The fate of the Olympic semifinal against Uswnt was still decided by a penalty. Christiane Sinclair, the only one there the last time Canada managed to win over their eternal rivals, decided not to challenge the US goalkeeper, her teammate in Portland. In what looked like a handover, she handed the ball over to Jessie Fleming. The team that arrived in Tokyo is in fact a mix between veterans, who experienced on the pitch the defeat in London 2012, and girls who saw it with their eyes glued to the television at 14 years old. Among those, Jessie Fleming, who was born in 1998 at London, Ontario, was destined to rewrite the ending of what had always seemed to be a Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale.
Beating the United States, Calli says, sounds already like a win for Canada. Of course, if we want to talk about revenges to be taken, it was Sweden that eliminated the Canadians at the 2019 World Cup in France. But it would be useless to make an Olympic tournament look like an episode of Game of Thrones at all costs.
Sweden is a selection that is not talked about much, but that never fails in important tournaments. They are a good team, Calli confirms, and she would not mind having Caroline Sieger on Canada side, one of the players who, together with Canada’s determination, made her fall in love with women's football back in 2011.
In the end, Canada won thanks to the last penalty scored by Grosso. The same surname, speaking about rivalry, of the italian footballer who scored the last penalty on the World Cup final against France in 2006, starting the Gioconda restitution saga.
As reported by The Athletic journalist Meg Linehan, at the end of the match Sinclair said: "I had the honor of playing with Seger in New York, we actually lived together. She's one of my friends and my heart breaks for her. She's done so much for soccer in Sweden. My heart hurts for her.”
Beyond rivalry and revenge, another circle that closes, pointing out the really good compass job that Canada did in this five circles final at Tokyo.