Like many Whistler kids, Cassidy Deane always thought she would be a skier. She’s been carving powder since she could walk, with figure skating being her other main youth sport. Deane also participated in volleyball, basketball, and track and field, but skating helped her fine-tune her stance and balance as a ski racer.
Today, Deane is a national team-calibre rower who has helped Canada to an Olympic berth in Paris. Come next summer, they’ll attempt to defend their women’s eight gold medal from Tokyo 2020.
How did she end up becoming a summer athlete who deals with water in its liquid form, as opposed to frozen? It was all a matter of opportunity.
“I went off to university. There’s skiing in Ontario but not in Kingston, specifically, and so I was kind of looking to pick up a new sport,” Deane said.
A new start
Partway through her physical and health education degree at Queen’s University, a member of the campus rowing team approached Deane. She’s tall and lean, with an athletic body type that evidently caught the recruiter’s eye. At that point, Deane had only ever seen rowing on television, but was eager to give it a try.
At first, coaches moved her all over the boat, and she wondered if she had what it took. In hindsight, she realizes they saw her potential, and were trying to figure out how to best use her physical gifts.
Deane officially began with the Queen’s novice rowing program in fall 2015, and donned a Canadian uniform three years later at the World University Rowing Championship in Shanghai. It was at that point she realized she wanted to double down on her new sport, attempting the considerable leap from varsity to national-level competition.
Her diverse athletic background has, at least indirectly, empowered her to make the step up.
“Rowing has a lot of timing elements to it. You have to be in time with your crew, you have to be in time with the boat moving underneath you and the speed of the water,” explained Deane. “That’s similar to skiing: you have to load the ski at a certain time of the turn in order to carve the ski properly. I do feel like there was a timing element that transferred from skiing into rowing, and I do have quite a few teammates that were also previous ski racers.”
After graduating from Queen’s, the now 26-year-old knocked down a master’s degree of kinesiology in sport management and leadership at Western University. She grinded through the doldrums of COVID-mandated lockdowns and admitted to struggling with the mental challenge of training by herself at home. Fortunately, she stayed the course—and it paid off.
Upholding the standard
Deane represented Canada last month at the World Rowing Championships in Belgrade, Serbia. There, she helped propel the Maple Leaf to a fifth-place finish and a secured spot at the 2024 Summer Olympics.
“It was a great experience,” Deane said. “I am very grateful for being able to travel to all these amazing countries. I don’t think I would have found myself ever going to Serbia to compete, or even possibly to travel. Canada will have a boat at the Olympics, hopefully defending its gold medal title. It’s really great for our program and for the entire Canadian women’s rowing team.”
It was a big deal when the Canadians broke through in Tokyo. They had won the second Olympic women’s eight gold medal in this country’s history and the first since 1992 in Barcelona. Four members of that championship squad—Avalon Wasteneys, Kasia Gruchalla-Wesierski, Sydney Payne and coxswain Kristen Kit—were back in Serbia, but the rest (including Deane) are relative newcomers.
“I think it’s very cool because the veterans are able to lead by example, demonstrating the best practices and what a gold medal mentality looks like,” Deane said. “Our process is training every day, upholding that standard that we have highlighted as being the best, and that includes showing up both mentally and physically. We need to just make sure all the details are there.”
As she and her teammates embark on their final approach to Paris, Deane is proud to be the only Whistlerite among them. She hopes to do her part in raising awareness for rowing in the Sea to Sky corridor, growing the sport beyond a dedicated few who train on Alta Lake.
“Rowing’s a bit of a unique sport in the sense that it’s very individualized. I can only control what I’m doing,” said Deane. “But then, it’s also a team sport, because you’re in a boat with either two, four or eight other people. I really like how it mixes both.”
