What's a Barnacle? It's yellow, sticks and screams if you try to pry it off your car
Barnacles, bright yellow devices used to make sure parking scofflaws pay their tickets, could soon be making their way to cities across Canada.
The defining moment of Annie Vernon’s rowing career is one forever captured on TV news footage – she and her three teammates standing at the rowing-canoeing park in Beijing, receiving their Olympic medals in 2008. But the footage shows clear anguish on the faces of Vernon and her Great Britain teammates; the medals were silver, their quadruple sculls boat having been passed by the Chinese in the race’s home stretch.
For Olympians who train with the dream of feeling the gold medal being placed around their neck as their national anthem plays, falling just short can feel like missing the opportunity of a lifetime.
Even now, the memories pack a punch for Vernon.
“I think I still feel 90 per cent the same emotions that I did in that moment, which was just huge frustration. I really felt like we'd let ourselves down. We would really focus on winning gold and I still think we were capable of doing it on that day,” Vernon told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday.
It’s a reality that can seem strange to an armchair fan, watching elite athletes compete at a global level for the highest honour in their sport. Surely, finishing second in the world should feel like an amazing achievement? It’s a nice thought, but one that runs into the reality that any competition that is about winning is also about losing. For instance, Vernon points out that the area where athletes are able to see family and friends immediately after a race is often referred to as the ‘kiss and cry’ area, with tears that are not always for joy.
Vernon, a two-time world champion, has examined the subject beyond just her own first-hand experience. In 2019, she looked at the psychology of elite athletes in her book “Mind Games.” She says that finishing a close second can often be more difficult for an athlete to process than missing the podium outright, or finishing well back of the leaders.
“I think it's because you're so close but you're so far. You know you can touch the podium but you're not standing on it. You're watching other people stand there they get their medals and have their moment,” says Vernon.
Now 13 years removed from her Olympic medal race, Vernon has had time to reflect on her performance and can recognize it for the monumental achievement it was. She says she tells athletes that it’s important to look beyond the podium.
“I think as an athlete you've got to look beyond the result, you've got to understand everything you've achieved, the highs and lows the friendship, the memories, the people you’ve met, the experience you’ve had,” she says. “Yeah, that the medal, the result is a huge part of that, but it's just still one part of that picture.”
That said, as someone wired for elite competition, the sting of losing can linger. Vernon had hoped to repeat on the Olympic podium at the 2012 games in London, this time with a gold. Instead, her eights crew finished fifth.
“Resilience comes from being tested, doesn’t it?” she says. “Obviously four years later I wasn't able to get that goal that I wanted, so I didn't have that that fairy tale ending that I would have loved. But again that's life isn't it? You grit your teeth you smile and you move on to your next challenge.”
Barnacles, bright yellow devices used to make sure parking scofflaws pay their tickets, could soon be making their way to cities across Canada.
An Airbnb in Montreal's Verdun borough was the source of much frustration from neighbours who say there were constant parties at the location. It has been taken down from the app, but housing advocates remain upset about short-term rentals.
A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former U.S. President Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said.
He decided to spend Christmas somewhere that wouldn't involve snowstorm disasters. She was spending the holidays with family, travelling for the first time outside of her native country of Venezuela. 23 years later, they're still in love.
One day after a Montreal police officer fired gunshots at a suspect in a stolen vehicle, senior officers were telling parliamentarians that organized crime groups are recruiting people as young as 15 in the city to steal cars so that they can be shipped overseas.
A Nigerian chess champion and child education advocate played chess nonstop for 60 hours in New York City's Times Square to break the Guinness World Record for the longest chess marathon.
RCMP say the fire that prompted a state of emergency in a Labrador town is now under control.
Thirteen victims of the Columbine High School shooting were remembered during a vigil Friday on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the shooting that was the worst the nation had seen at the time.
An Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza's southernmost city killed at least nine people, six of them children, hospital authorities said Saturday, as Israel pursued its nearly seven-month offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory.
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a grade four student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.
When Les Robertson was walking home from the gym in North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood three weeks ago, he did a double take. Standing near a burrow it had dug in a vacant lot near East 1st Street and St. Georges Avenue was a yellow-bellied marmot.
A moulting seal who was relocated after drawing daily crowds of onlookers in Greater Victoria has made a surprise return, after what officials described as an 'astonishing' six-day journey.
Just steps from Parliament Hill is a barber shop that for the last 100 years has catered to everyone from prime ministers to tourists.
A high score on a Foo Fighters pinball machine has Edmonton player Dave Formenti on a high.
A compound used to treat sour gas that's been linked to fertility issues in cattle has been found throughout groundwater in the Prairies, according to a new study.