Samuel and Fast headline OFSAA medal haul

The Lions pride brought home a total of eight medals from this past weekend’s OFSAA High School Championships at the Pan Am Stadium in Toronto. The haul was headlined by Sharelle Samuel’s double gold and Joe Fast’s collection of a gold and silver.
Samuel came tantalizingly close to better her lifetime bests on her gold medal runs in both the 400m and 400m hurdle events. The Ashbury Collegiate student was the class of the field in both events, winning the 400m on Friday in a time of 53.77 seconds, nearly a full second ahead of second place.
The level of dominance only increased Saturday in the hurdle event as the defending Commonwealth Youth bronze medalist in the event bested the field by two and a half seconds to win in a time of 59.64 seconds. The victory was the fourth in Samuel’s career at the OFSAA Championships to go along with a silver and bronze. She will head to Cambridge, Massachusetts next fall to continue her studies and athletics with the Crimson of Harvard.
In the junior boys middle distance events, Ridgemont’s Joe Fast continued to make a name for himself picking up gold in the 1500m event for the second year in a row. Fast comfortably won over Mason Jones of Thousand Islands Secondary School in 4:01.37, crossing the line nearly four seconds ahead of Jones.
Fast would have gladly used some of those surplus seconds as he battled for gold in the 3000m event with Dakota Goguen from Newmarket. Unfortunately for Fast, Goguen edged him at the line, winning in 8:56.07 to a diving 8:56.09 from Fast. After just two years, Fast has upped his OFSAA haul to four gold and two silvers.
Other medal winners included Caroline Poirier who improved on her bronze from 2017 with a silver medal jump of 3.60m in the senior girls pole vault. The clearance equaled her lifetime best set last summer. As well, Andre Alie-Lamarche of Gloucester High School was a silver medalist in the open boys 2000m steeplechase with a school record time of 5 minutes 55.77 seconds.  The previous record was held by Lion Farah Abdulkarim who won OFSAA bronze in the event back in 2014.
Brandon Ovington saved his best performance of the season for Friday’s senior boy’s discus final where he launched a personal best of 50.37m on his final throw to momentarily grab a hold of gold before being knocked down to silver on the final toss of the competition.
The final medal came from David Adeleye of Ashbury who nearly equaled his personal best en route to a bronze in the junior boys 100m hurdles.
Here are the remaining results from the Lions pride: