Ottawa has a long and proud sport tradition, and in this ongoing series, we will present highlight moments and figures from our local sport history. The Ottawa Sport History Highlight series is produced collaboratively by the Ottawa Sports Pages and the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame, which has welcomed almost 300 inductees dating back to its establishment in 1968.

In this edition of the Ottawa Sport History Highlight Series, we look back on the career of 1986 Ottawa Sport Hall inductee Linda Thom, who won Canada’s first gold medal of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics Games in the debut of women’s shooting.

You could call Linda Thom a trailblazer, but you’d only be partly correct. Now 80 years old, and 40 years removed from her gold medal win, no Canadian has since followed her pioneering path to the Olympic shooting podium.

Thom will always be the world’s first female Olympic champion in sport shooting, the women’s division having made its debut at the Los Angeles 1984 Games.

The opportunity to compete on sport’s grandest stage lured Thom out of a six-year retirement. The Ottawa-raised markswoman learned to shoot using her brother’s BB gun under her father’s watch at age eight.

Thom didn’t start competing until she began studying at Carleton University, where she graduated with a journalism degree in 1967.

Thom quickly proved to be a force both nationally and internationally. She was Canadian women’s pistol champion from 1970-1975, a double-gold medallist at the 1973 Americas championship, and a top-10 finisher at numerous world championships in the 70s.

She put her competitive pursuits aside in 1976 and started a family with husband Don, and focused on her career as a caterer and cooking instructor, having studied at the Cordon Bleu while they lived in Paris.

But when the International Olympic Committee announced in March 1982 that women’s pistol shooting would be added for the 1984 Games, Thom headed straight to the range at the R.A. Gun Club, with Olympic gold as her target.

She had a national coach in her backyard in Ed Kelly, a devoted volunteer coach who helped her reemerge as a world-class talent, prior to his death from cancer seven months before the Olympics. National team head coach Joe Liota, Kelly’s mentor, then became Thom’s primary coach.

Liota assisted in delivering an impressive sports mental performance training program, before the field was recognized as such. That regiment wound up giving Thom the edge come competition day on July 30, 1984 at the Prado Olympic Shooting Park, well east of downtown L.A.

The competition featured two segments of three rounds each. Thom’s first of three morning rounds in the precision portion of the contest was her worst of the day.

She scored 95 out of 100 points to sit in 12th place. But she rose to fifth after the next two rounds and moved within five points of the leader.

In the afternoon, Thom excelled in her signature rapid-fire phase, where the target is only exposed for three seconds. She scored rounds of 98, 100 and 99 to wind up in a tie for first place with American Ruby Fox, who was from nearby Parker, AZ.

A thrilling three-round shootout scored out of 50 ultimately decided the champion. Both competitors shot 49 and 50 to start, but Thom bested Fox 49-48 in the deciding frame, which turned her diary messages into gospel, reporter Martin Cleary wrote in the next day’s Ottawa Citizen.

“I followed a program of psychological training diligently and that’s the reason for my success,” Thom told Cleary. “I write in my diary every night. I wrote supportive notes and in the first person present. I write, ‘I am the 1984 Olympic gold medallist in women’s sport pistol.’”

Reflecting years later on the mental edge she was able to gain, Thom “felt that I could be more determined than the other competitors might be, and therefore that I would win. Somewhere deep down in the core of Linda Thom existed a belief that I could do it, or I would never have come back to shooting after seven years off,” she wrote in a detailed blog entry at HavingTheMentalEdge.com. “For 18 months I wrote that I was the Olympic Champion, every single night in my diary, and it came true. It helped me grapple with myself and my image of myself as a champion.”

Thom was the first Canadian woman to stand atop the podium at the Summer Olympics in 56 years, since high jumper Ethel Catherwood in 1928.

“I thought I’d cry, but I didn’t,” Thom added in her interview with Cleary. “I really enjoyed it. I sang the anthem quietly to myself and drank in every second of it. This was my moment. I’ve won gold before, but never had a flag raising or the anthem played.”

Thom’s family was set to arrive at the venue after her competition so they wouldn’t be a distraction, but wound up catching the dramatic shootout.

“I didn’t want my kids yelling, ‘mommy, mommy,’” explained Thom, who celebrated her son Murray’s sixth birthday a few days later with a trip to Disneyland along with eight-year-old Samantha. “They were as good as gold. Samantha has been telling her classmates for the past two months, ‘my mommy is going to win a gold medal.’

“It’s wonderful to have that encouragement because there are times when you have a few doubts. I did it for her.”

Thom was later awarded the Velma Springstead Trophy as Canada’s outstanding female athlete of 1984, and she served as an advocate and leader for women’s representation in sport for years to come.

That advocacy started somewhat inadvertently right from the get-go. While the Citizen‘s coverage focused on sport first, several Globe and Mail readers were fuming about that publication’s front page headline “Canada’s first Olympic gold captured by mother of two”, alongside a photo of a male swimmer who won silver, and a report that focused heavily on Thom’s skills as a cook.

“It is wonderful that Canada won a gold medal on the first day of the Olympics. It is appalling that there was no front-page photo of Linda Thom, and that the only thing the headline writer could come up with was ‘mother of two.’ When male athletes are described by parenting skills and cooking ability, I will rest more easily with The Globe‘s sexism,” one reader wrote in a letter to the editor.

“We decided that (reporter) Frayne’s emphasis upon the private life of the athlete indicates the threat implicit in the image of any woman with a gun in her hand,” commented another reader.

Though her sport made it into the Olympics, Thom still had to lobby for the Commonwealth Games to include women’s shooting events. After retiring from competition in 1987, the Lisgar Collegiate Institute grad worked with local school boards and sports organizations to develop greater women’s sports and recreation opportunities.

“It was just like my mother always told me: ‘You can do it. You can do it,’” Thom reflected in a 1988 Toronto Star story by Kellie Hudson.

Thom spent her entire sporting career confounding stereotypes, the Canada Sports Hall of Fame notes in her biography. Upon Thom’s induction to the national shrine in 1992, the 1986 Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame inductee said she hoped more women would be given the chance to compete in sports.

This summer, like Thom had done 40 years earlier as Canada’s Closing Ceremonies flag bearer in L.A., another Ottawa woman (para canoe paddler Brianna Hennessy) carried the maple leaf into the Stade de France to close the Paralympic Games. Paris 2024 was the first time as many women competed in the Olympics as men, though the Paralympics still have more male participants.

Back in Ottawa, the 40th anniversary of Thom’s gold medal win was marked with a celebration organized by Ottawa Centre MPP Joel Harden, held in Linda Thom Park next to the Rideau River and Billings Bridge.

“I’m really proud to be a Canadian and I know people back home are proud of me,” Thom told reporters the day after she won gold. “I thank all of Canada for being behind me.”

In 1985, Thom was appointed to the Order of Canada alongside 73 other Canadians, including former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. She told the Ottawa Citizen that her gold medal was “the realization of a dream,” while the Order was “the greatest honour people of your country can bestow upon you.”

“I’m humbled to be in a room full of such distinguished Canadians,” Thom underlined.