OTTAWA, ON – On Wednesday, May 28th at Lansdowne Park’s Horticulture Building, the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame will induct the Class of 2025 into our local sports shrine. Each Wednesday until the ceremony, the Sport Hall will post an article on an aspect of the event. Today’s feature is a profile on 2025 Inductee Erica Wiebe.

2025 SPORT HALL INDUCTEE – ERICA WIEBE:

It was on Aug. 18, 2016 that Erica Wiebe cemented her place in the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame when she won the biggest prize in sport, an Olympic gold medal.

Wiebe’s journey to the top of the sports world of course started much earlier, and the soccer pitch was actually the original setting. The Stittsville-raised athlete first made her mark as a goalkeeper with the Ottawa Fury youth program, but it was the poster she saw one day while walking down the hall at Sacred Heart Catholic High School that would ultimately shape her life.

Wiebe decided to tryout for the wrestling team, and from there, she began a slow and steady rise to become the best in the world, inspiring countless Canadians along the way.

Wiebe won her first major title at the 2006 cadet national championships when she and her mom travelled on their own to Newfoundland.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Wiebe’s mother Paula Preston recalled in an interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Dan Plouffe. “We went there with no expectations, just thought we’d go see what it’s like, give her some experience, and she goes and wins.”

The mother-daughter duo wound up being honoured on the same night at the 2016 Ottawa Sports Awards with Sports Volunteer Lifetime Achievement Award and Female Athlete of the Year prizes.

“(My mom)’s always been so generous with her time and energy,” Wiebe told Plouffe. “That’s the backbone of why I’m able to do what I do. Without that support infrastructure, I wouldn’t be wrestling. And without the volunteers that were part of National Capital Wrestling, I wouldn’t be where I am.”

Wiebe went on to join the University of Calgary Dinos, where she experienced a rough ride as a rookie training alongside more experienced teammates. She lost an internal wrestle-off and didn’t get to compete for the Dinos in her first year.

“Every day I went into the room and didn’t score a single point,” Wiebe recounted to the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Braedon Clark just as she was emerging onto the international wrestling scene. “But when I went to junior nationals that year I knew no one in my age group had competed against that level of talent and that gave me so much confidence heading into that event and I ended up winning it very easily.”

On top of her second junior national title, Wiebe became a three-time individual Canadian university champion with the Dinos, as well as a FISU 2013 World University Summer Games bronze medallist and a 2014 FISU gold medallist.

Wiebe carried on to win seven senior national championships and two Olympic berths over the course of her career while regularly representing Canada internationally for a decade.

“It’s pretty surreal that I get to do what I love and travel the world,” Wiebe told Plouffe in 2014. “My dad will joke around and say I still live below the poverty line, but I feel like I’m living a pretty good life.”

She got a taste of the Olympic stage as an alternate for Canada’s London 2012 and travelled to those Games as a training partner for Leah Ferguson.

Then came her own rapid rise. In 2014, Wiebe won 36 matches in a row to become the world’s #1-ranked wrestler, including her first of two Commonwealth Games gold medals.

“Erica can drop down and untie your shoelace, or she can reach up and grab your arm and shoulder-throw you in the same moment,” Team Canada coach Leigh Vierling told Plouffe at Glasgow 2014. “She scrambles so well when someone attacks her, she’ll get a leg or redirect like a bullfighter and she’s back on them.

“That’s what we want from our athletes – continuous wrestling. She’s a good example of the type of wrestler we want in the national program. She’s truly an all-around athlete.”

Wiebe’s biggest win of all came in the women’s 75 kilogram division at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games when she left no doubt about who was the world’s best. Wiebe won all four of her matches by at least three points, including the gold medal match 6-0. She then showed she had plenty of energy left by hoisting her coach on her shoulders and parading around the mat in celebration.

“You train for eight years in a little tiny padded basement room at the University of Calgary. I trained every single day for this one moment,” Wiebe reflected in an interview with CBC Sports’ Scott Russell. “I remember walking into the stadium and I already felt like a champion. I felt 10 feet tall, I felt this energy vibrating in me.

“Don’t get me wrong, I did puke that morning in the Olympic village because I was so nervous, but I was also so ready. And I was so ready for whatever was going to happen because I knew I was ready to put down a performance I was proud of because I’d left no stone unturned.”

Erica Wiebe standing teary-eyed atop the podium, with O Canada playing, was an indelible image for Canadian fans from the 2016 Olympics (and the ending image in Russell’s montage of moments from the Rio Games).

“I’m sure anyone in Canada can name a few moments of watching their favourite athlete on the podium at the Olympic Games, watching the Canadian flag raised. It’s just such an iconic moment in sport,” Wiebe told Plouffe after the Games. “For me to be there and have that be my moment, it was so surreal.”

When she arrived home at the Ottawa airport, Wiebe was greeted by family, friends, supporters from her home club, media, the mayor and her city councillor, and other members of the public who didn’t know her but were nonetheless very proud of her performance and journey.

The Winsport-based athlete received a similar welcome in Calgary, the gymnasium at the Goulbourn Rec Centre was named after her, and the social media tributes with the #bewiebe hashtag took hours to read.

“Oh my God, it’s so overwhelming,” added Wiebe, who became Ottawa’s first Summer Olympic champion since men’s 4×100 m relay runner Glenroy Gilbert won gold at the Atlanta 1996 Games. “Even going into the Olympics, I had so many people reach out to me to say they believed in me, and that they’d be watching and supporting me this whole way, and they knew I could do it. Having all of that support going into it, I was so buoyed by all the love from my community.”

Wiebe won many more international tournaments during her career, and a 2018 world bronze medal. After a difficult 2019 season – which included 3 MRIs, 7 x-rays, 6 stitches, and 5 defeats (more that season than the previous four years combined) – Wiebe rebounded to earn her second Olympic berth.

She clinched her ticket to the Tokyo Games at the continental qualifier in her hometown – in front of no spectators just as COVID was shutting the world down.

“I know that Ottawa’s been behind me since day one, and so it’s still an honour to do it here,” Wiebe told Plouffe at the event. “Looking out here at Parliament Hill and seeing all the Canadian flags that are flying downtown, it’s like surreal. You don’t see that internationally, so to qualify for my second Olympics, in the nation’s capital, in my hometown, I start to get a little bit emotional about that when I start thinking about it.”

The Tokyo Olympics wound up being delayed by a year and Wiebe lost her first match of that event for an 11th-place finish in 2021. She told Russell the result was “devastating.”

“Trying to cobble together training in the midst of the pandemic in Canada was extremely difficult. Also the emotional burden of being able to train and knowing that in the entire wrestling community, many, many Canadians were not able to do what they wanted to do, that was really hard as well,” she explained. “But I also have the distinct privilege of having the most insane, amazing performance at an Olympic Games and also experiencing the most devastating low of an Olympic Games. Those very distinct experiences are really woven into the tapestry of who I am today.”

Since announcing her retirement last spring, Wiebe has also rapidly been inducted into the Wrestling Canada, Calgary Dinos and Stittsville Sports halls of fame.

“It’s so cool,” Wiebe said of being named to the Stittsville Sports Hall of Fame in an interview with Ottawa Sports Pages High Achievers columnist Martin Cleary. “I got involved in high school and (Sacred Heart) now has one of the largest wrestling programs in Ottawa (with almost 100 wrestlers).

“I feel I have come full circle. It’s the place that has made me.”

Wiebe is the second wrestler to be inducted into the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame, following three-time Olympian Ray Takahashi, a past Pan American and Commonwealth champion.

Wiebe now works as the Canadian Olympic Committee’s Manager of Athlete Relations, Safe Sport and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

“I really hope that my impact off the field of play is going to be even bigger than my impact on the field of play,” the 35-year-old told Russell. “I feel like I’m retiring on my own terms. I’m still healthy, I have an amazing relationship with sport, with my sport, and I’m very excited for the future.”

Wiebe will also soon serve as Canada’s chef de mission for the 2026 Commonwealth Games, back in Glasgow. She most values the friendships she’s developed through sport and she’s a huge believer in sport’s transformational powers.

“For me to share my love of wrestling from coast to coast to coast in Canada, to share the ability of sport to create communities that are welcoming and belonging and safe is something really foundational to what I do,” Wiebe told Russell, noting that sport reflects society. “It brings people together. It shows what they’re capable of individually and collectively. I think we need it more than ever.”

MAY 28 OTTAWA SPORT HALL OF FAME INDUCTION EVENING

Tickets for the Wednesday, May 28th Induction Ceremony are now sold out!

In the lead-up to the banquet, full-length features on each of the inductees and honoured teams will be posted on the Hall’s website at OttawaSportHall.ca and shared through the Ottawa Sports Pages.

Sponsorship opportunities are still available. See OttawaSportHall.ca/Sponsorship for more details.

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Contact:

Dave Best
Chair, Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame
Chair@OttawaSportHall.ca

About the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame:

The Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame is a non-profit organization, which documents, curates and celebrates outstanding achievement in local sport heritage. The Sport Hall is overseen by a volunteer Board of Directors to maintain and preserve our rich sporting legacies. Each year, the Hall of Fame Board receives nominations from the public and selects new inductees to be honoured in the Hall.