Ottawa – The six-year campaign of two Canadian sailing sisters to compete at Paris 2024 has come with an unexpected windfall: the sport has brought them closer together than they’ve ever felt before.
This past March, Georgia and Antonia Lewin-LaFrance from Chester, Nova Scotia felt more than a little wind in their sails as they qualified to represent Team Canada at the Olympic Games. Then, the sisters did something that didn’t come all that naturally to the two of them after they finished in eighth place at the 2024 49er FX World Championships in Spain.
“We hugged many times. It’s funny hugging in sailing gear because you’re in all this equipment with life jackets and wetsuits. You’re like the Michelin blimp,” Antonia says.
They couldn’t believe what they had just accomplished after the six-year campaign to get to the Paris 2024 Olympics. More importantly, they couldn’t believe they were hugging like they were. “It’s funny because when we were growing up, we weren’t super close sisters. We were not best friends most of the time, like some siblings are,” Georgia says.
Anybody with siblings can probably relate. Blood is thicker than water, so says the old expression, but sibling relationships are often complex. Some siblings are the best of friends, some may not have much of a relationship, and, in the worst cases, some may not even talk. Others are somewhere in the middle.
Sibling relationships can be complicated by small things like growing up and fighting over the bathroom or hot water to bigger issues like fighting over the place in the family, favouritism from parents, or simple sibling rivalry.
To understand how far these two sisters have come in their relationship, we have to go back to the beginning, before their sailing partnership was formed in 2018. Georgia, now 24, knew she wanted to be an Olympic sailor from an early age after getting her start at the Chester Yacht Club in Nova Scotia. She wanted to follow in the wake of her big sister Antonia, now 26.
Source: https://olympic.ca/