The little girls came to know her name and learned about the game, and in that sense Christine Sinclair was the role model of the year—and Canada’s best athlete, too. The gawky ones in ponytails, working on stepovers on crusty fields in the heat; the ones who gathered when school was out this summer to watch the Women’s World Cup in Germany with friends from their team. They know who Christine Sinclair is—striker for Team Canada! They know she broke her nose (“Oh my God, that must have hurt sooo much!”) when she got elbowed by that German player. They know she got mad at the doctor for not letting her go back in right away.
They know what happened next: a rifled, curling free kick around the German team’s wall and just inside the crossbar and the goalpost (“Did you see that shot!? That was, like, A-mazing”). They know that Canada didn’t play as well as they were supposed to in Germany, returning home winless and crushed from the experience. They also learned that the 28-year-old from Burnaby, B.C., has been nominated five times for the world’s best player. They may not have known, but may have sensed, that Sinclair was being the kind of role model parents and coaches talk about when, as things were going from bad to worse at the tournament, she accepted responsibility: “When it came time to win a game, we couldn’t do it,” she said. “We didn’t perform. Bottom line. No excuses.”
Naturally, that attitude—her obvious, galloping skill and her sheer, unequivocal commitment to Canada on the world stage—earned her fans outside soccer-daughters. The broken nose and the subsequent mask became the Canadian story at the World Cup. And it was one any sports fan craves: a talented leader willing—demanding—to put aside her own well-being for a greater cause. It lacked the kind of arc that makes folk heroes—Canada’s dispiriting loss to France nipped that in the bud. But it had the kind of substance that earns widespread, and lasting, respect.
After watching Sinclair on the world stage, fans may have followed her in the summer when she starred for the New York Flash of WPS—arguably the planet’s best women’s soccer league—winning the points title. It was Sinclair who scored the goal for her team in the final and then scored in penalties to give her team the title while winning most valuable player honours. Then, back with Team Canada, Sinclair did it again in the gold medal final at the Pan Am Games in Mexico, helping a wounded team pull it together for a new coach, with Olympic qualifying looming in January. Canada can’t afford not to go. Not after last summer. Not as the host country of the 2015 World Cup, when those ponytailed girls will be teenagers watching every move.
There are big goals and there are big goals, and Sinclair (‘Sincy,’ as any of the girls who follow her on Twitter would know) scored a big one when she put a header past the Brazilian keeper to tie the score 1–1 in Mexico, and then she came through again in penalties. And for the first time in a long season, Sinclair got to stand on a podium and hear “O Canada,” which had been the point all along. Meanwhile, thousands of little girls—all sports fans, for that matter—learned the true meaning of coming through in the clutch.
Next finalist: Dylan Armstrong