QUEBEC (CP) — Former Olympic champion Myriam Bedard was convicted Thursday on a charge of breaching a custody order involving her daughter.
Sentencing arguments were postponed until Oct. 9 at the request of Bedard’s lawyer.
The jurors convicted Bedard on their third day of deliberations.
The triple Olympic medallist faced a charge of breaching a custody order between last Oct. 3 and Dec. 22 by taking her daughter, who was then 11, to the United States.
Bedard and her current boyfriend, Nima Mazhari, said they went to the United States to denounce "Canadian bureaucratic terrorism" and had intended to stay for only a couple of weeks.
Bedard’s lawyer said during the trial his client did not prevent her ex-husband, Jean Paquet, from seeing the girl and that he was often unavailable.
The Crown argued the opposite.
The 37-year-old former biathlete won three Olympic medals, including two golds at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.
Bedard shot back into the public spotlight in February 2004 when she said she had been forced from her marketing job at Via Rail for raising questions about inflated payments to Quebec ad firms under the federal sponsorship program.
Via Rail chairman Jean Pelletier was subsequently fired for belittling Bedard when he called her a "pitiful" single mother who was seeking publicity.< .
In March of that year, she then stunned a Commons public accounts committee by referring to "top secret" information that race car driver Jacques Villeneuve had received US$12 million to wear the Canada logo on his uniform.
A Villeneuve spokesman vehemently denied the allegations.
Bedard also said she had been told of alleged drug trafficking at Groupaction, a Montreal ad firm that was at the centre of the sponsorship affair.
She raised even more eyebrows when she noted that former prime minister Jean Chretien decided not to go to war in Iraq because of advice offered by Mazhari.