PARIS – Krissy Scurfield will be back.
The first Olympic experience for the new silver medallist from Canmore has finished in what was Rugby Canada’s best-ever result at a Games, but an untimely in-game injury wistfully forced Scurfield out of the competition prematurely.
“At first, I honestly thought it broke my hip,” said Scurfield. “I never felt something like that and it was super strange.”
An international star on the rise, this won’t be the last of the lightning-quick 21-year-old wing on the rugby pitch.
The Olympic Games are a time when athletes and teams can differentiate themselves from unknown regional standouts to national sports heroes to immortals on the world stage.
For Canadians, moments like The Golden Goal in 2010, Donovan Bailey becoming the fastest man in the world in 1996, and swimmer Penny Oleksiak winning four medals at age 16 in 2016 will live forever in national heritage.
Those Olympic moments are what every athlete strives for but only a few will achieve.
This year, Canada’s rugby sevens women were seven minutes away from achieving immortality as their epic run of upsetting higher seeds landed them in the gold medal game against the powerhouse New Zealand Black Ferns.
It was a moment that Scurfield and her teammates had dreamt about achieving together. The long hours of training and sacrifice were all for a common purpose.
But due to the severity of Scurfield’s injury – an internal laceration on her kidney – she was resting in a Paris hospital bed during the historic gold medal game as Canada played on without one of its most vital players.
“I watched it all on my computer and it was a pretty challenging day for me to not even be allowed in the stadium or to receive the medal with the team,” said Scurfield. “It’s something I never actually had to do before so for it to happen at the Olympics it was definitely a challenge.”
The injury
The devastating injury happened in Canada’s second game of the Olympics against New Zealand in pool action.
Bad luck followed Scurfield at every turn in the match.
In the opening seconds, the Canmore athlete’s nose broke as the two teams clashed at centre field for first possession. She was removed from the field for most of the half to get cleaned up.
For the former hockey player, a “classic” broken nose isn’t anything new, though the intense sensation she would feel minutes later was a new experience.
On the drop kick to the Canadians to start the second half, Scurfield was first on the ball and trying to get it under control by diving on it. While Scurfield was grabbing the ball, charging downfield full speed was Michaela Blyde, one of the top try-scorers in the world, who laid in a tackle on the Canadian that was more brutal than it appeared. When Scurfield got up, something clearly wasn’t right and she was favouring the left side of her torso.
“Basically her knee just went straight into my kidney, like, it was a crazy kidney shot,” said Scurfield. “Then I got up and I was trying to see if I was OK and the play ended and I did a line out and I thought ‘this is kind of weird.’ I've never felt this before, but maybe I can still run. Then I got the ball again and I thought ‘I think I can score this try’ and I went to sprint and I just couldn’t move so I then I kind of just went down and that was it.”
The aftermath was devastating: three CT scans, six blood tests, and spending days in the hospital.
The kidney trauma ended Scurfield’s first Olympics.
The heartbreak of not being able to compete with her teammates outweighed the physical pain.
Devastated, she uploaded two emotional social media posts afterwards to address her situation. In the first, she had tears in her eyes and wrote her injury had forced her out of the tournament. The second was a video following the gold medal match, which showed a teary Scurfield in her hospital bed chatting over FaceTime with coach Jack Hanratty, who was holding her medal. He said she was the “heart and soul” of the belief that Canada could medal in Paris.
Injuries are an unfortunate reality of sports. Scurfield is grateful to have gotten to the Games and is proud of her teammates for carrying the torch to the finals.
“Being absent from the game, this is noticeable, and I kind of wanted to have a voice for people who get injured in major events because it’s something that happens a lot more commonly than you’d imagine,” said Scurfield. “Obviously it sucks, but also it’s something that happens and you just have no control over it … and it’s not the end of the world.”
Scurfield said in four weeks she’ll be re-evaluated and if healing is on track, she could start gentle training.
For the 2024-25 season, Scurfield signed to play with the Loughborough Lightning, a 15s team in the Allianz Premiership Women’s Rugby in the United Kingdom. Fellow Canmore rugby star Holly Phillps plays for the Bristol Bears in the same league.
“It starts in October, so that’s lots of time to heal and rest to that point. It’s all going to be alright,” Scurfield said.
Receiving the medal
A photo was snapped of Scurfield biting down on her silver medal, an iconic thing for medal winners to do.
But before that, Scurfield was rushing to the Canada Olympic House after being released from hospital a day after the gold medal game. Because of the circumstances, Scurfield was the last member of the team to receive her silver.
Each of the Paris 2024 medals includes iron pieces cut out of the Eiffel Tower. The pieces were cut from girders and other areas from the historical landmark and swapped out during renovations.
At nearly a pound in weight, when it was handed to Scurfield, she thought it was heavy.
“I was like, ‘oh my god, this is real’ and it kind of just hits you that this is something that just happened and so special to share that with my teammates,” Scurfield said.
Looking at her teammates and embracing the moment, she said she was proud of them.
“It’s something we have been dreaming about for so long and something that seemed almost out of reach, and the fact that there’s a physical thing proving we did that was just so special that we did that and everyone was just so in disbelief at first," she said.
During the national anthems before the finals kick off, Canadian captains Olivia Apps and Chloe Daniels held a Scurfield jersey as they sang O Canada.
The Canadian women upset the higher-seeded Australia and France teams in back-to-back quarter and semifinal games to advance to the finals.
Continuing with the underdog theme, Canada held a 12-7 lead at halftime and were only seven minutes away from gold. However, the Kiwis came out hot in the second half and scored in the opening seconds.
With less than two minutes on the clock, New Zealand scored a critical five points, eventually leading to their second-straight Olympics gold in a 19-12 victory over Canada.
The nation's next best result came in 2016, when rugby sevens was introduced as an Olympic sport, and the Canadian women took bronze.
Scurfield plans to bring her silver to Canmore and said she is thinking of potentially hosting a rugby day for the occasion. The former Banff Bears rugby standout has been known to return to the high school and offer advice to the next generation of players.
“I wanna do something for the kids,” she said.
Olympic Village, memes and opening ceremony
Snoop Dogg wandering around Paris as a broadcasting correspondent, and somewhat unofficial mascot of Team USA, has been a recipe for smiles to many on the internet during the Summer Games.
Without fail, internet memes will start emerging from major events. Usually a peculiar mixture of odd and funny photos and videos that capture the imagination, Paris 2024 has churned out a few viral moments already.
Besides the hip-hop artist popping up in feeds wearing equestrian clothing or having strange sound bites on sports he’s never seen before, most notably the shooting competitions have been huge with one-hand-in-pocket Turkish pistol shooter Yusuf Dikec’s casual mannerisms winning over audiences, and the ridiculously cool main character vibes of Korea’s Kim Yeji.
Although Scurfield noted the Dikec memes are hilarious, she wasn’t around by the time he became popular.
She had mostly been off her phone, instead choosing to embrace the village, she said.
She didn’t meet the likes of United States superstars like LeBron James, Simone Biles, and Sha’Carri Richardson, but spoke with many other Olympians.
“It’s just so normal and you can just walk around and talk to whoever you want and it’s not like not anything crazy … Everyone’s human and everyone is nice and chill and happy to have a conversation with you and there’s a lot of mutual respect,” she said.
During opening ceremonies, the rugby team didn’t partake in the controversial spectacle that included musical performances and a boat parade with the athletes on the River Seine in Paris.
Scurfield wanted to see the performances of Celine Dion and Lady Gaga, but she also wasn’t too crazy about being on her feet for six hours in the rain, two days before competition.
“I wish I could have seen those performances live, but sometimes you have to prioritize the competition,” she said.
