A funny thing happened to 20-year-old Gabriela Stafford on the way to her 2020 Olympics in Tokyo: she started cutting minutes off her time. First one, then another, and soon, much sooner than anticipated, the middle distance runner met the Canadian Olympic standard. Then, at the Olympic trials in July, she won the Canadian 1,500-metre title, punching her ticket to Rio.
“I remember watching the London Olympics and was completely dispassionate about it. At that point I hadn’t even made the national team yet,” she says. “To become an Olympian at only 20 makes me excited for my future in this sport, but that being said, I absolutely do not take this opportunity for granted because track is a very delicate and fickle sport.”
Stafford was born into a running family. Her father was a track and field athlete and competed four times at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships. Her aunt Sara Gardner was a junior national team member. Her sister just became the 2016 junior national champion in the 1,500-metre event. Her father was introduced to her mom, who passed away when Stafford was just 13, by fellow University of Toronto track teammates who also happened to be her mother’s siblings.
“We have a long lineage of bleeding blue,” says Stafford, over coffee at a small Midtown café in Davisville village. Stafford began her running career at Toronto French School where she competed in cross-country and trained along the Beltline Trail and in Sherwood Park. She was intrigued by the mental side of the game, when to let the pack go, when to turn it up a notch. Not surprisingly, she is currently enrolled in a five-year psychology research specialist program. In Grade 10, she started working under University of Toronto coach Terry Radchenko, who continues to coach her to this day.
“It’s a gift, and I really feel like the track team, and my coaches at the University of Toronto gave me this gift,” Stafford says. “I could not have done it without the unconditional support from my coaches Terry, Ross and Carl. I am so blessed.”
