If he had shown this kind of speed on skates, Austin Cole might have ended up against the likes of Connor McDavid in NHL skills competitions.
However, the 18-year-old Sherwood Park product has no regrets about trading in his hockey gear for track shoes.
It’s pretty easy to see why, as Cole has managed to rise to the very top ranks of the national track scene in just two years of involvement in the sport — winning gold in the 400m race at the recent Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg on the heels of making the Canadian national team to compete at the Junior Pan American Championships in Peru.
A scant two years ago, a track career was the furthest thing from Cole’s mind, as he was far more focused on hockey and helping the Sherwood Park Midget AA Oilers to a league championship that season. But he started to focus on running a little more in his Grade 11 year at Salisbury Composite High School.
“I was doing a little bit of running after hockey, but I wasn’t training for it at all, I was just doing it for fun,” he said. “In Grade 11, I made high school provincials and my coach found me and said I should train for this, and I said I would after I finished one more year of hockey. I started training once or twice a week and when hockey was done I started training every day.”
In his Grade 12 year at Sal, Cole won a medal of every colour at the 2016 high school provincial finals, as he blazed to gold in the 200m intermediate boys race, added silver in the 400m and a bronze in the 100m behind fellow Sherwood speedster and major U.S. college football and track recruit Chuba Hubbard.
He would go on to win a silver in the 200m at the junior nationals that summer and was recruited to join the University of Alberta Golden Bears track team last fall.
“It was basically my first full year in track and I knew that it was the way to go for me,” Cole said. “I knew that it had a chance to take me places and then next thing I knew, I had a scholarship at the U of A. I couldn’t believe how much my life had changed in one year. I went from thinking of myself as a hockey player to, ‘Oh, I am a sprinter now.’ ”
The sudden sporting transformation was as much of a shock to his hockey buddies as it was to Cole himself.
“They were asking me why I was never that fast on the ice,” he laughed.
Cole managed to become the 2017 300m USports indoor national champion in his freshman year with the U of A, and was named to the Canadian national team for the Junior Pan American Championships in Peru in July, finishing seventh in the 400m.
“That was the coolest moment of my life, getting to compete for Canada,” he said. “I’d never been to South America before, so that was an experience in itself. I had all these people coming up to me and wanting to have their picture taken with me and my signature. I took so many pictures after one race and I was just dead tired, but how often do you have people wanting something like that? It was such a unique moment.”
The Sherwood sprinter had barely returned from Peru when he was off to Winnipeg for the Canada Summer Games, where he would win the gold medal in the 400m.
“I came back from Peru and had a day to pack and I was off to Winnipeg. I was kind of living out of a suitcase for the last few weeks,” Cole said. “It was a great experience at the Canada Summer Games. There was a crazy number of volunteers there and having big crowds out to watch us compete was a huge bonus. When you are training, you don’t have that kind of hype and you don’t run your fastest times. It was a really cool time. Especially crossing that finish line in first place after a rough month where I have been struggling with an injury. Winning that race was a really good feeling, almost a feeling of relief to have finished my season in a really good way.”
Considering what he has managed to accomplish thus far in his short track career, Cole has his sights set rather high for the future.
“There is always that one goal, the 2020 Summer Olympics,” he said. “That’s the top goal, but you have to take it one step at a time. Right now, I want to defend my 300m indoor title and I would love to make another national team, whether it is at the U-23 level for international trips, or maybe even the Commonwealth Games. The Olympics is the ultimate goal. If it doesn’t happen in 2020, hopefully it would happen in 2024.”
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