In 2002 at the Salt Lake Winter Olympic Games Trent Evans, an icemaker from Edmonton, Alberta, placed a loonie (the Canadian one dollar coin) at centre ice in the E-Centre in hopes that it would bring good luck to both the men’s and women’s Canadian Olympic Hockey team. It seemed to work considering that the both teams beat the United States to collect gold in Salt Lake.
Andrew Tiffany decided to spend a little more money to see if he could bring the same kind of luck to the country’s best swimmers, “We ended up putting a toonie (the Canadian two dollar coin) underneath the competition pool just to give our athletes a little taste of home while they’re in the water,” Andrew Tiffany told CBC News.
Tiffany owns Sustainable Aquatic Systems, which was commissioned by the Rio Organizing Committee to work on the Olympic Aquatic Stadium.
Being extremely superstitious Evans was not willing to go public with the placement of the loonie in 2002,”I probably told a dozen people within Team Canada, people I felt could be trusted with the secret,” Evans told the CBC. “If they wanted to use that as motivation for the men’s and women’s teams, well, that was great.”
It was a secret the team took seriously. After winning the Olympic gold in the women’s event Danielle Goyette almost let the cat out of the back before she was stopped by one of her teammates, “After the game, I went and kissed centre ice,” Goyette told the CBC. “Hayley (Wickenheiser) came over and said to me, ‘Get away, Danielle, we can’t tell people it’s there.”
“The men’s final is in three days and we have to keep it secret.”
The legend of the loonie is so great that the 1987 coin is now enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Although Tiffany did not subscribe to the same process the toonie has already proven to be a good luck charm for the Canadian swimmers on the first day of competition. In the prelims 16 year old Penny Oleksiak broke the junior world record in the 100 butterfly and this evening the women’s 4 x 100 freestyle relay took the bronze. The medal was the country’s first for a women’s relay in 40 years and is the first women’s medal the nation has won since Marianne Limpert took a silver in the 200 IM in 1996.