Grimsby man near top in Javelin

We’ve all heard stories about world-class athletes who trained and competed in their respective sports from a very young age. But rarely do we find someone who’s achieved national notoriety in a sport they started on a fluke.

Raymond Dykstra was a little kid — at home, sick in bed, watching the Winter Olympics — when he decided he wanted to be an Olympic athlete. He just didn’t know what sport he wanted to play: “No kid grows up saying, I want to be a javelin thrower.”

When he didn’t make Grimsby secondary’s boys soccer team back in grade nine, he was asked if he wanted to run track. But it was the javelin throwers on the other side of the field that caught his eye, and he asked one of them if he could try: “My very first throw beat his best all time, so he was one of our senior athletes and that was a javelin I shouldn’t have even been using.”

That same year, Dykstra not only won gold at OFSAA — he beat a 30-year record by six metres.

His success in high school earned him a scholarship at the University of Kentucky, where he’s currently ranked the number 2 javelin thrower among division one schools.

You might be wondering why Dykstra isn’t at the Commonwealth Games — and so is he. Team Canada set a standard qualifying distance of 81 metres, which neither Raymond, nor anyone else was able to meet. So, Canada didn’t send any javelin throwers to Glasgow.

However, if we look back to the 2010 games in Delhi, the 76.72 metre distance that earned Ray a silver medal at the NCAA Championships this year, would have been good enough for a bronze medal: “All my coaches keep telling me that currently I’m in 80 meter shape, I just have to do it. So, I have to master that technique a little more — better on the runway, faster, more athletic, stronger, and work out all the little kinks.”

And if he does, we just might see him in the Pan Am Games next year. One more step towards his Olympic dream.