Rosie MacLennan: Canada’s golden girl is focused on the future

Rosie MacLennan isn’t sure life will ever go back to the way it was before; in fact she laughs thinking about it. She’s not being cocky or overconfident, rather just speaking to the amount of attention she’s received ever since capturing Canada’s lone gold medal at the London Olympics this past summer.

There’s been plenty of stories run about Canada’s golden girl, how she had placed seventh in Beijing four years before, how she'd been a volunteer in Vancouver in 2010 and how it was her teammate, Karen Cockburn that was the country’s trampoline medal hopeful in London, not her.

But six months removed from the Games the 24-year-old admits that life is back to being about as normal as it can be.

Sure there’s the occasional person who pulls her aside on the street or recognizes her at school and there have been and will be more opportunities to share her story with children around the country – a privilege she may not have had if she didn’t win gold – but for the most part it’s back to the usual routine which involves plenty of time in the library and at the gym.

“It’s been great to be able to get back to focusing on training and really focusing on the next goals, moving forward and trying new routines,” MacLennan said in an interview on Friday.

When she isn’t in the gym MacLennan is often focusing on her schoolwork. The King City, Ont., native is currently working on her Masters degree in exercise sciences at the University of Toronto.

She began school about a month after returning from the Games and in a small classroom setting it didn’t take people long to realize who she was.

“My professor pulled up the homepage of my faculty on one of the first days of class and at that time only one or two people knew who I was,” MacLennan said. “My face was on the [faculty] homepage so at that point they looked at the screen and looked at me and I guess they [put it together.]

Friday, MacLennan was on hand at the Allstream Centre in downtown Toronto along with fellow Canadian Olympic trampoline gymnast Jason Burnett and bobsledders Heather Moyse and Shelley-Ann Brown as BMW Canada Group announced a new four-year sponsorship deal with the Canadian Olympic team that will help financially support the country’s Olympic athletes.

“It is really exciting to welcome BMW to the Canadian Olympic Team,” MacLennan said. “It means the world to us. It means that we can focus on training and keep pushing to be at the top.”

Ironically MacLennan’s success in London earned her a new set of wheels from a local Ford dealership back in August and while she admitted that there have been a few conversations about potential endorsement deals she wouldn’t discuss any of the details.

MacLennan says the entire experience from London to now has been a whirlwind, and when asked how her life has changed since the Games she says it’s really just opened her mind to the idea that anything is possible.

“Determination, hard work, perseverance, resilience, all those five words that the entire team stood for and was represented by they are really true, she said. “They hold true and just keep on pushing and you can really accomplish some tremendous things.”