Christine Sinclair still carries the torch as the queen of Canadian soccer

RIO DE JANEIRO – For a decade and a half, Christine Sinclair has been the face – and the heart and the soul – of Canadian soccer.

Now she needs soccer perhaps more than ever.

As the latest chapter in her story starts in Brazil, one of the ironies is that if this Canadian women’s team is to progress, someone else has to step up and stand alongside – or even, perhaps most ideally to coach John’s Herdman’s liking, take a spot under the Olympic stage’s hottest lights.

These things don’t happen overnight, though, and Sinclair’s has been a unique, and uniquely Canadian story. She inherited a torch just sputtering to life from pioneering Charmaine Hooper at the turn of the century, then carried it to a healthy roar through two Olympics and four World Cups, up to last year’s right at home in Canada.

Such a load it’s been. And if ever an athlete needed a little lightening of the burden at these Olympics, it is Sinclair.

Since the World Cup, she’s been troubled by nagging injuries that limited her contributions at Portland, the NWSL club where she plays. Her role within the national team has changed, too, not quite the focal point she once was and more of an X-factor as Herdman is looking for bigger contributions and especially goals in Brazil from the likes of Olympic debutantes Jessie Fleming, Nichelle Prince and Janine Beckie.

Such sport-related developments are in line with what you might expect from a 33-year-old athlete like Sinclair, winning her 246th cap Wednesday in Sao Paulo, where Canada opens its tournament against Australia. But they pale next to the personal grief she’s gone through in getting here, as she tended to her ailing father Bill, who died in April. During the winter and into spring, Sinclair would commute from Portland back to Burnaby to be with him in his final days, and all of this going on in a fashion fitting with her style, far away from the public eye.

In a personal sense, after such a huge loss, these Games loom as a bit of a coda to that struggle. And amid this infusion of youth and a program searching for a new identity following on their inspirational 2012 Olympic run, she’s been revitalized by the enthusiasm around her, the new faces and the freedom and positivity they bring, and the way the group has helped her handle some of the grief.

So here she is, ready for another closeup, in some ways still the same reserved kid who arrived on the scene at the turn of the century, prompting Hooper to note almost immediately upon her arrival that “talent like here just doesn’t fall out of the trees.”

This is the same young woman who was saluted in Edmonton with “You the queen, Christine” signs in Edmonton, during the inaugural U19 World Cup tournament that amounted to a coming-out party for her and this program.

But in Brazil, 14 years later from that moment and after so many trials this past year, she gets tested again:

Still standing, still carrying the torch.

Still the queen.