In curling, skip Hayato Sato (Coquitlam) turned in a masterful performance in the finals and received solid support from his team in earning gold before another excellent crowd at the Pidherney Centre.
The team had finished the round-robin with 9-1 win-loss records before earning a berth into Saturday’s championship final.
Sato, third Joshua Miki (Port Coquitlam), second Dawson Ballard (Surrey) and lead Troy Chong (Burnaby) recorded a five-ender in the seventh end to break open a tight game in recording a 7-2 victory over Ontario’s Daniel Del Conte.
“My goodness, just looking at the shot (for five) and waiting to finally make it … we got that five-ball and they shook hands and my knees were just trembling there,” admitted an elated Sato. “It was an incredible feeling. We were already sitting three and every shot is huge, so I just took that extra moment to make sure (he made the shot for five).”
Cross country wouldn't let the flu travelling through the team deny them of a medal. Rémi Drolet (Rossland), Jasmine Drolet (Rossland), Elizabeth Elliott (Revelstoke) and Ian Williams (Kelowna) added to Team BC's medal count with a gold medal performance in the mixed relay.
"Today was an awesome race," said Rémi. "I felt really good. It was so much fun to ski with all my teammates. This was one of the races I was looking forward to the most during the week just because the relay is always so fun to ski with your teammates. It was a hard fight out there against the other provinces but we were really happy to come out on top."
In squash, both men’s and women’s teams took home silver medals. In the women’s final, team Ontario and team British Columbia put on quite the show as they split their matches 2-2 and it came down to a tiebreaker for the gold medal. As outlined in the rules, it starts with games won so the edge went to Ontario 8-7 in games to become the 2019 Gold Medalists with BC winning silver.
Team BC consisted of Cindy Cao (Richmond), Sarah Cao, Richmond, Quan Ng (Richmond) and Lucia Bicknel (West Vancouver).
In men’s, Team BC's Matt Bicknell (West Vancouver), Sam Scivier (Vancouver), James Toth (Richmond) and Gabriel Yun (Richmond) lost 0-4 to Ontario to gain BC another silver medal.
Team BC's women's hockey team battled in a tense game against Ontario to win the bronze medal 5-4 at the Canada Winter Games.
"It feels awesome. The whole game my heart was racing. We just have a great team and that last five seconds of the game you could really see it." said Team BC captain Kate Reilly (Richmond). "I had goose bumps and all I could think about in those last moments was don't let it get to the net. My teammate had a great block and I just went crazy on the inside."
It's the first medal for the women's Team BC program at the Games since they won a silver medal in 1991.
Summerland's Heming Sola raced to a bronze medal at the Canada Winter Games in the men's alpine ski cross event.
Sola, who won gold earlier in the week in the slalom event, took the top spot in his heat during the round of 64. He then finished first in his round of 32 heat and the quarterfinals. During the semi-finals he crossed the finish line in second place pushing him to the big finals (medal) event.
Chase Burns (Abbotsford) finished just off the podium in fifth place. Other men's racers in the event include Adam Usher (North Vancouver) in 13th place, Matthias Shorter (Whistler) in 17th, David Wood (Whistler) in 17th, Taylor Nellis (Burnaby) in 25th and Ben Jacoby (Kamloops) in 33rd.
Team BC ends the games with the most gold medals ever in a winter games with 30. BC won 87 medals at these games, just shy of the 88 it won in both 2015 (a home games) and 2011.