Penny Oleksiak named Canada’s flag bearer for closing ceremony of Olympic Games

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Faced with a surfeit of choices for flag bearer at Sunday night's closing ceremonies, the Canadian Olympic Committee went with the numbers.

Penny Oleksiak, the most successful Canadian summer athlete in history, gets the honour.

It's a measure of how well Canada did in Rio that any one of a half-dozen athletes – trampolinist Rosie MacLennan, sprinter Andre de Grasse, race walker Even Dunfee, high jumper Derek Drouin, wrestler Erica Wiebe – might have been reasonably picked.

What you need to know on the last day of the Olympic Games

But Oleksiak was a gimme. Only 16 years old, she strung together four medals in Brazil, despite this being her first major senior swim meet. If the tone here was almost entirely positive, Oleksiak set it on the first day of official competition.

She certainly didn't compete like a teenager. It wasn't until she was introduced on Sunday morning that she reminded you that she's still a kid.

"I'm super honoured just to carry the flag for Canada," Oleksiak said, head down and mumbling through her speech.

What has she been doing for the last week?

"I've been sleeping and eating a lot of junk food," Oleksiak said. "It's been pretty fun this last week just to chill out and everything."

This choice breaks with two generally recognized flag-bearing patterns.

First, that if a woman carries it in, a man carries it out, and vice versa. The honour was given to MacLennan, Canada's lone gold medalist in London, at the outset of the Rio Games.

The other unspoken rule – that one flag bearer should be an Anglophone and the other a Francophone – was also set aside in this instance. Both Oleksiak and MacLennan are Ontarians.

With that one out of the way, we're freed to begin the next debate. Who'd be dumb enough to bet against de Grasse carrying the flag into Tokyo's National Olympic Stadium four years from now?