Our Golden Shoe Awards: Performance of the Year — Melissa Bishop’s Silver Medal Run

As part of our Golden Shoe Awards, we honour seven deserving runners who have made a huge impact on our sport in the past year. Melissa Bishop’s silver medal run at the IAAF World Championships wins best performance of 2015.

The mainstream sports media establishment is unaware of this, but Melissa Bishop’s 800m silver medal run at the IAAF World Championships is one of the top performances by a Canadian in all of sport in 2015. This isn’t hockey, curling or speed skating, where Canada is dominant because, let’s face it, only about a tenth of the global population participates. Bishop came within 0.09 of being the greatest in the world in the single largest participation sport there is. And she made it look effortless.

Back in 2012, Bishop graduated from being a decent Canadian varsity runner with the University of Windsor to a respected worldclass performer. She qualified for the London Olympics and cracked the 2:00 barrier in the 800m, something only a few women had ever done to that point in Canadian history. But she was well off the pace of the world’s best and, like many other Canadian track runners, wasn’t really considered a podium contender, even by her fans here in Canada. She had disappointing races in both London and the following year at the World Championships in Moscow, failing to get out of the qualifying rounds. Concensus was that Bishop was like so many other Canadian trackies – good, but not quite good enough to be a medal threat.

RELATED: Melissa Bishop wins silver at the IAAF World Championships

At this year’s World Championships in Beijing, Bishop looked like a different runner: relaxed, confident, wise and with a ferocious finishing kick. In the semi-final, she beat the most feared in the world, Eunice Sum of Kenya, and the eventual world champion, Marina Arzamasova of Belarus. In the process, Bishop set a new national record of 1:57.52. So really, Bishop’s performance of the year was actually an encore for the best 800m ever run by a Canadian woman.

In the aftermath of her silver medal run, Bishop is now being talked about by pretty much everyone in the running world as one of the odds-on favourites to win gold in Rio. Along with Andre De Grasse, the homegrown talent from Eganville, Ont. should be considered one of this country’s global superstar athletes. As Melissa Bishop has shown, we don’t have to be the country that’s only good at hockey – we can be the best in a truly global sport.