NORCECA Continental Cup: 'We gotta be friends and enemies at the same time'

For 33 months, Ben Saxton and Grant O’Gorman have competed all over the globe. They’ve hit tournaments in the Middle East and the Czech Republic, southern Russia and Cancun. They’ve won medals at home in Canada and lost in qualifiers in China. They’ve grinded.

And they’ve fallen short, a little more than 1,000 points shy of the mark to punch their ticket to Tokyo.

That two-plus-year phase of Olympic qualifying, then, is over.

On Saturday, the three-day phase begins.

There are myriad ways to qualify for the Olympic Games. There is the Olympic rankings, the 33-month-long globetrotting tour that takes your top 12 finishes; the 15 teams with the most accumulated points in that span qualify for the Olympics. That’s how Saxton qualified with Chaim Schalk in 2016.

Then there is the World Championships, in which the winner receives a bid, similar to the Olympic Qualifying Tournament, in which the top two teams receive a bid. The host country, Japan, also gets a bid.

And, after all of that is said and done, there is the final leg of the race: The Continental Cup. Around the globe this weekend, five continents -- Europe, Asia, Africa, NORCECA, South America -- are hosting tournaments to determine which federation will earn the final five bids to the Olympic Games. Saxton and O’Gorman, along with fellow countrymen Sam Schachter and Sam Pedlow, are in Colima, Mexico, in the final stretches of the NORCECA – North America, Central America, Caribbean – Continental Cup.

On Saturday, they will see Nicaragua in the semifinals, where the winning federation will play the victor of Mexico and Guatemala.

Sunday's match between the winning countries will determine who will compete in the Tokyo Olympic Games.

It’s a strange shift, from such a marathon of a race, one that crisscrossed the globe and featured more than 20 tournaments, to a single weekend. Making matters stranger still is the format: federations compete not as individual teams, but together. Saxton and O’Gorman are relying as much on Pedlow and Schachter as they are themselves. To claim their Olympic bid, Canada will need to win two matches over Nicaragua, then another two over Mexico. For the first time in the Olympic race, they’ll need to root for one another, as teammates.

“It’s a different dynamic and it’s actually pretty fun to have a team for a little while,” Saxton said. “I don’t think we would be alright with it if it was all the time, but for a one-off tournament, it’s pretty fun.”

And then, of course, the very next day, they’ll be rivals once more. Every federation treats their Olympic bid differently. Some will simply choose which team will represent them in the Olympics. Others, like Canada, will have a single match playoff between the two teams who competed in the Continental Cup.

In Canada's case, that match, should it be needed, will take place on Monday.

“It’s very tough to be friends when you know that you’re going to have to take your teammates out immediately after,” Saxton said, laughing. “It is a very interesting system in that way, and especially Canada’s method to go about it. We gotta be friends and enemies at the same time.”

Saxton has played on the biggest stages this game has to offer. He’s competed in World Championships, played for medals in World Tour Finals. He’s represented Canada in the Olympic Games.

Nothing compares to the pressure of a playoff match between his countrymen for which team goes to the Olympics.

In 2012, after securing the Continental Cup, he and Christian Redmann played a single match against Josh Binstock and Martin Reader. They lost, and Canada sent Binstock and Reader to the Games, where they finished 17th.

“It’s a very draining match for sure,” Saxton said. “I played at the Olympics and there wasn’t as much on the line in our Olympic games or any of the matches we played on tour, World Championships, anything. There’s nothing that has so much where you have four years on the line based on one single match.”

But first, he must get to that single match, beginning with Nicaragua on Saturday. Should Canada win, they’ll move onto Sunday’s finals, most likely against Mexico, which is being represented by Juan Virgen and Lombardo Ontiveros, and Josue Gaxiola and Jose Rubio. Should Canada win that, then they will play the most pressure-filled of matches.

Where, for an hour or so, friends must become enemies.