All athletes dream of their moment in the sun. For the outstanding ones, there’s no greater dream than winning a world championship title, proving they are the best among the best.

     Heather Hattin lived the dream.

     It happened in Copenhagen, Denmark where Hattin and her partner, Janice Mason of Victoria, B.C., placed first to claim the gold medal in the lightweight doubles category at the 1987 World Rowing Championships. What made the feat even more remarkable is that Heather didn’t know until just hours before the event if she would get to the starting line at all. All week long prior to the event, she was nursing an injured back and couldn’t even practice for what loomed as the most important race of her already distinguished athletic career.

     “I remember it well,” recalls Fred Loek, the man who coached her from her high school days to the zenith of her global success. “Heather’s back was so bad, she just couldn’t get in the boat to work out.” To make sure that her partner would get in much needed training time, Loek had to take Heather’s place in the boat. “Never worked so hard in my whole life,” Loek says.

     But all is well that turns out well – and things couldn’t have turned out much better for Heather.

Naturally, winning the world championship stands out as the most memorable moment in her long list of athletic successes. “It really was a great feeling,” says Heather, adding that overcoming her back woes made it even more special. “We didn’t know if I could race at all.” Born in Windsor, Ont. Heather moved to Mississauga with her family in 1970 when she was nine. It was when she attended high school at Lorne Park that she decided to become an athlete – more specifically, a rower.

     One bright fall day in ‘76, Heather and her high school friend, Anita Moller, showed up at the Don Rowing Club at the Credit River and approached coach Loek asking him to teach them how to row. “There they were, two skinny girls wanting to become athletes, ” recalls Loek. “I was thinking that if I humor them, they’ll go away.”

     Away they went, all right, to lift weight, join the Lorne Park school cross-country team to get in some serious running and do the exercises Loek prescribed.

     On the water, Loek – a former competitive sculler himself – passed along the tricks of the trade and soon came to realize that the girls were serious about their chosen sport and possessed a burning desire to achieve success.

     Heather made her international competitive debut at the 1983 Pan-American Games, placing second in the heavyweight doubles category. She was chosen alternate for the ‘84 Olympic Games in Los Angeles and proved herself as a world-class power to be reckoned with at the World Championships in the same year by finishing fourth in lightweight single division. In the ‘85 World Championships, Heather was a member of the seventh-place Canadian heavyweight quad, a placing she duplicated a year later as a lightweight single.

     In ‘86, Heather put another feather in her cap when she won a lightweight singles bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games. She bid farewell to competitive rowing at the 1988 Olympic Games in Soul, South Korea, having finished 10^th in singles. “A lot of people didn’t realize just how well she had done at the ‘88 Olympics,” says Loek, who accompanied Heather as her coach to Soul. “Arguably, she was the best on the Canadian team.”

     What made Heather Hattin tick? “Self motivation and a tremendous amount of determination,” says Loek.

     Mississauga first paid tribute to Heather when she was chosen the city’s Female Amateur Athlete of the Year for 1987, then with her induction into the Mississauga Sports Hall of Fame for 1995.

     It’s all in recognition of her contribution to rowing at club, national and international levels.