January 3, 2007 (Montreal, QC) – Clara Hughes has been named the “Quebec Sporting Personality of 2006” by La Presse, the province’s largest daily newspaper. Hughes, 34, won Olympic medals in both cycling (bronze in the road and TT events at Atlanta in 1996) and in speed skating (gold and silver at Turin in 2006, and bronze at Salt Lake City in 2002). But her charitable work is what impressed the readers of La Presse, who selected her for this title.

The 2006 season did not start well for Hughes. In January, suffering from pneumonia, she was 30 seconds off her personal best time at a 3000m speed skating event in Calgary. Nonetheless Hughes finished ninth in the same event at the winter Olympics in Torino in February, helping to pull the Canadian team to a second place finish. She subsequently won gold over Germany’s Claudia Pechstein in the 5000m event, collapsing at the finish line. Pechstein had been unbeatable at this distance since the 1994 Lillehammer Games.

“At the Games I was not at my best, but I was capable of finding within me what it took to push myself to my physical and emotional limits. It wasn’t the gold medal that made that race so special; it was my struggle to win that medal,” said Hughes in La Presse.

Hughes won gold and then donated $10,000 of her winnings to Right to Play (www.righttoplay.com), an athlete-driven international humanitarian organization that utilizes sport and play as a tool for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world. Hughes challenged other Canadians to contribute as well and managed to amass $430,000 for the charity.

She travelled to Ethiopia in 2006 with Right to Play and on their web site noted: “Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa is home to over four million people. The impact of seeing such rampant poverty was so strong for me. It felt like being hit by a truck. I couldn’t help but ask myself over and over, how can we have so much, and millions have so little?”

Apart from her skating accolades, Hughes has distinguished herself in both track and road cycling. In addition to winning her Olympic medals in cycling she was also a Canadian road champ and a former member of the Saturn team with Lyne Bessette. Born in Winnipeg, Hughes now makes Glen Sutton, QC her home.

Right to Play is not the first charity Hughes has affiliated with, she is also a spokesperson for the Nature Conservancy of Canada in its efforts to preserve wilderness areas on Mount Sutton, which is just north of her home in Glen Sutton.