BEIJING - Canada's Priscilla Lopes-Schliep won the bronze medal in the women's 100-metre hurdles at the Beijing Olympics on Tuesday.
The 25-year-old from Whitby, Ont., raced to a time of 12.64 seconds Tuesday night in a packed 91,000-seat Bird's Nest stadium.
"I feel like I've jumped out of my body, went to heaven and back," Lopes-Schliep said. "This is a huge accomplishment, it went by so fast and here I am with a medal."
Dawn Harper of the United States won gold while Sally McLellan of Australia took silver.
It was Canada's first track medal since the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where Donovan Bailey won gold in the 100 metres and the men's 4x100 relay team also finished first.
The unheralded Lopes-Schliep had hoped to play spoiler in the Olympic final, coming into Beijing ranked No. 9 in the world.
She was coming off a big victory late last month, beating a world-class field to win the DN Galan meet in Stockholm, Sweden.
The muscular five-foot-four hurdler was one of three Canadian women in the hurdles at the 2004 Athens Games, but was coming off a long NCAA season with the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, and didn't make it out of the preliminary round.
Former world indoor and outdoor champion Perdita Felicien of Pickering, Ont., was picked to win gold in Athens but her Games came to a disastrous ending when she crashed into the first hurdle. Angela Whyte of Edmonton went on to finish
Felicien had to bow out of Beijing with a stress fracture in her foot, while Whyte was eliminated here in the opening round.
