Login / RegisterMiss Pole Dance Canada 2011 crowns a champion in Vancouver
And the newly crowned champion of the Miss Pole Dance Canada 2011 competition’s professional division is... 31-year-old Shanyn Pollard from Grimsby, Ontario. Pollard was one of 14 competitors in the division at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver last Saturday (September 10).
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At the competition, Pollard wiped the awards table clean by taking home four honours: Best Pole Tricks, Best Entertainer, Best Costume, and first place in the professional division. She will be off to Budapest, Hungary, to represent Canada at the 2011 World Pole Sport Championships on October 1.
This is her fifth year pole dancing for fitness. She started pole dancing after having her second child, and it has led her to a career as an owner of a pole dance fitness and aerial arts studio, aerial silks and pole performer, and circus coach.
“Shocked” and “happy” are the words Pollard used to described how she felt immediately after. “I started pole dancing without the intention of competing, but that’s just kind of the way it went,” she explained. Pollard went on to say, “I came into this [competition] really with the intention of having a good time and meeting some new people and I’m in shock right now. This is amazing, I’m so happy.”
Interviewing, filming, and editing by Judy Anna Madarász.
Tantra Fitness founder and owner Tammy Morris brought Miss Pole Dance Canada to Vancouver in 2007 after participating in the 2005 Miss Pole Dance World competition in Amsterdam. She continues to organize it every year. “This was definitely one of the smoothest competition so far...every single year I hold this competition it gets bigger,” Morris said. Next year, she plans to move the Miss Pole Dance Canada competition to Toronto.
Asked how excited she is to go to Budapest, Pollard says she’s very much so. “It’s crazy because I’ve never travelled anywhere other than Vancouver and Ontario,” she said, laughing.
What got her the win? “100-percent perseverance. Busting my butt off and just having a positive attitude...just going out with the intention of having fun.”
Twenty-eight-year-old Jess Gilmartin, one of the three judges for the pro division and the owner of Polenastics Dance & Fitness, said the reason for Pollard’s accomplishment was her technicality, perfection, and performance. “She’s just overall a great entertainer,” Gilmartin said. “We couldn’t find anyone else more suited to represent Canada in the world championship.”
Notably, this was the first year an amateur division was part of the competition. It was clearly a tough decision in this division as the judges decided to tie 25-year-old Marianne Wong, an accounting supervisor in Vancouver, and 27-year-old Tara Meyer, a fitness instructor from Victoria, for first place, after finding that Meyer was only one point below Wong. Both won tickets to attend a pole-dance convention in L.A., hotel accommodation, and $250 toward their flight.
Judy Anna Madarász is a freelance multimedia producer.
