Thunder Bay has beat out Grande Prairie, Alta., in a bidding war to host the 2023 Canadian National Disc Golf Championships.

According to the Canadian Disc Golf Association, both of the submitted bids were strong proposals and it wasn’t an easy decision to make.

Chris Ozolins, president of the Ontario Disc Sports Association (ODSA), said this is the first time the national championship has been back in Ontario in more than 10 years, which is nice because the majority of Canadian disc golfers are actually from Ontario.

Ozolins credits the annual Northern Ontario tournament that his organization brought to Thunder Bay over the last three years with shining up their national bid.

“We had 190 participants last year, coming straight out of COVID, and we’re aiming for the same amount this year again,” he said. “The whole premise behind that was we wanted to set a precedent that Thunder Bay was going to have the infrastructure to host a much larger championship in the future.”

The ODSA has been working with the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission (CEDC) and Tourism Thunder Bay, to submit an attractive bid for the National Championship using the precedent they have set with the Northern Ontario championship in the past.

And it worked.

“We’ve been funded by the CEDC and we have a partnership with them and a promising bit of funding if we were to ascertain the same 2023 national championship, “ said Ozolins. “That was all part of our 36-page bid document. We ended up short-listed against Grand Prairie as a finalist. We did our interviews, we won the bids and so now we’ll be hosting the event.

Part of the…