By the time he was 17 years old, George Genereux had been the Junior North American Champion (1951) and a silver medalist at the Senior World Championships (1952) in sport shooting’s trap event, in addition to having earned a spot on Canada’s delegation to the 1952 Summer Olympics. At the Games he earned 95 points on the first day and was tied for second place with Sweden’s Knut Holmqvist and Czechoslovakia’s František Čapek, leaving him only one point behind leaders Hans Aasnæs of Norway and Hans Liljedahl of Sweden. On the second day, Aasnæs dropped in the rankings after attaining only 89 points, while Genereux scored 97. With Čapek and Liljedahl scoring 93 and 94 respectively, the only remaining challenger was Holmqvist, who need a perfect round of 25 to tie the Canadian. He failed, missing the 24th bird, and Genereux was awarded the gold medal, his nation’s only one of the 1952 Olympics and its first since Frank Amyot’s in 1936. He also received the Lou Marsh Trophy that year as Canada’s top athlete.
Genereux never again attended the Olympics, but remained active on the international sport shooting scene for over a decade, even while obtaining his bachelor’s degree from the University of Saskatchewan. His career was curtailed by rheumatoid arthritis, from which he had suffered since before his Olympic victory, but he used his pain to help others and earned a medical degree from McGill University in 1960. He specialized in radiology and served as a professor in the department at the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon. He has been inducted into Canada’s Sports (1955), the Saskatchewan Sports (1966), the Saskatoon Sports (1986), and the Trapshooting (1986) Halls of Fame. Genereux’s nephew, his sister’s son, was Brendan Fraser, a well-known Canadian-American actor.
Canada