St-Gelais has learned to put herself first
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— It was eight years ago in Vancouver that Marianne St-Gelais and Charles Hamelin announced themselves as Canada’s first couple of short-track speedskating, celebrating Hamelin’s gold-medal victory in the 1,500 metres with a famous rinkside kiss.
But as much as their relationship has endured — Hamelin and StGelais, still together after all these years, have been talking about getting married and starting a family after these Games, which they insist is their last — it hasn’t come without its challenges. St-Gelais identified one in the wake of her disappointing performance in Sochi four years ago, where she failed to make the final in both her individual events before salvaging her Games with a silver medal in the 3,000-metre relay.
Her assessment of the problem: As a natural-born pleaser of people who let her emotions guide her behaviour, she’d come to focus too much of her energy on others, Hamelin included. If she was going to find herself on future podiums, she needed to be more ruthless about putting herself first.
“Sometimes I was just losing it, emotionally. I was losing everything. Everything was focused on (Hamelin), or on something else. And I was just losing myself,” St-Gelais was saying this week. “I’m really emotional . . . So I was losing my focus. I was losing why I was doing it. I was losing my goals. Mentally, I had to make sure I was doing more things just for me.”
That moment of self-realization has led to an impressive career renaissance at age 27. From Sochi’s failures, St-Gelais has arrived in South Korea in the best form of her career as one of the linchpins of a Canadian short-track team brimming with medal hopefuls. She won an overall silver medal at last year’s world championships, where she finished second in each of the 500, 1,000 and 1,500 metres. In 2016, she became a first-time world champion in the 1,500 metres. All of it seemed unlikely four years ago.
“I think after Sochi, she believed she was finished,” said Frederic Blackburn, the coach of Canada’s women’s team. “But from my side, I knew she still had a lot of things to learn . . . She grew up as a person, and as an athlete.”
The growing came, in part, with the help of team sports psychologist Fabien Abejean. Abejean’s services had been available to St-Gelais for years, but she’d paid his advice little mind.
“My mind,” St-Gelais said, “was closed to (Abejean).”
Perhaps because she enjoyed great success as a young skater — she was just 19 years old during that breakout moment in Vancouver — StGelais had become wedded to a pattern she didn’t want to change, even if the pattern wasn’t producing results.
“Marianne, she’s a girl that doesn’t like to change things,” Hamelin said this week. “She doesn’t like to adapt to something different. But as an athlete, you need to adapt, you need to evolve, you need to change. Because if you don’t change, if you don’t evolve, you’ll get passed. You’ll get outdated.”
That was the hidden blessing of a sub-par performance in Sochi — it forced St-Gelais to re-examine her established ways. Blackburn said she needed to focus on becoming a better athlete. To that end, the focus of practices, Blackburn said, went from “being good today” to “being better tomorrow.”
But the crux of St-Gelais’s problem was something beyond a training mindset.
“After Sochi, one of the things she realized is she did a lot of things for others, to (alleviate) the pressure of the others on the team,” Abejean said. “We worked a lot about doing things for herself, ‘This is my project. This is my goal. That’s the way I want to do things.’ ”
Said St-Gelais: “I was thinking about too many things other than myself. So the process became about doing more things for me . . . And honestly, I’m a better athlete because of that, but also a better woman. I’m just happy with all the work I did. That’s the thing that I’m most proud of, because after sport there’s something else, and I think it’s just the best gift I’ve given to myself.”
Hamelin, who remains a medal threat in the 1,500 metres at age 33, said he’s proud, too, of St-Gelais’s commitment to personal transformation.
“She did an awesome job. Because she became someone who’s really, really strong, not only on the ice, but as a woman,” Hamelin said. “I think nothing can affect her right now. She’s in her bubble. Everything is on track for her. I just wish her the best of luck.”
All these years after St-Gelais and Hamelin rose to fame engaged in a kiss, St-Gelais said she’s seen the importance of disengaging when it matters.
“I realized I can do things for other people — I can cheer for Charles, I can be there for him. But if something bad happens, if something good happens, I just have to keep in mind that I still have a race to do, that I still have goals, and I still want to be on the podium,” St-Gelais said. “I feel like my first Games was just having fun, enjoying the Games, learning. But right now, the learning is done.”