Many happy returns for Olympians
Friendship and good vibes helped Canada construct winning culture for athletes
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— There’s something special about snowboarders that sets them apart from a lot of their Olympic counterparts. Maybe it’s their extreme sports ethic that, for years, valued doing tricks for tricks’ sake and demonized podiumranked achievement. Maybe it’s inhaling all that, uh, fresh mountain air.
But listening to Montreal’s Sebastien Toutant at the bottom of the big air snowboarding jump after winning the first-ever Olympic gold medal in the event the other day, you felt a genuine warmth that doesn’t often emanate from an athlete at, say, a hockey game or a ski race.
“The vibe is so good,” Toutant said, explaining the dominance of Canada’s snowboarding team.
It is impressive dominance, to be sure. On a day when podium favourites Max Parrot and Mark McMorris failed to land their best tricks, the 25-year-old Toutant was there to save the moment. And as much as Parrot and McMorris pronounced themselves “bummed,” both also seemed genuinely happy for Toutant.
“We’re just good friends,” Toutant said of his team.
“It’s nice to travel together. All the medical staff, physios, trainers, we’re all, like, good friends . . . It’s fun. And it’s all about fun. We snowboard because it’s fun. And I had fun today. I was stressed, crazy. But it’s all about fun, right?”
It was charming, feel-good stuff. But it wasn’t wholly unique at these Olympics. If there was a recurring explanation for a lot of the hard-won success achieved here, maybe it was the emphasis on the importance of soft skills. Yes, there was the usual talk of victories born of relentlessness and perseverance and grit. That’s not going away.
But there were also stories about the importance of things like having fun and being a good person, as though some 2018 Olympians were channeling one of the credos of the New Zealand All Blacks rugby juggernaut — the one that says, “Better people make better All Blacks.” May- be it was no coincidence that James Kerr’s Legacy, a book about the All Blacks, has been having a moment in sports psychology and coaching circles.
That was part of the story of Canada’s short-track speed skaters. When Kim Boutin won three medals — a haul that earned her the honour of closing ceremony flag-bearer – the exuberance of her teammates, particularly Marianne St-Gelais, was notable. St-Gelais, after all, had a disappointing Olympics; she failed to step on a podium in what she said was her final run at the Games at age 28. Despite that, she somehow parked her disappointment and excelled at the non-medal event of being a model teammate.
“I give a nickname for Marianne: She’s a Pacifist Warrior,” said Frédér- ic Blackburn, one of Canada’s shorttrack coaches. “She’s ready to fight on the ice. But after that, it’s done — ‘I’m gonna help everyone. Doesn’t matter if she beat me. Good job, you beat me.’ She’s like that. She doesn’t have to hate everybody because she doesn’t get what she wants. That’s so good for this team. And it’s not easy to have that.”
It’s not easy to have, so it’s cultivated. Canada’s short-track team leaned heavily on sports psychologist Fabien Abejean, who worked with athletes to help develop what he calls both “task cohesion” and “social cohesion.”
“When you have task cohesion, that’s minimal to perform — during the moment you need to be together on tactical, technical things,” Abejean said. “But if you are happy to be together — if you have social cohesion — that’s even more powerful. This team loves being together, and that’s why you saw such success.”
Who else had such success? Norway’s powerhouse alpine ski team helped explain its big medal at the Olympics — where they were again dwarfed in size and budget by rivals such as Austria — by pointing to an indomitable team chemistry and a lack of hierarchy where the multimedallist legends treat newcomers as peers.
“We believe there is no good explanation for why you have to be a jerk to be a good athlete,” Kjetil Jansrud, the skier who won his fourth and fifth Olympic medals here with bronze in downhill and super-G, has said. “We just won’t have that kind of thing on our team.”
Team chemistry, and not the kind that comes from a Russian lab, got credit for medals in more than one individual sport. Canadian doublemedal-winning speedskater Ted-Jan Bloemen said his late-blooming success coincided with a commitment to being a better teammate — even though the bulk of his competition, beyond the team pursuit, is solitary.
“Earlier in my career, I would be pretty selfish. I would only care about my own performances. But the last years in Canada, I learned a lot about being a team player,” said the Dutch transplant. “Winning that gold medal, I know it was a team effort. It makes me really grateful. And it’s a different feeling than just being proud of yourself. It’s a better feeling. I became a lot better person, and yeah, it made me a better athlete. It all adds up to a more relaxed, more happy experience for everybody. It’s a good atmosphere to get better.”
This isn’t to paint Canada’s Olympic outfit as a utopia. Good teammates don’t let good teammates allegedly drink and drive — especially in a stolen Hummer. And even Blackburn acknowledged that jealousy and back-biting is always a part of the Darwinian world of sport. The trick is to limit that drama, or preemptively squash it before it ruins your squad. In Sochi, where the short-trackers underperformed, there were rumblings of poor interpersonal dynamics.
“The whole team was a bit more individual in Sochi,” said Pascal Dion, a member of the bronze-medal-winning 5,000-metre relay team.
“That’s the reason why we performed better at this one,” said Dion’s relay teammate Charle Cournoyer. “We had group energy.”
You could make the case they had better people making better performances. Which is not to say they’ll be amending the Olympic motto anytime soon. But let’s assume the snowboarders would wholly approve of, say, “Faster, Higher, Nicer.”
“If we’re good to each other you know, whatever happens, you have the whole team to back you up,” said Cournoyer. “There’s less stress on you. You can just go for it.”
As Jansrud has said: “If you have teammates who consistently lift you up, then the environment will make you happy. You’ll work harder and stay motivated. You’re giving yourself your best chance to win.”