CANADA’S GREAT DECATHLON HOPE IS DESTINY’S CHILD
From a young age Warner knew he was destined for Olympic glory
LONDON, ONT By his own admission, Damian Warner had no hope of winning a perfect attendance award at school.
“He was like smoke,” says Gar Leyshon, who taught the future Canadian Olympian English and coached him in track and field. “People knew who he was, but nobody had ever spoken to him. He just came and went. Came and went — like a ghost.”
As it turns out, the ghost reported to class the day his Grade 7 teacher, Catherine Zeisner, asked her kids to write a letter to their future selves.
“In 10 years from today, I will have a job in the NBA or a runner in the Olympics,” Warner wrote on a lined page with three holes punched down the side.
Talk about the power of intention. Roughly 10 years later, Warner ran — and jumped and threw — in the 2012 London Olympics as a young, raw decathlete competing for Canada. At age 22, he finished a shocking fifth.
Now 26, the soft-spoken track star heads into the Rio Summer Games as a legitimate medal favourite. Reigning Olympic champion Ashton Eaton of the United States is expected to win gold, but Warner is his chief rival and a world championship silver medallist.
Once too shy to even answer a question in class, Warner is also a seasoned professional speaker. After the 2012 Games, he went back to Sir John A. Macdonald Public School in London and spoke to the kids about goalsetting.
After everyone dispersed, Zeisner sat down on a bench with her former pupil and gave him the sealed letter he wrote so long ago.
“It gave me chills,” he says. “I was always a huge basketball fan. I watched track and field with my mom — like Donovan Bailey and stuff. But I never really imagined that I would be a runner in the Olympics.
“It’s kind of weird that I put that down and it’s weird that I made it happen.”
“Weird” is not the word Leyshon would use to describe Warner’s journey to the London and Rio Games. “Improbable, bordering on unbelievable” is more like it, given the lack of direction the kid displayed in high school. Warner is the eldest of three siblings brought up in a single-parent household. His mom, Brenda Gillan, regularly held down two jobs — logging roughly 75 hours a week as a personal support worker — to pay the bills for her young family.
That meant Warner could slink back home during the day and lose himself in his video games.
“I was never doing anything bad,” he says. “I just wasn’t interested in school for some reason. When I look back at it, I think I wasted so much time and that I’m kind of crazy. But luckily, I had people around me who pushed me in the right direction.”
The push came in Grade 11 from Leyshon and fellow teacher Dennis Nielson in the form of subtle bribery. Warner could miss some class time, without punishment, if he joined the basketball and track team.
Given the options, he agreed. And in spite of her crazy schedule, Gillan was in the stands cheering her son on.
“At first, he didn’t like me going to watch him,” she says in a chat at her apartment in downtown London, the walls adorned with pictures of her son in a Team Canada singlet. “He told me I yelled too much. I don’t know if (that’s because) he’s sensitive, or if he’s embarrassed.
“My daughter came with us one day and said, ‘Just don’t yell, OK?’ ”
In truth, Gillan simply can’t stop yelling due to her sheer exhilaration.
In her job, she works with patients suffering from dementia, helps them with eating, toilet use, dressing — all the daily tasks in life that most of us take for granted.
“I’m with them more than my own family,” Gillan says. “You get attached. It’s hard when there’s a lot of death and stuff like that. You just have to think it’s the process of life.”
With the process of life in mind, she is determined to soak up every moment of her son’s Olympic journey — the good and the bad.
By definition, every decathlon features good and bad moments.
Day 1 of the event features the 100 metres, long jump, shot put, high jump and the 400 metres. Day 2 moves on to the 110-metre hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and the 1,500 metres.
The medals go to the men who accumulate the most points in all the events combined. So mental toughness is key.
A decathlete is much like a pitcher in baseball. The ability to shake off a bad event — similar to a tough inning — is essential.
“Damian’s personality is perfect for this,” says Leyshon, who still coaches Warner along with Nielson and Vickie Croley of Western University (formerly the University of Western Ontario). “You can’t get too up. You can’t get too down. You’ve got to see it all the way through. It’s a true marathon in the way a marathon is not. It’s more like the Tour de France.”
The best way to falter in the decathlon? Think too much.
“There’s an awful lot of time in your own head,” Leyshon says. “And Damian is disciplined in a way that people don’t understand. It’s not the kind of discipline where you never miss a workout or never eat an ice cream sundae. It’s the discipline to stay focused without tightening up.”
“As soon as you tighten up, everything shortens and all your numbers go down.”
Staying level-headed comes naturally to Warner, who leaves the emotional ups and downs to his coaches and his mother.
“Even though I know it’s tough at times for my mom, she always has a smile on her face and makes other people happy,” Warner says.
“That’s one of my favourite motivators about the whole thing, just seeing her happy, because she’s the most amazing person in the world.”
Rest assured, come the men’s decathlon on Aug. 17 and 18, Warner won’t be overcome by the magnitude of the moment.
He still sees himself as that Grade 7 student who wrote a letter to himself about his future job as an Olympian.
“I don’t really feel pressure,” he says. “This is something I want to do. It’s a game to me. This is something I choose to do.
“I just really enjoy competing. Whenever I get the chance to compete against Ashton Eaton or any of those top guys, I like to take advantage of it. Because that’s the fun part.”
As for the letter, his other goals — such as making $20 million, donating $5 million to charity and driving a Dodge Viper — are a work in progress.
Doubt him at your own peril.
I don’t really feel pressure. This is something I want to do. It’s a game to me. This is something I choose to do.