OLYMPIC DREAMS CAN TURN ON A DIME
FIGURE SKATERS GLIDE AROUND AN INDOOR RINK IN ROSEMèRE, spinning and leaping into the air as they practise jumps. A teenage girl grimaces when she takes a hard spill. But she gathers herself and does what they all do after a tumble: she keeps skating.
It takes years of training, at huge personal and financial sacrifice, to become an Olympic athlete. But all the big dreaming can be interrupted by a split-second mistake. Brenda Branswell looks at the busy routines of two young skaters, and she catches up with a third one who missed the Sochi Games by five-100ths of a second.
Joseph Phan is one of the youngest skaters on the ice. The 12-year-old is Canada’s new novice men’s champion.
He works on a triple-triple jump combination that he’s close to landing for the first time. Then he moves to the centre of the ice and practises spins. He reaches back and grabs his skate blade, pulling his leg up behind him as he rotates in circles. He releases his leg and keeps turning, lowering into a sit spin.
Violaine Émard, one of his coaches, watches him closely from the boards. “He has about all the qualities to become a great skater,” Émard says after the session.
When the Winter Olympics open Friday
in Sochi, Russia, many aspiring Olympians back home in Canada will be glued to the television, watching the action unfold in their sport and probably imagining what it will be like if their turn comes in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, or in 2022 in a host city to be determined next year by the International Olympic Committee.
Getting from here to there takes a level of dedication and discipline that is worthy of a medal of its own.
Like Joseph, Julianne Séguin hopes to compete in the Olympics. The 17-year-old figure skater from Longueuil takes part in singles and pairs competitions. She and Charlie Bilodeau finished second last month in the junior pairs competition at the Canadian national figure-skating championships, and she placed seventh in the senior women’s event. She trains on the ice about 15 hours a week at an arena in Chambly, from early to late afternoon every day after classes let out.
Séguin started in the sport at the age of six after a friend had taken her skating. “Since then,” she said, “I never wanted to get off the ice.”
Joseph practises on the ice in Rosemère
13 hours a week, every afternoon after classes and two mornings before school. He started skating when he was five. His parents wanted him to play a sport, to keep him busy with something after school.
It took a bit of trial and error — and tears — before he landed on an activity he liked.
“They started with swimming and then I didn’t like it, so then they put me in gymnastics, soccer and tennis, but I still didn’t like it,” Joseph said last month at the arena in Rosemère where he has trained since last summer. “So they tried figure skating, and I loved it.”
By the age of six, Joseph could do an amazing spin and a coach remarked that he had a lot of potential, said his mother, Maggie Truong.
He started competing at seven, and when the skating competition was held at the Vancouver Olympics, “I watched everything,” he said. “Skating is his passion,” Truong said. Sometimes he’s so excited when he watches skating on television that he gets up from the dining table, performs a jump and comes back to eat, she said.
Joseph won the novice men’s title last month in Ottawa at the national figureskating championship. He held the lead going into the long program and had to skate last, competing in a field of older boys.
The long program was held at Canadian Tire Centre, the home of Joseph’s favourite hockey team, the Ottawa Senators. It was his first time skating in a large arena.
“I was really nervous,” he said.
There were a few glitches in his l ong program, but he finished first overall in the competition and is now moving up to the junior level. He’s excited about the transition, which will include mastering more triple jumps. He can already do a triple Salchow and a triple toe jump.
Yvan Desjardins, his other coach, talked about Joseph’s natural skating skills: good flexibility, good edges, nice glide and flow on the ice. He also has a strong rotational position during his jumps that earns him extra points, Desjardins said. “When he does it, it’s esthetic, it’s effortless, so those are pluses.”
The main quality he has is that he likes skating, Desjardins said.
“He’s passionate about it and he likes to train. … He likes pushing himself and he’s able to do it when we supervise him, but he also does it by himself. So that’s a quality that it takes.” Pursuing an Olympic dream is a pricey proposition that involves financial and time commitments from parents, who help foot the bill and often drive their child to and from practice.
In Joseph’s case, his family moved f rom Gatineau to Laval for better training opportunities, and because the available ice time at the rink where he previously trained was sometimes late at night. “I found it was hard for him because he had to wake up the next morning for school,” Truong explained.
She and Joseph moved here first, renting an apartment in Montreal in the fall of 2012 and travelling back to Gatineau on the weekend to see her husband and oldest son. When she and Joseph would leave on Sundays to return to Montreal, Truong said, they would cry in the car.
Her husband and 13-yearold son joined them last summer when the family moved to Laval.
They know Joseph has a lot of potential in skating and that he loves the sport, his mother said.
“That’s why we want to see how far he can go,” Truong said, adding their son has always said he wants to compete one day in the Olympics.
“That’s why as the parents we want to help him to get his dream. ... We try our best for his skating life.”
Some elite athletes receive funding through Sport Canada’s Athlete Assistance Program, but that isn’t the case yet for Joseph. According to Skate Canada, skaters are required to represent Canada in international competitions at the junior or senior levels, or finish in the top three at the senior national championships, to be eligible for grants.
Truong estimates it costs just under $32,000 a year for her son’s training, taking into account ice time, coaches, travel and other expenses. She and her husband pay for all of this out of their own pocket, working extra hours in their office-cleaning business. Séguin started competing when she was about seven years old. “I really wasn’t very good,” she laughed. “I was stiff as a board.”
She started training seriously five years ago and has risen up the ranks quickly in a short period of time, according to coach Josée Picard.
“She has a lot of charisma,” Picard said. Séguin often has a smile on her face, works hard and sticks with things, the coach added, suggesting that approach has helped her progress quickly.
Séguin’s schedule is especially busy because she competes in both singles and pairs events. For example, this meant eight consecutive days at the Canadian cham- pionships compared to three for those who compete in one category. Séguin acknowledges she’ll have to choose between the two types of competition one day. “But now is not the moment.”
Séguin estimates her training costs at $28,000 or $29,000 a year. She receives an annual $10,800 grant through Sport Canada’s Athlete Assistance Program. She also receives help from such sources as Patinage Québec, a company that provides her with figure skates, and of course, from her parents.
The Olympics are often on Séguin’s mind. “In my practices, it’s what motivates me,” she said. She is eyeing the Games in 2018, but next up is the World Junior Figure Skating Championships in Bulgaria in March. She’ll compete in the singles and pairs competitions.
Jumps are her strength, Séguin said. She also mentioned another strength: the understanding of her family members, who support her but don’t push her.
“That’s really positive, so I think mentally I’m quite strong, and that helps me.” You might wonder where young elite athletes find the motivation to sustain endless hours of training.
Montreal-based sports psychologist Wayne Halliwell, who has worked with hundreds of athletes, is a mental performance consultant for three freestyle skiers on the Canadian Olympic team: Alex Bilodeau and sisters Justine and Chloé Dufour-Lapointe.
The elite athletes he has worked with have certain traits that allow them to keep up their training and achieve their goals, Halliwell wrote in an email this week before his planned departure for Sochi. They have a real passion for their sport and are “committed, focused and resilient.”
“Their passion is evident in the joy with which they approach training and competing and they look at training and practices as opportunities to improve their skills and keep pushing their potential,” Halliwell said.
“These elite athletes never say: ‘I have to go to the gym and do my cardio.’ Instead they say to themselves: ‘I get to go train and keep getting better.’ ”
When asked about a sacrifice or part of her training that is the most difficult, Séguin paused and struggled to come up with an answer. “I don’t see it like, ‘It’s hard, I don’t feel like it.’ I don’t see it like that at all.”
It’s really her passion, she said.
“I feel good (on the ice). It’s not stress. It’s really my environment.”