OK, NO MORE GRUDGES
Dufour-Lapointes rewarded for making tough choices for daughters no matter what the results were
Journalists and organizers declaring a truce, Bruce Arthur writes/
When the first baby girl with the hazel eyes arrived, Yves Lapointe and Johane Dufour thought about their friends who already had children. Babies grow up so fast, they thought; this will vanish so fast. So Yves and Johane made a choice. They talk a lot about choices.
“We said, we have to do everything to spend more time with our kids,” said Johane, looking across the room at her three daughters, surrounded by cameras and lights. “Because tomorrow they will be women. So that’s why we made those choices. To watch every single moment that they have success or pain. We want to be there.”
They had two more daughters — one with deep brown eyes, then one whose eyes are pale bluegreen. They were all different, but so similar, and Sunday at the Sochi Olympics the Dufour-Lapointes gathered to bask in their extraordinary day, and their extraordinary lives. Justine, 19, won gold in the women’s moguls; her sister Chloé, 22, won the silver; Maxime, the one who blazed the trail for her younger sisters, finished 12th. And Canada’s newest Olympic royal family sat side by side taking turns crying, or making one another cry.
“It was very hard to contain all the emotion,” said Yves, an electrical engineer in Montreal. “I’m so proud of my three daughters ... we made choices in life, choices of values, and those choices pointed us in the right direction.” He choked up at one point, like a father at a wedding. “C’est des grosses emotions, je pense,” he said. His daughters nodded, wiped their eyes, bit their lips.
“You understand why I’m so proud of these three girls there,” said Johane. “They are beautiful women, and I’m certain of their future. I’m not worried, because when we have children we hope, above all, that they become autonomous, that they face their road in life, and again ...” She turned to her right. “I’m just so proud of you. You will have beautiful lives. I am certain.” She blew her daughters a kiss.
It had the emotion of a wedding, without the need for a groom. Yves talked about how Johane stayed home despite her master’s degree. Johane talked about how they never compared the girls to one another, but gave them little goals, encouraged them to compete against themselves. When Chloé cried, talking about her mother, Yves gave Justine a Kleenex to pass along.
And Yves talked about how the family would go sailing on Lake Champlain every weekend in the summer when the girls were younger, exploring coves and just being together, until Chloé said she wanted to make the Olympics when she was 17, and they sold the sailboat so they could drive 2½ hours to Lake Placid every weekend, where they would camp in a tent and the girls would train and the family would stay together, every minute they could.
“We listened to them, and we would say, we’ve never been that way, but why wouldn’t we try?” said Yves. “Why not try? And we made choices, and always keeping a family values that was important — school, to have respect for everybody. And that’s how it started, and it is because of that that we’re here today, I think.
“Sacrifice I don’t think is the right word. Choice is much better.”
But having three girls in the same sport was tricky, because not everybody can win. So Johane would tell them, you will ski for a while, but you’ll be sisters forever, and Yves would tell them they could not lose, because they were proud.
“There were days where we’d come home with three girls, one super-happy, one moderately happy with her result, and one that was unhappy,” said Johane. “And we had to return it to a level that was more neutral, so we could live in the house together.
“So when we came back from a competition where one was shining and the others weren’t, the one who had succeeded in an extraordinary achievement, we couldn’t say, ‘Oh, it’s extraordinary!’ No, we had to think of the other two. That’s maybe my regret, honestly. I would have loved to have said it.”
But she could still not say it, not here. They have been waiting for this moment since Maxime decided to try moguls, and her little sisters wanted to be like her, and here they were, the ones with medals. After the press conference the entire family posed for more photographs, still more, hugging closer, smiling their beautiful smiles, and then one thoughtless photographer bellowed “Just the two winners! Just the two winners!”
And Maxime slid to one side and her dazzling smile fell away for a minute and she stood there, her face suddenly a little empty. It was her 25th birthday. Not everyone can win.
This is why they raised their girls to care about process, about racing themselves. Johane said she had three medals in her heart because all three girls made the Olympics, because she couldn’t imagine leaving one at home. One time Chloé won the world juniors and Maxime didn’t, and when she and Yves picked them up at the airport they decided not to bring flowers, because ... well, at competitions winners get flowers, and they didn’t want that thought in their minds.
“I’m sure she’s OK,” said Johane. “She’s happy for her sisters, she would like to have a medal, for sure. But I’m sure inside of her, she’s OK with that. She has so many, many qualities. I’m not worried about her.”