Whitfield turning the page to next chapter in his life
TORONTO — On the screen, a young Simon Whitfield is turning the corner around the fountain in front of the Sydney Opera House, and he is racing past German Stephan Vukovich, and he’s making his move. That’s the moment he really won the gold medal and it’s still incredible 12 years later. The actual Whitfield, meanwhile, is looking at his two-year-old daughter Evelyn. She won’t let go of his hand.
Whitfield is in a gym at an elementary school in north Toronto, talking to kids while juggling Evelyn and five-year-old Pippa, who is over on a wooden bench playing with his iPhone. He is trying to get kids to try triathlon and is also working on a Triathlon Canada-aided initiative called Tri This, which attempts to stream athletes who may have topped out in other sports — swimming mostly, because swimming is the hardest skill to acquire, although only a few swimmers will also have the leg power to perform on the bike and the run. Whitfield is, in the short and the long term, trying to replace himself.
“Who’s six?” he asks, and a raft of kids raise their hands. “Who’s seven? Who’s eight? Nine? 10? Any 11-year-olds? Any 35-year-olds?” The kids laugh, and say no. “Nobody’s that old. Nobody could possibly be that old.”
He, of course, is 37, and this is the start of him trying to navigate his post-Olympic future. It has been nearly four months since Whitfield crashed in his fourth Olympic triathlon in London, almost certainly ending a career that included that gold in Sydney in 2000, a silver in Beijing in 2008 and an enduring place in Canada’s sports landscape.
But where is his place now? Where will it be? He he has a race in California at the end of March, the first-ever Endurance Games in Barrie, Ont., and will start the transition to Ironman after the Toronto triathlon in July. Left largely to his own devices by Canada’s big Olympic federations after the awful end in London, this is what Whitfield’s devices are trying to produce.
“You get your Paula (Findlay) once in a generation,” he says just before Evelyn tried to climb him in her taupe-and-gold princess dress. “We need to bring in more athletes. Swimming clubs should really be embracing triathlons.”
Isn’t he haunted by London, where four years of family sacrifice and punishing work ended when he yanked on his bike shoe just as he hit an unexpected speed bump and crashed? Whitfield shakes his head.
“No, life goes on,” Whitfield says. “I have two great little kids and, I don’t know, life goes on. The next journey is trying to build our sport with this program, Kids of Steel, with the Endurance Games. To be honest, I just got busy with the next thing. Certainly there were times when I just laid back and said, ‘Are you kidding, that happened?’ And now I get to make my speed bump jokes. It’s the easiest jokes in the world.”
He won’t absolutely close the door on Rio 2016. As he told some of coach Barrie Shepley’s young triathletes the other day, he wants them to close the door on him, because he won’t walk through it unless it’s open. That said, he’s struggling to really start training again. He said after London he wanted to go mountain biking with his wife Jennie and not worry about crashing, and he broke his hand mountain weeks ago. If he is haunted, it doesn’t show. “He’s the same Simon, man,” kayaker and good friend Adam van Koeverden says. “He is so good at putting things in perspective and being positive. He allowed himself some down time, he allowed himself a few moments of despair and I think it went away when he saw his kids.”
Whitfield walks out of the gym carrying Evelyn, with Pippa trailing beside him, and Evelyn wants to get hugs from all the kids they just left behind, but he soothes her with a few words. He totes the girls’ jackets and their pink Princess backpacks, one a little bigger than the other. He says goodbye, waves to the kids in the schoolyard who yell out his name, and they all buckle into a town car with their car seats strapped in and leave for to the airport, for home, for the future.
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