New timeline for turning back the clock
Lanni Marchant can at least be grateful that she has recent experience being sidelined.
The Canadian marathoner was hospitalized last year after abdominal surgery, which came a year after hip surgery. And a year before that she had kidney surgery, a procedure that left her fighting for her life.
This wasn’t how she pictured the next Olympic cycle after running at Rio 2016. But last year, after the last of the trips to the operating room, Marchant started feeling right again. She came into this season with, she says, “an actual race calendar” and a plan to get back to the Olympics one last time, at 36 years old.
And then the world stopped. If competitive sports had been upended in any of the past three seasons, it wouldn’t have affected Marchant at all. But now, like every other athlete hoping to compete at Tokyo 2020, she’s been forced into playing a long game. The last dance, as it were, has been pushed to 2021.
Angela Whyte, a three-time Olympian in the hurdles, finds herself in a similar position. Left unsatisfied by her performance in Rio, where she didn’t get beyond the qualifying heats, she decided to quit her job at Washington State University, move back to Toronto, and throw herself into training for one more Olympics.
She also turned 40 last week. The goal — the difficult, possibly mad goal — of being an Olympian in a power sport at 40 has become a goal to do so at 41.
“I mean, what’s one more year, really, for me?,” Whyte asks rhetorically from her Toronto home. “Especially since I’ve put so many things on hold as far as whatever a normal lifestyle would be.”
An extra year means another year funding her own training, as she hasn’t competed at a high enough level recently to benefit from the Canadian Olympic Committee’s targeted financial supports.
“But I’ve lived the spartan life a very long time, and I can do it for one more year,” she says.
Like so many Olympians, Marchant and Whyte have been thrown into makeshift training routines that are nothing like the regimented programs they normally would be doing at this point in an Olympic year.
Whyte has been jumping hurdles on the streets of Toronto — not over trash cans or park benches or raccoons, but over actual track hurdles that her coaches were able to borrow from a local facility before the pandemic forced its closure.
Marchant has spent her pandemic pause in Boulder, Colo., where she can train at altitude and continue the road back from all those medical setbacks.
Both athletes will take part this Friday in Team Canada Champion Chats, a COC initiative hosted by skater Tessa Virtue that connects Olympians with students in an interactive online format.
Marchant, with all she’s been through in recent years, will share her experiences in overcoming adversity.
“My story’s always kind of had those mountain peaks that I’ve had to climb, so it’s just added a few more peaks,” she says.
One of the messages of the program is also about not focusing entirely on an athletic pursuit, which is again something Marchant has recently dealt with, trying to think of herself as more than just a marathoner.
“It’s kind of married well with what I’ve learned the last three years about being a well-rounded person and being a well-rounded athlete,” she says.
Whyte says she looks forward to sharing her experiences from a long career.
“But I’m also excited to see what the kids come up with, as well,” she says.
Then it will be back to training and the long road — now even longer — to Tokyo. Marchant says she’s been thinking about it since Rio, even when she had developed sepsis after the kidney surgery.
It won’t be easy; the same is true for Whyte. She battled hamstring problems last season and will need a marked improvement to make the Canadian team in either the hurdles or heptathlon.
“It has become part of the challenge, obviously,” Whyte says.
But this isn’t about podiums anymore.
“I think there’s something to be said for making the team in your 40s,” she says. “I think that’s an accomplishment in and of itself.”
Absolutely it would be that.