By the times they get in Phoenix . . .
An Arizona training group has the attitude and results that athletes will pay for
PHOENIX— It’s Monday morning of the training week before the Christmas break and the track, as usual, is littered with bags, extra shoes and castoff clothes.
The jumpers in the early group are warmed up and already well into their session and the sprinters are starting to trickle onto the track.
The mix of accents — Australian, British, Caribbean and Korean, among others — offers the first hint that this isn’t any ordinary American track and field training hub. Altis, which started as the World Athletics Center 10 years ago when it was the one man-operation of former world shot put champion John Godina, has 110 athletes from nearly 30 countries, including a growing contingent from Canada.
The Canadians include Rio medal hopefuls like sprint sensation Andre De Grasse and world-class long jumper Christabel Nettey, as well as athletes who need big gains just to make the Olympic team. What they all have in common is that they’ve left other training centres and paid to be here because they believe it offers something they can’t get anywhere else.
“Once you’re here, you don’t want to leave,” says Canadian heptathelte Maddie Buttinger, who is here for six months hoping to qualify for Rio.
As stressful as finding thousands of dollars in training fees can be — the majority of athletes here aren’t successful enough yet to make a living from their sport — no one is complaining.
This is an Olympic year and athletes feel certain that the calibre of coaching and training environment here will give them their best shot at success.
“You’ve just got to do things you’ve never done before in order to get results you’ve never received before,” says sprinter Tremaine Harris, who left the free Athletics Canada training centre in Toronto for Altis.
“If it means I’ve got to move out of the country and fund-raise money and pay fees that I’m struggling to pay, it’s okay, for the end result.” Altis prides itself on being different. The focus is on quality training over quantity, which many athletes have suffered through elsewhere, and extensive use of therapy that the organization says leads to fewer injuries. The group maintains a mix of athletes, from professionals who pay $15,000 annually to those who are still developing and generally pay half that.
Altis says its positive training vibe comes from its athlete screening, which focuses on character as much as athletic excellence.
Altis coaches also have an appealing long-term vision for a day when athletes can be paid to be part of a track club rather than the other way around and, in the meantime, they provide training scholarships for 20 athletes whose potential outstrips their bank account.
It all adds up to an attractive package that has drawn a dozen Canadians, including so many sprinters they could field a 4x100 men’s relay team.
Throw in the two senior Canadian sprint coaches — Stuart McMillan and Kevin Tyler — and Altis has become a sizeable Canadian training hub operating outside of the Athletics Canada system.
Altis head coach American Dan Pfaff has trained numerous Olympic champions and world record holders, including Canadian sprint great Donovan Bailey. He says Altis is still a “start-up” enterprise.
The group doesn’t yet own anything other than the will to develop great athletes and coaches (which they believe is equally important) and the reverence of athletes.
The track is rented from Paradise Valley, a local community college. Strength and conditioning happens at Exos, a facility that includes everything from gyms, a pool and treatment rooms to a health food bar and video-game lounge that feels like a campus for the ultra-fit.
Integrated support teams, where coaches, medical and support staff work together, is all the rage these days but at Altis it is so integrated that the therapists work on massage tables set up around the track during practice.
“We treat athletes like F1 race cars — something’s off, do a pit stop, recalibrate and go back out,” Pfaff says. “At this level, the number one virus is injury — that usually stops the show and destroys confidence.”
Altis isn’t the only training hub to make use of warm southern weather to attract athletes who do best outdoors, but it is getting the most attention right now.
Part of that comes from picking up talent like De Grasse, who just signed a multi-million-dollar deal with Puma, a rare occurrence in track and field; and some comes from a combination of social media savvy and a desire to broadly share information on training methods instead of treating it like a state secret.
Elite Canadians routinely train in the U.S. — in university and afterwards — but rarely have so many congregated in one place. That hasn’t gone unnoticed by Athletics Canada head coach Peter Eriksson.
“With time we’ll see how well they do,” he says. “That’s going to be the judgment.”
So far, they seem to be doing pretty well.
There were17 Altis-trained athletes at the 2015 world championships in Beijing and they won five medals — one gold, two silver and two bronze. If they were a country, they’d sit just behind China in the medal table.
“The end goal, first and foremost, is that everybody gets better and healthier and enjoys it more. If we tick those boxes, results kind of take care of themselves,” Pfaff says. “Our best salesmen are our kids.”
Four years ago, Altis had half a dozen athletes in Phoenix; now there are more than 100 and twice as many more wanting to get in.
“We don’t allow whining and we don’t allow negativity,” McMillan says of the training culture.
The Calgary native is the high performance director and lead sprint coach and, as of two weeks ago, he is also the man responsible for guiding Canada’s fastest man in a generation, De Grasse, who left his Californiabased coach for Altis.
McMillan and fellow Canadian coach Tyler speak passionately about their vision for a future where athletes without lucrative contracts — such as Justyn Warner, who was on the 2015 world championship bronze medal-winning 4x100 relay team with De Grasse — won’t have to worry about how to pay training fees and living expenses.
They are looking to develop side businesses in sport performance with the hope that those profits can filter back to fund the elites, McMillan says.
If successful, it could help fill the massive gap that currently exists between the ranks of elite collegiate athletes and the few true professionals who can actually make a living from track. That might provide a model for others to follow.
“Athletes leave the NCAA and they have to beg, borrow and steal to get coaching services or rely on philanthropy,” McMillan says.
“Each year half a dozen come out and sign a contract big enough to support themselves. What do the other 100 do? And what about the others who develop later? For every Andre De Grasse that develops at 21-22, maybe there’s another guy who develops at 22-23 who isn’t supported.”
There are plenty of athletes here who hope they fit that bill.
Harris, 23, and Dontae RichardsKwok, 26, don’t receive national sport funding, which essentially means that Athletics Canada doesn’t see them as good enough to support.
But, given how few metrics there are to accurately predict future excellence in track they, like many other athletes, believe that with the right coaching they can reach their Olympic goals.
That’s why Harris, who is rarely silent, finds himself happily living in Phoenix without a phone plan, a car or the money to fly home.
“I get rides to practice and I live across the street from a grocery store, and other than that I don’t do anything,” says the 2012 Olympian.
He can make do long enough to get his shot at making the Rio team but he knows that his scholarship status here and fundraising campaign isn’t a long-term solution.
To stay he needs to become a top Canadian again in the 200-metre distance — no easy feat given his current competition — so he can earn national sport funding, get invited to meets where he can earn money or sign a professional contract. “There’s no other option,” he says. Nettey, Canada’s record holder in the long jump, spent her first two years at Altis on a scholarship and last season she was regularly in the top three in the prestigious Diamond League and just off the podium at the 2015 world championships.
“A lot of people come here because they see the success,” she says. “It’s either stay home and be consistent or take the opportunity and maybe you’ll get better. You have to take risks on your dreams.”