Pain leads to big gains for Beaulieu-Marchand
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— Alex Beaulieu-Marchand grew up listening to his grandfather’s stories about how hard he had worked as a ski racer and how disappointed he was to have missed making the Canadian team for the1956 Olympics.
Roland Beaulieu was ranked sixth then and only the top four could go.
When his grandson landed at the 2014 Sochi Games — as the only man who qualified to represent Canada in the Olympic debut of slopestyle skiing — he was barely an athlete at all.
“He was more of a passionate skier,” recalled one of his coaches, JF Cusson. “Skiing for him was fun, it was just about having fun.”
That has changed dramatically between Sochi and Pyeongchang, where he ar- rived as a medal contender.
It wasn’t finishing 12th at the 2014 Olympics that changed Beaulieu-Marchand, then just 19; it was crashing off a jump a year later and tearing his anterior cruciate ligament.
“I had never set foot in the gym. I didn’t want to hear about the gym. I would bike and I thought skiing as much as I could was enough,” Beaulieu-Marchand said. “I was young and healthy and I thought I could do everything. I was invincible back in the day and that definitely changed because of injuries.”
After his knee surgery in 2015, he was in the gym six days a week, three hours at a time, for nine months. No one was more surprised than he was. “That proved to me my dedication for the sport.”
He also sought the help of a sports psychologist.
“What’s the positive in you injuring your knee?” he remembers being asked.
“There’s no f----ing positive! I wanted to tell him to go f--- off,” the 23year-old from Quebec City said. “Now, I realize that there were a bunch of positive things that came out of it.”
Sports psychologist Alain Vigneault helped Beaulieu-Marchand through the anger around being injured and taught him visualization techniques, how to focus on what matters most and coping skills to handle the stress of competitions.
Cusson recalls Beaulieu-Marchand’s first training camp after he’d spent three-quarters of a year off snow. They expected little. It was supposed to be a mellow experience, learning to ski again and, maybe, trying a few small jumps.
“In five or six days, he was back to where he was doing the same tricks as before and, on top of that, he learned new triples right away. This was crazy. It just showed how much he trained and how strong he was. He became an athlete, a real one,” Cusson said.
“He’s the real deal now, he’s the full package.”
Beaulieu-Marchand stepped into his first skis when he was 2 years old and, for a time, was heading in his grandfather’s footsteps. But, at 11, he abandoned the racing slopes and moved to the snow park to ride rails and flip and spin his way off jumps. By 17, he was being invited to pro skiing events.
Freestyle competition is all about making creative and technically demanding tricks look effortless. Beaulieu-Marchand does that.
But, after suffering a broken collarbone in 2016 and another knee injury and a concussion in 2017, he’s also come to understand another truth: “One of the hardest parts of our sport is literally making it through the season without injury. If you want to have results, you need to be standing at the competition and that’s hard to do.”
Beaulieu-Marchand still thinks back to Sochi. He knows now that he was never ready to win there. He’d qualified at the last minute and didn’t have enough confidence that his tricks could beat the more experienced skiers, so he tried the hardest combination he could come up with and hoped for the best.
“It was just an insanely hard run to land,” he said. “I didn’t even land it in practice.”
That says a lot about how new this sport was then. And how green Beaulieu-Marchand was, too.
At these Olympics, Beaulieu-Marchand is joined by teammates Alex Bellemare, Teal Harle and Evan McEachran. Canada’s head coach Toben Sutherland said he can’t pick a podium favourite between them.
“It’s starting to be scary,” BeaulieuMarchand said, a few months before coming to South Korea. “It will all come down to these ski runs, which is like a minute in my life, but that minute will represent who I am as an athlete or how good I am as a skier.”
It got scarier still when he arrived in Pyeongchang and his back seized up, forcing him to miss the first day of training.
“It’s bad luck in a way,” he said, “but it’s just life testing me and testing how much pain I can endure to succeed and how strong I can be mentally.”
He was able to ski on the second day of training and was beaming afterward.
“I’ve had an awesome practice,” he said. “My mind is in a really good place and I know what I want to do and I know I can do it.”