Star search
The RBC Training Ground is mining Canada for hidden talent and, if things work out, Olympic medals
In Canada, a natural-born hockey player is likely to find his or her way to the sport. Good chance for a soccer player, too.
But someone with the potential to be a world-class speedskater, aerial skier, rower or track cyclist might never see those sports on television, let alone find their way to a local team or sports club. In most Canadian communities, those teams and clubs don’t exist.
But if Canada wants to win Olympic medals — and, with a funding organization called Own the Podium, it certainly does — more naturally gifted athletes need to find their way to the less common sports.
RBC Training Ground, a talent identification and athlete funding program, is proving that process can be helped along, even engineered. It connects athletes, with abilities they may not have known they had, to sports that many would never imagined competing in.
Jumps, sprints on a stationary bike, and good old push-ups are among the tests being used at national finals this month to help pick 30 athletes with the right mix of talents for national sport organizations — from boxing and canoe kayak to ski jumping and speedskating — that are looking to add athletes to their development pipeline.
It’s speed dating for Olympic sports and the prize for a match is potentially life changing: “The chance to earn funding and a potential spot on a Canadian national team.”
That’s a heady pitch but the Tokyo Olympics proved this approach can uncover hidden talent and help deliver medals.
Kelsey Mitchell didn’t own a bike when Cycling Canada recruited her through training ground in 2017. Just two years later, the former varsity soccer player from Sherwood Park, Alta., set a sprint world record. This past summer she won a gold medal in track cycling at the Tokyo Olympics.
She wasn’t the only athlete who got a boost from this program to compete in Tokyo or even to win a medal there. And on the winter side, freestyle skier Marion Thénault and several bobsleigh athletes are coming up fast.
Thénault was a high school gymnast about to retire from her sport when she turned up at a testing event in Quebec in 2017.
Rémi Belanger, an aerials ski coach with Freestyle Canada, saw that she had gymnastics experience and started watching.
It was not the tests, but her confidence and effort in tackling them, that would lead her to a new sport. There is no bike sprint or standing triple jump benchmark that indicates an athlete is suited to launching off a ramp at more than 50 kilometres and hour to flip and twist in the air before landing and
skiing away.
Belanger recalls her vertical jump. “Not a big strength of hers,” he says, “but I could tell she wanted to get as high as possible. She wants to go to the next level.”
Thénault had no idea what that next level would be. When Belanger asked if she would be interested in coming for sport-specific testing for aerials, she breezily replied, “I’m open to anything.”
She went on YouTube afterward and typed in aerial skiing to find out what she had just agreed to do. “Oh, no,” she recalls thinking. “Those people are crazy.”
But it was too late. She was already excited about the prospect of a new sport that she might be able to excel at. Like Kelsey Mitchell’s experience in cycling, Thénault’s rise in aerials has been nothing short of meteoric.
Last season, which was her first year on the World Cup circuit, she won an event and finished third overall. The 21-year-old is expected to lead the Canadian aerials team at 2022 Beijing Olympics in February.
These are the kinds of stories that fuel Olympic dreams in young athletes and re-energize those in their early 20s who are seeing the end of the line in their chosen sport. The national sport organizations that are using this program to find diamonds in the rough rely on that very thing.
Glory Ezedue, who did her finals testing at the Mattamy Athletic Centre in Toronto last weekend, hopes her results draw the attention of rugby or maybe cycling.
“I’m not sure about rowing,” she says, laughing. “I’m not the best swimmer, so falling out would be my fear.”
Ezedue grew up playing all the school sports on offer in Vaughan: basketball, volleyball, soccer, rugby and track and field.
Other than rugby, which she still plays, the sports recruiting this year aren’t ones she ever had an opportunity to try. But in qualifying for the finals, she produced some of the top speed and power results in the nation.
“I’ve always kind of dreamt of being in the Olympics,” she says. At 22, in the last semester of sport management at Durham College in Oshawa, she figures this is her best and last shot at that dream.
Like many Canadians, Kyle Drisdelle, an 18-year-old from Thornhill, grew up playing hockey. He loved the game but didn’t have the puck-handling to get to AAA, the highest level of minor-league hockey.
His endurance and power scores in his qualifying testing, though, were impressive enough that speedskating has already put him through an on-ice trial.
He felt great about his finals testing, right up until the push-ups. “Hopefully speedskating doesn’t care about push-ups,” he says, with a smile.
For sports like cycling, hitting the testing benchmarks along with body measurements are considered a direct line to potential success. For other sports, like aerials, that line is much less clear.
In both cases, the incredible success of athletes like Mitchell and Thé nault have made the journey seem almost easy: Nail the testing and the Olympics are around the corner.
It’s really not.
RBC Training Ground will announce the top 30 athletes on Jan. 7, and it will call them “future Olympians.”
They will benefit from $7,500 a year for at least two years. That funding goes to the national sport body to help cover the athlete’s needs, such as equipment, coaching or travel. But with the cost of high performance sport, it doesn’t go far.
The most important thing being offered through this program is the hookup, the matchmaking service that connects athletes with the right abilities to the sports that need them.
Canada wants to win Olympic medals but to keep doing that in an increasingly competitive environment means overcoming the twin challenges of too much geography and too little money in the amateur sport system. Canada’s high performance organization, Own the Podium, provides funding to develop athletes once they are far enough along to have been recognized as having Olympic medal potential.
RBC Training Ground doesn’t wait. It seeks out naturally gifted athletes who start off with greater odds of success and uses sport science data to nudge them into the sports they’re most likely to excel at.
For less popular sports, this can be a fast-track to finding talent that might never have made it to their doorstep. For Canadian athletes, it can be the chance to fulfil an Olympic dream in a sport they could scarcely have imagined.