The commodity of excellence.
Athletes seek best experts even if they don’t share same passport
“Other people call it stealing. Coaches call it research.” Dave King of North Battleford, Sask., coach of the KHL’s Lokomotiv Yaroslav.
There used to be a saying around the track and field competition at the Summer Olympics: there are no countries any more, only shoe companies. At the Sochi Olympics, the international borders so sharply drawn on the map are, in fact, more like turnstiles. Scrape away the layer of flagwaving patriotism inspired by the world’s greatest sportsmen and women, and an incestuous flow of stolen ... er, borrowed coaches, knowledge, technology, even athletes is revealed.
Excellence is a commodity, and for the buyers and sellers, the run- up to an Olympics represents peak market conditions. And the commerce cuts both ways, as Canadians have found out at almost every venue:
• Brian Orser of Penetanguishene, Ont., coaches two rivals, one Japanese, one Spanish, of Canada’s three- time world champion Patrick Chan, whose own coach is an American, Kathy Johnson.
• The Dutch skaters are dominating at the speedskating oval, but one of their own, Bart Schouten, is coaching silver- medal- winning speedskater Denny Morrison of Fort St. John.
“( Schouten) was showing me the stats before. I’m the only non- Dutchman to have won a medal, in the men,” Morrison said, the night of his silver medal in the 1,000 metres, “but still all the medals have been won by Dutch coaches.”
• At the hockey rink, the Latvian national team is coached by “Teds Nolans,” as they refer to him in Riga; otherwise known as Buffalo Sabres head coach Ted Nolan, from Sault. Ste. Marie, Ont. Two other Canadians, Emanuel Vivieros and Rob Daum, coach Austria. Sean Simpson coaches the Swiss, who made great strides for years with Winnipeg’s Ralph Krueger in charge.
Krueger is now Team Canada’s expert consultant on coping with the bigger international ice surface.
“Certain countries export different things and one of the things Canada exports is hockey coaches,” said Nolan’s assistant Thomas Coolen, who’s also Canadian.
• The Chinese women’s curling team skipped by Wang Bingyu, the same one that won the bronze medal in Vancouver four years ago, trains in Leduc, Alta., coached by Marcel Rocque, a four- time Brier winner and threetime world champion as the lead for the Randy Ferbey team.
Rocque also coaches the Chinese men’s team.
• Canada’s 2010 Olympic ice dancing champions, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, are coached and choreographed by a Russian émigré, Marina Zoueva, a naturalized Canadian who was based in Ottawa for many years but has since relocated to Detroit. She also trains American world champions Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who are favoured to beat Virtue and Moir here.
• After the runaway success of Canada’s Own The Podium program in 2010, 1976 silvermedal speedskater Cathy Priestner- Allinger, one of its architects, and her husband Todd, a biomechanist, landed a lucrative contract to help the Russian Olympic Team improve its medal performance for the Sochi Games, following the OTP blueprint.
• The Russians even tried to lure a team of Canadian curlers to represent them in Sochi, but in the end, couldn’t grant dual citizenship and the Canadians weren’t about to renounce their own. One of the recruits, Jason Gunnlaugson, fell one victory short of representing Canada at these Games — he was the fifth curler on the John Morris-skipped Kelowna rink, which lost to Brad Jacobs in the final of the Olympic trials.
• Canada was the defending champion in the men’s 5,000- metre team relay in short- track speedskating, but crashed out in a semifinal Thursday. The Russian team advanced, led by Viktor Ahn, who was known as Ahn HyunSoo of South Korea before he left one of the most successful careers in the sport’s history to take up Russian citizenship
All this trade between nations paints a warm-and-fuzzy picture of global unity under the flag of sport, but it has its complications, and the arrangements don’t always work. Sometimes, they don’t last.
in time to compete for the host country here. He is seen as a likely future head coach of the Russian national team.
• The early hero in the sportsmanship category at these Olympics, Canadian crosscountry ski coach Justin Wadsworth — who crawled over a couple of snowbanks to lend a ski to a Russian athlete who had broken his — is an American who married 2002 crosscountry gold medallist Beckie Scott of Vermilion, Alta.
All this trade between nations paints a warm- and- fuzzy picture of global unity under the flag of sport, but it has its complications, and the arrangements don’t always work. Sometimes, they don’t last.
Orser, the two- time Olympic silver medallist who was denied victories in 1984 ( by Scott Hamilton) and 1988 ( by Brian Boitano), knows well the give- and- take of international alliances.
His work with the exquisite 2010 Olympic women’s champion Kim Yu- Na launched a whole new phase to his career, and 19- year- old Japanese Yuzuru Hanyu looks to have nearly as stellar a future.
But Kim fired Orser mere months after winning in Vancouver.
“I’m proud to work with anybody that wants to work with me. It doesn’t matter to me where they’re from,” said Orser, who — with help from former Olympic ice dancer Tracy Wilson and choreographers David Wilson and Jeff Buttle, all Canadians — trains Hanyu and Spain’s Javier Fernandez at Toronto’s Cricket Club.
“Back in ‘ 88, Boitano reached out to a Canadian choreographer ( Sandra Bezic) and that really made the difference for him,” Orser said, “so ... for me, this is my job.”
Don Laws, the man who coached Hamilton through his competitive career, later in life was the first of three American coaches with whom the 23- year- old Chan has worked.
Russian coaches — including some of the most famous ever, like Tatiana Tarasova and pairs wizard Tamara Moskvina — have gone to the United States during tough economic times at home, and then come back.
In pairs and dance, a Russian coach ( for a time, Canada’s Shae- Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz worked with Tarasova) is seen as a ticket to levels of expertise unavailable to the unlucky others.
“Figure skating is in their blood,” said American pairs skater Simon Shnapir, who was born in Russia — and that’s another common feature of the skating world.
Where a country lacks a male or female skater in pairs or dance, imports and quickie citizenship switches are common.
Coaches and technicians from Germany in the sliding sports, where that country reigns supreme, may be the most widely sought- after assets in national- team building.
They know things. Canada’s luge team is guided by one, Wolfgang Staudinger.
On the other hand, Russia hired 1998 bobsleigh gold medal pilot Pierre Lueders of Edmonton to be head coach of its bobsleigh and skeleton teams.
The Canadian alpine ski team’s longtime president, Max Gartner, came from Linz, Austria, and its alpine director, Martin Ruefner, was recruited after a long, successful run with the powerful Swiss team. Austria and Switzerland ... they’re pretty good at skiing, aren’t they?
Sometimes, poaching from other countries’ programs backfires.
The U. S. short track team’s hiring of Korean coach Jae Su Chun, who had previously worked with the Canadian team, ended in disaster when Chun and assistant Jun Hyung Yeo were implicated after U. S. skater Simon Cho admitted to bending the skate blade of Canada’s Olivier Jean at a 2011 meet in Poland, forcing Jean to withdraw.
Cho and Chun were both suspended, but Chun continued to work privately with some of the Americans’ best short- trackers despite the two- year ban that is still in effect through these Olympics.
The lesson, as Dave King might put it: do your research, then steal.
Even then, there’s no guarantee the magic is transferable once it crosses the frontier.