ARTICLE
“I had a strong sense that if we were able to turn this culture around, performances would improve. Full stop.”
One of the indelible moments during the Canadian Para Athletics Team’s trip to Europe last year was a visit to the Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery in the Netherlands.
Some 1,680 Commonwealth servicemen of the Second World War, many Canadians, are buried or commemorated there.
“Our hotel,’’ recalls Carla Nicholls, Para-Performance Athletic Lead and driver behind the trip that ran through Holland, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, “was literally a kilometre away from where Canadian soldiers parachuted into the Netherlands during the war to help liberate the country.
“We visited a war museum and the athletes learned all about the Canadian soldiers, how they fought, the pride Canada has in the Netherlands and how thankful the Netherlands is for Canadians.
“We then went to the gravesite where all the soldiers are buried, walked through the graveyard and read the gravestones.
“I cannot tell you …
“Just super inspirational.”
While visiting the battlefield, the Canadian contingent also toured a church and on a door there a soldier had carved with a knife a message of hope and support to his comrades that reads, in part: ‘We must stand or fall. Fight to the last round. So far, we have had a good battle against good troops that are not up to our standards. We have fought them in Sicily and Italy at times against the odds. I am certain they are not a match now.’
The more than a three-quarters-of-a-century-year-old message reverberated like a tuning fork through the team.
“Experiences like that take you out of the sporting element and make you realize there’s much more to life than just winning medals and performances,’’ reflects 10-year national Para team sprinter Marissa Papaconstantinou, a double 2023 World Championship bronze medallist, in the 100 and 200 metres, and a 2020 Paralympic bronze medalist in the 100-metre event. “It was inspiring. Sometimes things like that are greater than yourself and greater than sport itself.
“In the past, this program didn’t have much of a team culture but over the last couple years we’ve really made a point not only to bond as a team but to really broaden our outlook. You can get so caught up in the performing, winning medals, setting personal bests, the high-performance side of sport.
“But you tend to forget what got you there, what made you take it on in the first place. As a team, feeling that gratitude towards the people that get you there and our history in general makes a difference.”
Such was the impact of the Dutch visit that the athletes banded together to adopt a team motto they continue to uphold: Fight to the Finish.
“They came up with it,’’ says Nicholls proudly.
“They owned it.
“And they held each other accountable. The message was, and is: Are we doing our very best right until we cross that finish line?”
The European tour idea was a significant piece of Nicholls’ Push to Podium initiative, designed to fill gaps in the support mechanism and culture of the program, and done specifically to better familiarize Canadian athletes with the calibre of opposition they’d be facing at major international events.
The trigger for designing Push to Podium was, in fact, a “disastrous” - in her own words - 2019 World Para Athletics Championship. Nicholls’ first in charge of the athletics program, initially she blamed staff and the athletes for the dire team performance in Dubai, questioning their lack of preparation.
But her own time being involved in Own the Podium’s innovative, self-revelatory Pursuit program shifted the focus.
“After spending some time in Pursuit and reflecting, particularly focusing on effective debriefing and understanding its intricacies, I came to the realization that the blame rested on me,’’ Nicholls says now.
“I am incredibly grateful to the leads and the masterminds behind the Pursuit program.
“When you talk about gaps and identifying gaps … I worked on the Olympic side from 2008 through to 2018. Three Olympic Games. I was always focused on performance gaps. So, an athlete runs 10 seconds, an athlete runs 9.5 seconds, the gap is .5 seconds. So, you really target decreasing that .5 amount of time. You’re here, we need to get there.
“What Pursuit did was challenge me to say: ‘No, there are more gaps. I’m the leader, not the coach of these athletes. So, what can I do as the leader to identify gaps that I can actually help with for the athletes and the coaches?’
“It was a really tough exercise. But digging deeper and deeper I started to realize that were lot of programming gaps in the culture of the program. I needed to identify the issues we have to strengthen, in order to help close that performance gap that I mentioned.
“Through Pursuit I’m looking at myself and my support team and our gaps; athletes as human beings and how to bring this culture of high performance, but not necessarily judge it by medal, medal, medal.
More like: How can we be better together?
“I had a strong sense that if we were able to turn this culture around, performances would improve. Full stop.”
That shift in focus worked wonders. At the 2023 World Para Athletics Championships in Paris, a precursor to this summer’s Paralympics also being staged in the French capital, Canada claimed 14 medals.
“The staff really clicked,’’ she says. “Really en pointe. The athletes felt it, really appreciated it and they responded like true champions.”
Significantly, Nicholls had a door-sized enlargement of a photo she’d snapped at that inspirational church door at the cemetery in the Netherlands, pinning it on a wall in Canada’s athletes meeting room at those Worlds.
“The words on the door represented exactly what we were trying to achieve,’’ recalls Nicholls. “If you get here” - the team’s final preparation camp - “you are ready to compete (at the upcoming World Championships).
“And as they came in for the first team meeting, I noticed a few of them got tears in their eyes, as did I.
“This is what we’re here for.”
Other significant initiatives of the three Push to Podium instalments included enlisting noted Dutch wheelchair racing coach Arno Mul (coach to Canadian stalwart Brent Lakatos, who is based in the U.K.) to make the trek overseas with his equipment and share his knowledge at Athletics Canada’s Training Environment in Victoria. A team of Camosun College Innovates, worked with Mul’s sport engineer to learn as much as possible about world-class racing.
The Push program also established an integrated co-training between Paralympic and Olympic athletes and recruited inspirational speakers such as Judy Reige and Sean Bacon, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran who served 12 years as a paratrooper and as an instructor at the Canadian Forces Military Police Academy, to address the entire team.
Nicholls had been introduced to Reige and Bacon in the Pursuit program.
“Judy, I remember, delivered a fantastic workshop to the athletes on emotional intelligence, and specifically on how to have those difficult conversations and even more importantly just being leaders of your own life,’’ says Nicholls.
“That was amazing. It really started to turn the athletes around and they began to feel valued as people and we started to feel this coming together as a team.
“With Sean, we talked about what it means to compete for Canada. I’ll never forget, when Sean said to the group: ‘I don’t know about you guys but the last time I saw the Canadian flag it was draped over one of my comrades’ coffins.’ All of a sudden, the athletes were sitting on the edge of their seats, leaning in to listen. Then he said: ‘So don’t take putting on this flag on your back lightly.’ It was such a pivotal moment for our team.
“At that moment, we came together. ‘Okay, it’s a really big deal to represent Canada. Never take it for granted.’ Just super, super powerful.”
The time, work, and innovative thought have paid off in a truly united group.
“Knowing that no matter what if I have an issue I can go to Carla, is so important,’’ emphasizes Papaconstantinou. “Also knowing that she’s put a great team in place to support every athlete with their unique needs. Especially on the Para side you have many unique disabilities, unique circumstances, so it’s how to best cater to each individual in order to optimize their full potential.
“It’s just amazing to feel that support; to know that you have people in your corner, a team around you that genuinely cares and wants to see you do well. That has allowed us to stand together and realize we’re not in this alone. We have a whole group of people - fellow athletes, coaches, Integrated Support Team, mental-performance - all coming together in this cohesive unit to make sure that we are able to perform the best we possibly can.”
Found the gaps, and to a large degree, filled them.
Ahead for Nicholls and her team - the 2024 Paralympic Summer Games in Paris, Aug. 28 to September 8. And if their last competition visit there was any indication …
“I’ve never been so proud of this program and the individuals in it,’’ enthuses Papaconstantinou. “I’ve been a part of this for a long time now, so I’ve seen a lot of people, a lot of athletes, come and go.
“I can say confidently that this is the most elite group this program has ever had. And a big part of that is the culture around the team.
“You feel confident when you’re able to go out there with a team around you that has put in a lot of work, and you absolutely know will represent Para-sport incredibly well.
“It’s inspiring for me to be a part of that. I can’t wait to get to Paris and see what this team can do.
“I think it’s going to be amazing.”
