ARTICLE
“To make the transition from athlete to coach you have to turn that little bit of selfishness into a little bit of selflessness; putting everything you have into the people you’re working with."
Through her journey as an Olympic bronze medallist, a double World Championship medallist and now a high-performance coach, Laura Brown has been an unabashed believer.
In the intrinsic power of sport.
In its ability to nurture and transform.
In striving for the right way to achieve.
“Having been an athlete myself and gone through everything, the ups and downs, is a perspective I can share,’’ said Brown, who officially joined the national coaching set-up full-time in 2021 and helped steer the men’s pursuit cycling team to a 2023 Pan Am Games gold medal in Santiago, Chile.
“I don’t - can’t - know exactly how people are feeling in a certain moment - we’re all different, of course - but I have been in their shoes. And that’s an advantage. A lot of amazing coaches never reached the top of their sport competitively. So, I don’t think it’s necessary. But I’m very grateful for my sporting background.”
A bronze medallist in Team Pursuit at the Rio 2016 Olympics, a silver and bronze medallist at the World Cycling Championships in 2014 at Cali, Columbia and the year before at Minsk, Russia, the Calgary-born Brown is among a surging trend of successful athletes segueing into the tutoring/mentoring end to prolong their athletic journeys.
She views that evolution as nothing so much as a natural give-back.
“I’ve had a lot of support from Cycling Canada to begin a career in sport,’’ she emphasizes. “For that, I’m very grateful.
“Especially as a woman in coaching. I go to some events and I’m literally the only woman coach there. I look around and think ‘Oooookay …’
“So, to get that support in a not-so-traditional role has been great. I just fell in love with coaching. We have a campsite rule with the team I work with - Leave It Better Than You Found It. And that’s been my guiding principle, even in my later years of competing.
“So, I thought ‘Wow! Coaching is the perfect way to try and do something good.’ You spend your life doing something, then you retire and what do you do with all you’ve learned?
“It just felt right to share.”
Judoka Antoine Valois-Fortier is another prime example.
He, too, excelled on the Olympic stage (a bronze medal in the judo 81-kg class in London 2012) and at the World Championships (a silver, two years later in Chelyabinsk, Russia), and feels the need to help mold the next generation of judoka.
“I started in judo at four or five years old because I was a very … how can I say this in a politically correct way? … energetic person,’’ Valois-Fortier recalls. “A little bit too much so, I suppose. And judo is, of course, one of the martial arts that values respect and self-control.
“For me, the number one thing in coaching or in competing is being passionate, enjoying the tough and the long, the ups and the downs; that constant desire to get better.
“I never thought this sport would take me around the world, push me in so many aspects of my life and actually become my job one day.”
Jeff Bean reached 17 World Cup podiums as an aerialist in freestyle skiing and came within 2/10ths of a point of an Olympic medal in 2002 at Salt Lake City. Now in charge of Canada’s aerialists, he understands both ends of the spectrum.
“One of the successful traits of a really high-level athlete is that you have to have a little bit of selfishness,’’ he points out, chatting from pre-event camp in China. “To make the transition from athlete to coach you have to turn that little bit of selfishness into a little bit of selflessness; putting everything you have into the people you’re working with.
“That’s been the easiest and hardest thing about transitioning for me.”
The Ottawa-born Bean credits an intermediary step between competition and coaching - working for a spell as a Royal Bank of Canada branch manager – for helping his grounding process.
“That was a huge learning experience. It helped me remove myself, helped remove my ego, from things a little bit, helped me see that there is a bit more to life.
“It helped me look at the athletes from a holistic aspect as a coach. One of my mottos now is ‘I want to create good humans.’”
These three, and so many more of their contemporaries, can pinpoint someone absolutely essential in the development path to this point in their journey.
For Valois-Fortier that person was four-time Olympian Nicolas Gill. The two met when Valois-Fortier was all of five years old.
“I’m 33 now and to this day, Nicolas still has a strong influence on me,’’ marvels Valois-Fortier.
“He’s been a coach, a friend, a boss. Someone I look up to, as a coach and a leader in the sport industry. Someone I share a lot of values with, someone who’s been very kind to me. Honest, easy-going, calm … I don’t react so well to people who have big ups and big downs. I like my surroundings to be calm and constant.
“We connect on many things.”
That word - connection - is a recruiting theme in the common vocabulary.
“Being a good person, being kind, matters,’’ emphasizes Laura Brown. “I used to think the loudest person in the room was the leader. But just being the loudest doesn’t make you the smartest or the strongest or the best leader. And you don’t always have to be right.
“When I first started coaching, that’s how I thought leaders are. But going through the Pursuit program you realize it’s okay to be who I am, which is empathy, kindness, listening, admitting when I’m wrong, admitting when I don’t know something. Not being a dictator and telling athletes what to do but guiding them on their journey.
“Just a different, gentler style than I grew up with as an athlete.”
For Bean, the rush, the emotional rewards, the satisfaction of a job well done, are no different being tethered to the ground coaching than when flying through the air looking to nail the perfect landing.
“The intensity is the same. I love to work. I love figuring out people and situations. The best part of my job is that I have four, eight, 15 different humans that I’m trying to get the best out of, understand their brains.
“As a coach, I’m trying to figure out how to get the best out of my staff, the people I work with, my athletes. Some of them need a kick in the pants at times, some of them need a pat on the back at different moments, then flip-flop that back when need be.
“I love trying to figure what that person needs right now, not only in competition and training but in waking up the next morning happy and confident in themselves and not rely on me all the time to be that motivator for them.”
Been there. Done that. More and more of Canada’s top athletes are taking their own bruises and bouquets, successes and setbacks, to the current generation with the single aim to help them achieve their best.
“This is something, this judo fire, that’s burning too hot for me to step away right now,’’ confesses Valois-Fortier. “But I’m also a dad, and that’s the biggest challenge for me - balancing family life and work life.
“This is definitely not your typical 9-to-5 job. Late weekdays, weekends, away often. This is why it’s very important for me, as passionate as I am about my sport, to make sure my family is something I never want to overlook.
“The care for the human being behind the athlete is tremendously improved these days. A happy person is a performing athlete, there’s no doubt in my mind about that. There is a balance that needs to happen between life, mental health, studies, work and your athletic career. It’s a very demanding thing if you want to reach the highest level from energy, money, time. If everything is managed around sport objectives … I really believe that people who dig too deep in one area often fall short of improvement in other areas that will complement their sporting career.”
No one can possibly understand this quite as viscerally, of course, as those who’ve ventured onto the track, out to the judo floor or sailed through the air at the highest levels and on the grandest stages of athletic endeavour.
“Sports,’’ says Laura Brown, “are just a small sliver of your life. If we can help these young people function in this world, be adults and take responsibility, if we can do that through sport, we’ve done the job. With dictators, you just do what they’re saying, you don’t really understand why.
“If you can help athletes learn and reflect and make decisions on their own, when they leave sport and go out, they’re going to have the post-sport skills to make the world a better place because they’re going to be good people.
“Sure, you want to win Olympic medals but how can this affect the world. I know that sounds pretty out there, but for me that’s why I love sport. I think it can change the world.
“I feel like there have been trail blazers along the way, pushing that boulder up the hill. And maybe, hopefully, we’ve reached the tipping point where there’s enough athletes transitioning into coaches that it inspires other athletes to also go in that direction.
“The national sport organizations and Own the Podium being open to that possibility is huge.
“For them to say ‘They might not have PhDs but they are experts in their chosen sport. They’re good people. Let’s give them a chance’ makes all the difference.”