Sink or Swim

“The energy in this room is fantastic,” says Pierre Lafontaine, standing on a podium and smiling at several hundred swim coaches in Salon D of the Toronto Marriott Airport Hotel last September. “I’m not sure we’ve seen that in a long time.” Lafontaine, a Quebecer who left to coach in the US and Australia — both renowned swimming powers — was hired as Swimming Canada’s ceo within a year of the Athens debacle. Here, he’s presiding over the first national conference for swim coaches in over a decade. Most of those in the audience have already seen him in action, because since taking the job he’s spent most of his time travelling across Canada and around the world, pitching his ideas, which all boil down to one idea: everyone needs to work harder.

Lafontaine leads by example. At a Montreal swim meet last summer — one of a series he launched in which the top three swimmers in each event win prize money — he never stopped moving. “I sit down, I fall asleep,” he says. I watched him cheer on the top swimmers, shake their hands, and offer pithy critiques after their races, and consult individually with coaches on deck. “If you make them part of decisions, it will be harder for them to bitch,” he says. At fifty-one years old, he is affable and smiles easily, but he has an unyielding sense of duty. And he is tough. When a national team member who’d skipped out on a meeting walked by, Lafontaine took him aside, demanding that he apologize to his coaches and managers. “Are you a member of the team or above the team? ” he said several times, tugging on the swimmer’s arm.

“Swimmers want to be so good,” Lafontaine says, but he insists that coaches must do more to raise their expectations, “to help kids dream” about winning so that they someday might. Coaches, he says, need to motivate for athletes to train more. They also need to celebrate small victories, like rewarding the swimmer who can do the most chin-ups or finishes races the hardest. For his part, Lafontaine has found money for more than a hundred Canadian kids to travel internationally each year to compete, and he helped design domestic meets that draw international athletes to Canada. Last fall, he and Speedo Canada made a deal; the company will pay swimmers $50,000, $10,000, or $5,000 — in addition to money offered by the Canadian Olympic Committee — for winning gold, silver, or bronze at Beijing.

Lafontaine’s enthusiasm and openness have eliminated much of the ill will and bad habits left over from the old regime. Swimmers and coaches seem more at ease on the pool deck, though not too at ease; he has forbidden coaches from sitting down during big meets, and to keep them more engaged he’s actually taken away tables and chairs. “They used to stand around bitching,” a coach told me about his peers. “Now they’re coaching.”

It’s made a difference. In March 2007 at the world championships, sprint free-styler Brent Hayden won gold, the men’s relay squad won bronze, and six other individuals made the finals. Then, in July, Canadian swimmers pocketed seventeen medals at the Pan American Games. “A US coach said to me that it’s the first time in a number of years that [Canadians] were racing. Every kid on the block was pretty competitive,” says Paul Bergen, coach of Canada’s last world record holder, Allison Higson. (Bringing Bergen back to Canada’s program after years of working in the US and Mexico was another Lafontaine coup.) At the Olympic trials in April, the eight men who made the finals in the 100-metre freestyle all swam under fifty seconds — a first in Canadian history. Only a handful of other countries can boast such depth.

Still, Lafontaine believes he is fighting an entrenched culture, one he insists must change if Canadian swimmers are to reach their potential. At the Pan American Games, after a swimmer placed a close second in his heat, squeaking into the final, Lafontaine told him, “If you know you’re that close to a guy, you go in, and you beat him. Don’t just finish the race to make sure you get a spot. Stop being a Canadian, and just beat people.”

In the Toronto conference room, Lafontaine introduces Alex Baumann, hired in 2006 by the Canadian Olympic Committee to run Road to Excellence, a program designed to put more Summer athletes on international podiums. (The Winter counterpart, Own the Podium, was launched in 2004 to prepare for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010.) Like Lafontaine, Baumann moved back to Canada after years of working in Australia, and believes there are lessons to be learned from its program. Canada, he says, needs talent scouting, more sports facilities in general, and four well-funded national sports centres (in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec) to serve elite athletes.

Such initiatives require money — lots of it — and Baumann wants the lion’s share to come from government. While the last federal budget committed $24 million over the next two years and $24 million a year after that, this is less than the coc had asked for, and too late to help our athletes in Beijing. Baumann’s Road to Excellence may recommend targeting funds to those sports with the best chances for medals at future Olympics — track, canoeing, rowing, diving, and swimming — which, he concedes, may be an unpopular idea. Just the same, and perhaps tipping his hand, Baumann tells the coaches, “Ultimately, we have to sell high performance as a benefit to society. We tend to make decisions based on consensus. We’re very politically correct in Canada, because we’re scared of offending people. And frankly we didn’t have that in Australia: they call a spade a bloody shovel.”

Referring to Ben Johnson’s confession of steroid use and loss of his Olympic gold after the Seoul Games, Baumann suggests that Canadians have had little appetite for athletes’ trying to win at all costs, because doing so could mean cheating. “Winning” became “a dirty word,” he says, and “it took a long time to recover.” The swimmers aren’t entirely there yet, although Lafontaine’s enthusiasm and a wealth of international medals have helped enormously. “We’re not expected to win medals, and we take that to heart,” Olympic swimmer Keith Beavers told me at a meet last November. “Now we’ve seen what Brent [Hayden] did, and we can see us doing it, too. We haven’t had a world champion in twenty years.” Lafontaine acknowledges that Canadian swimmers have few medal chances in Beijing. But, he says, “they’re a really happy bunch.” And happy is something. It’s a start.