Golden partnership
photo by Gerald Deo (the Ubyssey)
Winning smile: Bilodeau won Canada’s first gold medal at the 2010 Vancouver Games.
U of O contributed to Alexandre Bilodeau’s historic achievement
HISTORY WAS MADE Feb. 14 at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics when freestyle skier Alexandre Bilodeau of Montreal won gold in the men’s moguls event. He became the first Canadian athlete on home soil after three Olympics to win a gold medal.
Less celebrated than his championship moguls run is Bilodeau’s connection to the University of Ottawa. During his recent years of training, the 22-year-old was privately funded by U of O alumnus Paul Desmarais and was a beneficiary of the Own the Podium and Top Secret programs, which included psychological training from U of O human kinetics professor Penny Werthner.
Desmarais is a graduate of the U of O and one of Canada’s wealthiest businessmen according to Canadian Business. As an influential figure and former chairman and CEO for the Power Corporation of Canada (PCC), he has overseen the funding of Canada’s Olympic athletes for years.
“Both the PCC and the Desmarais family have made contributions [to] the Olympics and the athletes in many ways,” a PCC representative told the Fulcrum.
“The first initiative is the Canadian Olympic Foundation, which is a national charitable organization. The second is B2Ten, a new [organization] where private companies can put in money to sponsor athletes.”
On top of the funding, Bilodeau has received the expertise from several sports psychology researchers, including Werthner. Reaching the Fulcrum by phone from Vancouver Feb. 26, Werthner described the program’s and her own contribution to producing the first Canadian athlete to win gold at home.
“The [Top Secret] program is a research funding project that Roger Jackson (Chief Executive Officer of Own the Podium) started, through what was called Own the Podium for Vancouver 2010, to try to create research in conjunction with specific sports,” said Werthner. “[The program] was meant to increase our possibility of winning medals in Vancouver.”
Werthner worked directly with Bilodeau in the months leading up to the Olympics. She described the process of their training sessions.
“What we do is an assessment of each athlete to see how they manifest stress and how well they focus,” she began. “And then we develop a training protocol to help them get better at that. We try to help them to eff ectively manage their anxiety and emotional levels. [Th ere are] similarities across athletes of course, dependent on the sport. But it’s [still a] pretty individualized process.”
Professor Werthner was chosen for the program for her extensive research on the topics of biofeedback and neurofeedback in the body, processes which aff ect mental cognition, reaction, and stress/anxiety management. Werthner said it was a pleasure to share and apply her expertise with Bilodeau.
“He’s a wonderful person, and he was a very quick learner, which was really interesting for me to see,” she said. “He did really good work and had lots of good people around him. ... He was very open to learning, which I think is a pretty key skill for anyone.”
During his Olympic press conference Feb. 15, Bilodeau was adamant in his praise of the Own the Podium program.
“Own the Podium did explore new facets of our sport. I mean, we had a data boy,” he said, referring to a special analyst who helped each skier on their runs.
“We never used to have [that], and never thought of having [it]. ... We were travelling with so much equipment [for] timing, and no other country was doing that.”
Werthner also talked about the program’s benefits.
“The money provided me with the ability to buy the equipment and travel with the athletes,” she said. “We had lots of good results, and the Olympics were very well received by Canadians.”
Now that the Games are over, however, Werthner said there is some uncertainty about research funding for the future.
“No one knows [about the funding] at this point in time,” she said. “I think that the research project funding source will not exist anymore. What I plan on doing and what I have been doing for the last year is looking for other sources. Hopefully, we can access some that will let us continue our work.”
In the meantime, Werthner will be looking for other avenues to use her research now that the Olympics have ended.
“I don’t know what we do in the next four years with winter sport athletes,” she said. “Maybe introduce new athletes to it or introduce it to new sports or levels of sport. We will do it in a different way if the funding is not there.”
—with files from Andrew Hawley and Andrew Bates, CUP Western Brureau Chief
