I love sports since my early childhood. In the past 45 years, not a day has gone by that I haven’t played sports, talked about them, watched them or thought about them.
When I was 10, I dreamed of playing for the Nordiques. At 14, I was aiming for the Olympic marathon. At 16, I still believed in my chances of becoming a professional tennis player. Two stinging defeats during the qualifications of the Quebec junior championship, at the Center Claude-Robillard, made me realize that I should earn my living differently.
The disillusion, for me, was painless. I practiced all these sports in the pleasure, without any pressure of my entourage, who saw only leisure there, and in independent, ie without official trainer. Basically, I was having fun, dreaming. Already, as a teenager, I discovered that I had as much fun reading about sports as doing them. I had a plan B.
I also quickly understood, thanks to these readings, that by missing my Olympic dream, I had perhaps escaped the worst. In The Olympic nightmare (Éditions de l’Homme, 1989), probably the finest Quebec book dealing with disillusionment with elite sport, 400m runner Sylvain Lake, who took his own life in 1992, at the age of 26 years, did not go with a dead hand. “Sport, he wrote, robbed me of the best years of my life. »
Indictment against sports doping, to which Lake refused to succumb, against the discrimination of Francophones in Canadian sport and, above all, against the obsession with performance at all costs, this informed and vibrant testimony, written by a disappointed athlete aged 23 years, deeply moved.
“Running the 100m in 9.79 seconds is all well and good,” Lake wrote, “but when the guy has trouble telling an apple from an orange, there’s something embarrassing about having one idol! Lake, on the other hand, admired his sister Josée, an exceptional elite swimmer who never received the recognition she deserved because she shone in the disabled sport.
Figure skater Julianne Séguin, born in 1996, should have read Lake’s book. With her partner Charlie Bilodeau, she obtained the 9e place as a couple at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in 2018. The feat is remarkable. Since then, however, the young woman, now 26, has suffered from nausea, migraines and anxiety. The very day of her performance, mentally and physically exhausted by years of hardship, she can’t even savor the moment.
Journalist at Quebecor’s investigation office, Marie-Christine Noël convinced Julianne Séguin to tell her story in order to illustrate what lies behind sporting exploits and medals, to show the price that athletes must pay to get on the podium.
A medal at all costs (Les Éditions du Journal, 2022, 200 pages), the fruit of this collaboration, tells a sad story, representative of the situation in many other sports. Aspiring athletes should take a break from training to read it, as a preventive measure.
The young woman began skating at the age of six. Two years later, she trains four times a week, at the arena, from 6:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. To avoid injuries, her coaches recommend, she must give up practicing other sports. We understand that she says, today, not having had adolescence.
To continue her ascent to the podiums, Séguin will choose to work in Chambly with Josée Picard, a renowned trainer who has trained several champions. Like many elite trainers, Josée Picard believes in the hard method: intensive training, minimal rest, obsessive weight management and military-type, even aggressive motivation.
The results are often there, but the athlete does not come out unscathed on the physical and psychological levels. When the skater evokes the months preceding the 2018 Olympic Games, notes Marie-Christine Noël, she speaks of it “as if she had lived a nightmare”.
Séguin, who passionately admired her trainer and who recognizes a host of qualities in her, must nevertheless note, today, the unhealthy relationship of dependence she had with Picard. The young woman is now paying the price for her hasty returns to the ice after concussions and for years of imposed body obsessions — she was never thin enough, according to her trainer — and pressure to perform.
Do you really have to go through all that, through such an ordeal, to become a champion? I hope not, but I cannot answer. I know, however, that if this is the price to pay for a podium, elite sport is not humanism and is not worth it. The important thing, basically, is neither to win nor to participate, but to have fun.