Road to Paris Olympics bumpy for boxer Tammara Thibeault, other Canadian athletes

The road to the Olympic Games hasn’t always been smooth for Canada’s athletes in Paris.

A capsule look at the challenges some have faced in their careers:

Sydney Pickrem, Clearwater, Fla., swimming

“The biggest challenge has definitely always been mental health. Until I really discovered my issues with depression and anxiety and tackled them, I don’t think I was able to be the person and swimmer … a lot of the time I took away Sydney as a person and was just the swimmer.

Trying to merge the two and also be in a healthy mindset has not always been easy. Someone asked me ‘is that all behind you?’ It’s never going to be behind me. Anxiety and depression is something that I will face every single day for the rest of my life.”

Phil (Wizard) Kim, Vancouver, breaking

“A lot of it was the initial doubt, both external and internal, of whether if I could do this, if I could compete at this level. I wasn’t a particularly talented kid. The challenge was people not believing in me, me not believing in myself, not knowing if it was a real viable career path, if I could make money off of it, if I could live off of it, if I could make it to the top.

At that time when I was trying, it was really only like the top one per cent who could make a living off of what I wanted to do, which is competitive breaking. It was a very long struggle both mentally, physically, externally and internally.”

Tammara Thibeault, Shawinigan, Que., boxing

“The biggest challenge I had to overcome is my own self-doubt and doubting what I’m capable of accomplishing. Overcoming doubt is a constant process. It’s reminding myself of what I’ve already accomplished, reminding myself of what makes me great, reminding myself of all my qualities, and also that I’m human. Mistakes that I make, certain failures that I do don’t define me.”

Katie Vincent, Mississauga, Ont., sprint canoe

“The biggest challenge I’ve overcome in my career is just all the hurdles we faced trying to get women’s canoe into the Olympics. As a team and an organization, we were really starting from nothing. We didn’t want to just go to the Olympics and make sure women’s canoe was there.

Canada was a huge part of it being in the Olympics, but we wanted to set the bar very, very high for the next generations to try and challenge and create a sport that was going to be respected. That’s something Laurence [sprint canoeist Laurence Vincent-Lapointe] and I did very well prior to Tokyo. I’m still trying to push that envelope in women’s canoe.”

Felix Dolci, Laval, Que., gymnastics

“If I can seize one event, I think it would be the pandemic. It was extremely different. Something we’d never had before and something we were not expecting. I was in my prep to qualify for the Tokyo Olympic Games at that time. That kind of got away because of the pandemic. Everything was closed. No more training. I wasn’t in control of my fate; I wasn’t in control of my results. I really couldn’t do anything about it. That was really frustrating and difficult to deal with.”

Charles Philibert-Thiboutot, Quebec City, track and field 1,500 metres

“It was rather a string of them more than just one. After a pretty explosive start to my professional career, after an amazing collegiate career from 2017 to 2020, I couldn’t find a groove, I couldn’t get healthy, I wasn’t able to put more than three months of training in a row. I finally got healthy in 2021 and was on track to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics, but I got sidetracked by a competitor stepping on my Achilles tendon in a race just a month out.

of the end of the qualification. My very last attempt to qualify, I was supposed to run a time that is like bread and butter for me, but on the day, there were 70 kilometre-per-hour wind gusts, and I missed it.”

Cam Levins, Black Creek, B.C., marathon

“In 2016, ending up needing a pretty significant surgery on my left foot and missing the Rio Olympics. And really underestimating what it would take to recover back from that. It took me really a good year to even start racing again. As I was going through it, realizing this is not actually a given. I have to really work at this and have things go my way.”

Aaron Brown, Toronto, track and field sprinter

“The biggest challenge for me was kind of getting out of my own way. I’m an overthinker sometimes and I like to think lots and overanalyze, and that could be a superpower, or that could be a detriment. Early on, it was kind of a hindrance where I would overthink certain situations and worry about the magnitude of failure.”