Team Canada's relay team trains on day minus one of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games at Milano Ice Skating Arena on Feb. 5.Elsa/Getty Images
Katrina Monton, PhD, is an assistant teaching professor and the director of experiential learning and professional development in the Organizational Psychology Program at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University. She was a Canadian national team water polo player.
As the Winter Games get under way this week, Canadians will once again celebrate podium finishes, personal bests and national pride.
Medals matter. But so does how they’re earned.
For years, high-performance sport in Canada has been shaped by a simple equation: win, or risk losing funding. That pressure has too often produced environments marked by fear, burnout and silence, with devastating consequences for athlete well-being. Recent reckonings across Canadian sport have made one thing clear: performance at any cost is not just harmful, it’s unsustainable.
Yet new research suggests there is another way. In a recently published qualitative case study of Speed Skating Canada, the country’s most decorated Olympic sport, my colleagues and I examined the organizational practices behind its sustained international success. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with athletes, coaches, staff and leadership, we found a high-performance system that has intentionally aligned excellence with care, and results with respect.
This matters, not because Speed Skating Canada is perfect, but because it operates under the same conditions as every other national sport organization: performance-contingent funding, limited resources and relentless pressure to deliver medals. What distinguishes it is not privilege, but choice. At the heart of the program is a clearly articulated dual mission: to pursue podium results while developing people – not just athletes, but whole humans. That mission is not aspirational rhetoric. It shows up in everyday decisions: transparent communication about budgets and trade-offs, leaders who invite and act on feedback and a culture where athletes are encouraged to speak up, take risks and ask for help without fear of retribution.
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Psychological safety, a term often misunderstood as “soft,” emerged as a cornerstone of performance. Athletes described environments where mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn, not as reasons to punish. Coaches and staff spoke about trust, accountability and shared responsibility. Leadership was characterized as agile and distributed, with expertise respected across roles rather than concentrated at the top.
Crucially, this culture does not dilute competitive standards. If anything, it sharpens them. Athletes consistently described how feeling supported as people enabled them to train harder, recover better and stay engaged over long careers. The message was clear: well-being and performance are not trade-offs, they are mutually reinforcing.
This challenges a deeply ingrained assumption in elite sport: that pressure, control and emotional toughness are prerequisites for winning. The Speed Skating Canada case suggests the opposite. When athletes feel psychologically safe and valued beyond their results, they are more willing to push limits, collaborate and persist through adversity.
The implications extend well beyond speed skating. As Canadians watch the Games unfold, conversations about success often focus on medal counts and funding formulas. Rarely do we ask what kind of systems we are rewarding, or what kind of experiences athletes are having along the way. If funding continues to privilege outcomes without examining culture, we risk perpetuating the very conditions that have driven so many athletes out of sport.
Speed Skating Canada offers a positive counter-example: a system that has professionalized its operations, diversified revenue streams and invested in leadership and culture, all while remaining competitive on the world stage. Its success suggests that reform does not require lowering standards or abandoning ambition. It requires clarity of values and consistency in practice.
This is not a call to romanticize one organization or to suggest its model can be copied wholesale. Every sport has its own constraints and complexities. But the principles are transferable: transparent leadership, meaningful athlete voice, psychological safety and a definition of success that includes human dignity.
With the Winter Games under way, Canada has an opportunity to broaden the story we tell about excellence. Medals will always be important, but if we want sustainable success, and a sport system worthy of the athletes who give so much to represent this country, we must also pay attention to the cultures that produce those results.
Winning matters, but how we win matters more.