Canadian swimmer Mark Tewksbury, chef de mission for Canada at 2012 Olympic games in London. FILE PHOTO: REUTERS/Christinne MuschiChristinne Muschi/Reuters
The athletes flooded the lobby of a Mississauga hotel on Friday, dressed in maple-leaf red like a team already, all hopefuls for the Olympics, all in it together.
They are here for the Olympic Excellence Series, learning about what it takes to be an Olympian and not only that, to succeed as one.
It is a time for team-building, said Canada's Olympic chef de mission, Mark Tewksbury, who delivered a keynote address to about 70 athletes from almost every summer Olympic sport, coaches, mission staff, team leaders, consultants, mental performance specialists, health science experts, 200 people in all.
In 1992, when Tewksbury won gold in the men's backstroke at the Barcelona Games, he didn't have all of this Olympic Excellence stuff, which is designed to help potential Olympic athletes reach their goals with mentoring from those who had gone before.
On Friday night, Tewksbury wanted to remind them and inspire them about why they are here for the next few days, and perhaps to even laugh a little bit at what he went through at the Seoul Games in 1988 and finally in what for him was a magical performance in Barcelona.
"Twenty-four years ago, this didn't exist," Tewksbury said. "I arrived as a young 20-year-old [in Seoul]at the Olympics with all the clichés: overwhelmed, totally lost, totally blew it the first time. All the things they tell us that could happen, it did happen."
Maybe, he said, the Canadian Olympic experience has come so far that perhaps they all sometimes forget why the Olympic Excellence Series began.
For Tewksbury, the weekend's activities will form the beginning of the team that will compete in London next summer. "In my era, the swim team was in a silo," he said. "We were all in these sport silos, where nobody knew each other. We'd meet at the Games. You'd see people for the first time at the Games. You were already so nervous and preoccupied with what you were doing, there was no real sense of team."
Tewksbury said he was impressed that at the Vancouver Olympics when athletes finished competing, they all headed to other venues to watch their teammates compete, interested in their fate, caring about each other.
All of this team-building has a huge effect on results, said Tewksbury, who thinks that finishing in the top 12 of 205 countries would be a good goal.