The Tokyo Roller Coaster The lives of athletes have been flipped upside down by the coronavirus pandemic and the postponement of Tokyo 2020. Mike Rowbottom asks how you prepare for Games like no other.
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uddenly, Marnie McBean, the triple Olympic rowing champion and Chef de Mission for Team Canada at Tokyo 2020, has stopped talking. I wonder if we have lost the line, but no. She’s still there, clearly considering her response to a question about the peculiar stresses she faces in her current role as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. “As an athlete yourself you know about the ups and downs of such a journey anyway,
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and with the pandemic it’s just been squared, hasn’t it?” I had asked. “It’s an enormous thing to take in as an athlete, and it must be really difficult for you, wanting the best for the athletes, and you can just imagine all the things they are going through?” She resumes. “Err…err well, yeah…honestly I think I just teared up at you saying that.” “The pandemic is different from anything,” the Officer of the Order of Canada and recipient of World Rowing’s Thomas Keller Medal adds. “I didn’t go through a pandemic as an athlete. But I remember the moment before what would have been my third Games in Sydney, when after my MRI for a lower back injury the doctor said ‘I can give you the bad news or the really bad news’. “Basically, it was done. It was three weeks beforehand. We had just arrived for a pre-Games training camp in Australia. So I remember what it felt like. Way back in March of
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2020 when the Tokyo Games were postponed, I knew what the athletes were hearing. “In that roller coaster analogy it’s that moment when you have just come over the top and the bottom falls out. “You just feel nothing below you. But there are times when really hard decisions are made very clearly and they are really easy to make. For me it was ‘I can’t row’. “So with the athletes I think the thing through this whole period of time is to really value every emotion that they’ve had. To never tell them to not feel something, whether it’s been anger, frustration, sorrow or depression. “I remember coming into this role in July 2019 and being asked what I wanted as the Chef de Mission. “I want Canadian athletes to be able to go to the Games and be their authentic self. If you’re a confident person I want you to feel authentically confident. And if you’re a person who needs to feel doubt, feel doubt. “I know athletes who can only perform
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