Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, dead even through three periods and into overtime. I hop on the ice as the last few seconds are running off the clock. Ten, nine, eight. I pick up the puck along the boards and charge towards the opposing goalie. Seven, six, five. I carry the puck over the blueline and make a move on the defenseman, beating him clean. It’s just me and the goalie now. Four, three, two. I fake a shot, pull the puck to the backhand, back to the forehand, and fire it upstairs past the goalie’s glove.
The crowd goes wild. Harrison Brooks has just scored the Stanley Cup-clinching goal for the Calgary Flames… or so I envisioned it countless times with my net and tennis ball in front of my house as a young kid in Saskatchewan.
And whether it’s the Stanley Cup-winning goal, a Game 7 buzzer-beater, or laying down that perfect run and standing atop the Olympic podium, playgrounds, driveways, backyards, outdoor rinks and ski hills across the country are filled with young athletes dreaming about their own spotlight moment in their favourite sports.
For Whistler’s Mike Janyk, that dream started at 10 years old while watching the Olympics with his family and picturing himself among the great skiers of the time. But it wasn’t until he was 13, while lying in bed recovering from a twice-broken leg he sustained alpine skiing, that the fire needed to make that dream a reality was ignited in him.
“I just remember lying in bed and I was like, ‘I’m going to be on the World Cup one day. I’m going to be racing for Canada in the Olympics.’ So really from that moment lying in bed with a broken leg at 13, it was like this is what I want to do,” says Janyk.
But for other elite athletes, pinpointing the precise moment their hobby turned into a deeper passion isn’t quite as easy.
Four-time Olympian Mercedes Nicoll just loved snowboarding. It’s all she wanted to do. And that love for the sport, along with an inherent competitive nature and tons of natural skill, blossomed into a 20-year career.
“When did I start getting serious about snowboarding? I don’t know. Was it ever serious?” she jokes. “I just kind of took it one day at a time, one contest at a time, one trip at a time. You’re always in the zone when you are competing, so it was probably from Day 1 that I wanted to win at the local contests—and then it snowballed into four Winter Olympics.
“When you grow up in that early generation of snowboarding, people weren’t going to the gym, they weren’t doing that. I just wanted to be on snow as much as possible. I honestly didn’t know anything better, so when people ask me, ‘What was your daily routine?’ I’m like, ‘I’d go snowboarding.’ That’s what I did.”
Two-time Paralympic snowboarder John Leslie, on the other hand, started out playing hockey and ski racing as a young kid. It wasn’t until he lost his leg to cancer at 11 that he found and fell in love with snowboarding, because it levelled the playing field and bridged the gap between him and his peers.
“In the beginning stages after I lost my leg, it was really nice because I can ride regular with my artificial leg in the front so I’m able to put all my weight on my back leg and really manipulate the snowboard with my able-bodied side,” he says. “Long story short, snowboarding really bridged my disability. No one could see it. I was wearing snow pants and I could be competitive with able-bodied kids, and I really enjoyed that.”
Regardless of where the love came from, that passion, that intensity, that drive to be great is what connects all elite athletes, no matter the sport. And it’s that same driving force that allows them to block everything else out and push their bodies to the limits.
But while putting all that energy, time and focus towards a goal is often necessary to reach the upper echelon of a sport, it also sets you up for some major low points when things don’t go to plan.
‘Self-discovery instead of self-proving’
For Janyk, that low came after the 2010 Olympics.
With visions of standing on an Olympic podium in his hometown, Janyk ended up in a disappointing 13th place. Following that letdown, he spent the next year recovering from multiple major injuries, which kept him out of competition and proved to be one of the darkest periods of his life.
“I actually wrote a letter of retirement to my sport psychologist. The Vancouver Games was this big pinnacle, and you envision yourself winning gold in your hometown, and then it doesn’t come to fruition. I went through a really big depression,” says Janyk. “I was so injured, I couldn’t train the way I was used to, so I tried to retire and my sport psychologist said, ‘This is really good, but I don’t think you are done.’
“And so that’s when I really used the last four years of my career where it was like, ‘OK, how do I want to be as an athlete?’ Everything that got me to this point, that motivation, that drive to stand out and make my mark in the world, sort of fizzled out and it was like, ‘OK, why am I doing this? Why would I go through all the ups and downs?’ From that point forward I was shifting, and I was using sport as self-discovery instead of self-proving.”
Nicoll went through a similar low point after a crash at the 2014 Games in Sochi that put her in the hospital staring down two years of recovery. While re-learning how to walk, Nicoll’s chances of resuming her snowboard career looked bleak.
“I had lost my personality and didn’t realize I was in a depression, so that was my first thing, like, ‘Am I going to get me back? Am I going to get my personality back? Am I going to be able to walk?’ So everything was like a micro step on getting my life back,” she says. “I knew I needed sport in my life because that’s what’s driven my life forever and I don’t know what life is without sport.”
According to sports psychologist and professor at Scotland’s Albertay University David Lavallee, this kind of existential crisis is common among elite athletes, who, from an early age, often make sport the primary aspect of their identity. That means anything that could disrupt that lifestyle—like injury—can lead to a diluted sense of self.
However, while injuries can lead athletes to dark places, they can also help re-light their fire, providing motivation to return to the top of their sport.
“Doctors telling me I should retire, I was like, ‘We’re going to have to stay positive here because that’s the only thing that’s going to get me through this.’ It was the most trying time of my life for sure,” says Nicoll.
“I worked two years to get back on snow and ended up competing at my last Games, which was in 2018, and I landed the trick that took me out four years prior in the exact same scenario where I crashed. So that was a huge highlight. I kind of call that a gold medal moment even though I didn’t get a gold medal.”
But after all the highs and lows, the injuries and the comebacks, there comes a time when each athlete must make the decision to step away from the sport for good. Sometimes this decision is obvious, like it was for Nicoll, who realized at her fourth Olympics that it was time to move on.
Other times the decision comes through long periods of reflection, like it did for Janyk, who was trying to rediscover the intensity he needed going into his third Games, but instead found relief in the realization that he was done, and could finally stop pushing.
And sometimes, like it did for Leslie, that decision comes from burnout.
“Leading up to the [2018 Paralympic] Games, I was very focused on winning and getting a gold medal, which is a pretty big thing to put on a pedestal. So when I didn’t get that gold, I took that pretty hard. It felt like the last four years, everything I have been training for, the blood, sweat, tears, time in the gym, the people that were helping me… I just felt like I let everybody down,” said Leslie.
“And I had a pretty big burnout after [that]. I just wasn’t having the time and space to realize something was missing in my life in terms of fulfilment. So with the slowdown [from the pandemic], and even just thinking about it with the amount of work between then and the same time the next year, it just wasn’t something I was willing to do.”
Retirement plan
According to Natalia Stambulova, senior professor of sport and exercise psychology at Sweden’s Halmstad University, making a conscious decision to retire is an important factor in an athlete’s ability to smoothly transition out of sport.
But sometimes a longer view is required beyond the initial decision to retire, says Stambulova.
“Many athletes plan retirement in terms of timing like, ‘OK, I will retire after these Olympics,’ but they don’t plan what they are going to do after that and what steps they can do when they’re still in sport in order to prepare themselves to deal with the new demands,” she says. “Also having a multi-dimensional identity—family member, student, employee, friend, all have their own resources, knowledge, skill and self-efficacy that add to the richness of the person and help to deal with retirement.”
While Janyk was content with his decision to hang up his ski boots, he still found himself in a two-year period of depression, being bombarded with visions of his unfulfilled goals, without a plan for what he wanted to do with his post-skiing life.
So he started exploring. He joined a writing group and tried stand-up comedy, looking for a new source of inspiration he could channel his energy into. But no matter what he tried, there was still that void that skiing used to fill.
“I didn’t want to do anything; I didn’t want to replace that void that being an athlete took away with something else just to replace it. So in that, I just started exploring some more creative stuff and seeing where some more inspiration could come from, and slowly it came. It took two and a half years before I did anything again,” says Janyk, who recently completed the manuscript for his memoir.
“Slowly I realized that I had a passion for sport development. I had a strong passion to kind of bring back into the sport what I thought wasn’t there. That’s when Grouse [Mountain] approached me to start working with them.”
After working as Grouse Mountain Tyee Ski Club’s program director for five years, Janyk’s career came full circle when he returned to the Whistler Mountain Ski Club as its executive director last summer.
Where Janyk decided to focus his time and energy on giving back to the same sport that gave him so much, Leslie’s path led him away from snowboarding to a new sporting endeavour entirely.
In the years after the 2018 games, until he officially retired last summer, Leslie says he felt lost, like he didn’t have the life skills necessary to live a life away from sport.
But with the pandemic came the time and space for Leslie to start building those other parts of his life, and he realized there were real life skills he could take away from his athletic career. He made friends outside of snowboarding, got a dog, found a new place to live, started working at Whistler Creek Athletic Club and really started to craft the multi-dimensional identity he was lacking as an athlete.
With his growing love for the fitness industry, Leslie recently completed his training to launch a career as a personal trainer.
Nicoll was one of the lucky few who didn’t go through the same post-retirement depression as Leslie and Janyk did, mostly because she never gave herself the opportunity to.
Nicoll went straight from a career on a snowboard to an office job in Toronto through the RBC Olympian Program, which is designed to give Olympic athletes in-office work experience after retirement.
As many can maybe guess, and as she has joked about herself, taking a born-and-raised West Coast mountain lover and dropping her into the hustle and bustle of downtown Toronto wasn’t quite the perfect fit.
After her three-month contract was up, Nicoll returned to Whistler where she continued her usual summer job working in events for the municipality, until this past November, when she moved on to new opportunities like Whistler Blackcomb’s Ride with an Olympian program, which offers private lessons taught by an Olympic athlete, as well as her new podcast, Dropping in with Mercedes. She’s also been a vocal advocate for youth mental health through Jack.org and has discussed her own struggles openly.
“I knew I needed to keep busy; that’s just how my life worked. So I worked from contract to contract as a snowboarder and then worked from contract to contract in the business world. It’s just this crazy mentality that I think athletes have of, ‘You’ve got to keep going, and you always need more, you need to do more, be better,’” she says.
“Now, I try to take time to not work, which is really challenging for me. It’s necessary because I’ve pretty much been working since I was 14, and to take an actual break is really difficult for a lot of us. It sounds so easy and gravy but to maybe not have like 10 goals at a time is kind of crazy to me.”
With the 2022 Winter Olympics getting underway in Beijing Feb. 4, chances are this will be the last Games for many of Canada’s athletes. And for those who are struggling with the decision of stepping away, or might struggle with it in the coming years, Janyk wants them to know they aren’t alone.
“I think the best advice is that you are not the first one that’s gone through it. There are others who have transitioned out and have transitioned successfully,” he says.
“Everyone has to do it in their own way, but someone has probably gone through it the way you want to … It will be some challenging times, but seek someone out who moved on from sport in a way that interests you and reach out—they’ll probably be happy to talk.”
