Olympic medallist Laurent Dubreuil says Canada must invest more in sport

Olympic medallist Laurent Dubreuil reflects on post-Olympic motivation and warns Canada risks falling behind without greater funding for high-performance.

During a recent interview, Quebec Olympic speed skater Laurent Dubreuil reflected on staying motivated after the Olympics and raised concerns about funding for high-performance sport in Canada. The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

CTV News: You’re on a whirlwind tour of skating. Tell me about the last couple of weeks. What has that been like?

Laurent Dubreuil: After the Olympics, it’s been quite hard to keep the motivation going for the world championship. You go from an absolute high in your career — in your life — winning an Olympic medal, to thinking, “I’ve got one more event to go. I need to keep training.”

You kind of want to stay on vacation or relax and enjoy it, but you have to stay focused. You have to do that for about three weeks. I raced really well at the world championship, and in the last week I’ve been relaxing more. I ate a bag of chips a couple of days ago, just off-season mode now.

CTV News: But it’s the same sport and you’re racing against the same people. What is it like having those two different levels of attention?

Laurent Dubreuil: For us, the normal is not the Olympics. At the Olympics there’s a lot more media and more people watching in Canada. But in the Netherlands, at the world championship, there were twice as many people in the stands as at the Olympic Games, about 12,000 people every day, and more than a million people watching on TV.

So in their country it’s a big deal. Every time we go there, we feel like hockey players.

But in Canada we know it’s not that popular. I think it could be, though, because so many people come up to me and say, “Speed skating is my favourite sport to watch at the Olympics.”

We give our best every race, World Cup races, world championship races, every season. For anybody wondering, our races are usually easy to find on YouTube next season. It’s the same beautiful sport, just a more anonymous setting, but we still do our best every race.

CTV News: We saw Norway with a huge medal count at the Olympics. What does that say about Canada and how it prioritizes funding for sports that maybe aren’t as popular as hockey or football?

Laurent Dubreuil: In Canada, we haven’t really had an increase in funding for high-level sports in over 20 years. With inflation, the same amount of money isn’t worth nearly as much anymore — probably about 30 per cent less.

With 30 per cent less, there’s a lot of stuff we can’t do anymore. We don’t send full teams to World Cups. We can’t pay for every competition. At the world championship we had to pay for ourselves, and we can’t really innovate anymore.

I think federations are more focused on surviving than innovating and performing, and I think it reflects in the medal table. We dropped quite a lot at the last Olympics.

As a society we have to ask ourselves: is it worth investing in the future — investing in a healthy, happy, active population — or not? And I think just by asking the question, you answer it.

CTV News: What was it worth to you?

Laurent Dubreuil: It’s worth all the sacrifices I’ve put in for four years. The medal itself is just a piece of metal, but the hardest part is making all those sacrifices. And not just the medallists do that, everybody does.

The guy in 10th place didn’t work any less hard than the guy who won. At this level everybody works extremely hard. But when you win a medal, all those desserts I declined, all those nights I stayed home and went to bed at nine instead of going out, they’re instantly worth it.

CTV News: What do you hope for in the future? In four years, what do you hope Canadian speed skating and other sports look like?

Laurent Dubreuil: I hope in four years we’ve started climbing again. If we don’t, it’s just going to get worse, and we might do worse in four years in skating and other sports.

We see it already in skating. One of the few sports that exceeded expectations at the Olympics was long-track skating. We won five medals, but they were all won by athletes 30 and older. Nobody in their 20s, and that’s not normal.

I shared the podium with a 21- and 22-year-old. I’m 33. You should be able to win medals in your 20s.

I won most of my medals in my 20s, but we haven’t produced medal contenders in their 20s right now because we’ve cut funding and we haven’t invested in the future. I probably won’t win a medal in four years. Valérie (Maltais) probably won’t either. We’ll be very old. We might not even be on the line.

So we need to change it. If we invest now, the results might not show in four years. It might take eight years, because it takes a long time to build a champion.