Good morning.
I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to share my experience, expertise and views on high-performance sport, generally, and the situation in Canada, specifically.
I'm a professor at the department of human resource management in the school of management at the Université du Québec à Montréal. I have a Ph.D. in social psychology, with a specialty in sport psychology. My research focuses on the coach-athlete relationship and the behaviours coaches must demonstrate to foster both athletic performance and the well-being of athletes.
I, myself, am a former national athlete and coach. I am still active in the world of high-performance sport, working as a performance psychology consultant, giving talks and training to coaches and sport organizations, serving as an official at the national level, and sitting on the board of a provincial federation.
The main thing I want to bring to the committee's attention today is the scientific research into how the social environment affects athletes' development. The science is clear: environments where the emphasis is strictly on performance are harmful to human beings. What's more, generally speaking, those environments lead to the worst outcomes in the long run. Individuals in those settings are willing to do anything for immediate results, even when their actions or decisions could be damaging to themselves, others or their organization.
The Canadian sport system, particularly its funding structure, is based primarily on the rapid achievement of results. When funding hinges on short-term performance and success, federations demand immediate results in order to keep their funding and ultimately ensure their survival. Consequently, they tolerate unacceptable behaviour on the part of certain coaches, administrators and athletes for the sake of short-term results. Under that type of system, it's always the same federations, the same sports, the same coaches and the same practices that benefit from funding, at the expense of innovation, modernization, diversity and well-being.
Tolerating—if not implicitly promoting—these kinds of destructive behaviours creates a sport culture where they are the norm. It is time to really educate all those involved in the Canadian sport system on what is acceptable behaviour and, conversely, what should be considered unacceptable in sport. For far too long, this results-driven system has allowed unacceptable behaviour to go unchecked in the name of athletic performance, so much so that the behaviour is now widely considered acceptable, even desirable.
In recent months, numerous coaches have been singled out, and rightfully so, for their inappropriate behaviour towards athletes. It is necessary, however, to examine how the current sport system influences and even encourages that behaviour. When a system prioritizes results—or worse, the rapid achievement of results—it puts pressure on coaches, who then transfer that pressure onto athletes.
Accordingly, it is time to not only point fingers at coaches, but also give them training, guidance and support. They need to education on what the building blocks of a healthy coach-athlete relationship are, on which behaviours to adopt and which ones to avoid in order to foster that healthy relationship, on issues affecting athletes' mental health and the list goes on. It is time to give them the right framework and to provide them with resources they can turn to when in doubt, resources that are co‑developed, resources that support their own mental health. Giving coaches a framework and taking care of their needs will help bring about culture change and improve their ability to cope with the pressure on their shoulders.
In conclusion, a number of actions are necessary to create the conditions for healthy and safe sport in Canada. They include reviewing the funding system, educating the public and members of the sport community to change the norm and culture, training coaches and giving them resources, adopting an approach that puts the well-being of athletes and coaches first, listening to athletes, and empowering them to create their own optimal training conditions. The current funding model produces medals in the short term, but at a cost: athletes' long-term mental and physical health. The research shows that similar results can be obtained and just as many medals can be won without sacrificing athletes' health. The science tells us that building a healthy sport environment, one driven by the well-being of athletes rather than athletic performance, produces equally good—and in the long term, better—results. It's time to stop following our old instincts and doing things the traditional way. Instead, we need to embrace science and apply the knowledge we have.
We must resist the temptation to focus on what we can readily see—like performance—and start focusing on what we can't. We can achieve the same results when we make that switch. It's time to ask federations to bring visibility to factors that have generally been overlooked: athletes' well-being, the purpose behind involvement in sport, skill development and so forth. It's time to focus on the long-term development of athletes and to give sport stakeholders the time and space they need to do things right. Bear in mind that results are nothing more than a consequence of doing things well. They should never be the end goal.