The olympics. An event every person knows, every person has watched, and every budding athlete reveres as the pinnacle of sport.
But from the inside of a sport, what does it mean to be on the road to the Olympics, and what does an Olympics cycle look like?
Every sport is different in terms of how they qualify for the Olympics. In some, there are qualifying events, and if you win those, you get a golden ticket to the Olympics. The gift of these tickets is accompanied by an athletes’s raw emotion of absolute joy and relief. In other sports, like my own; the sport of Track Cycling, more specifically the Team Pursuit, the Olympic qualifying process is over two years, where each country; Canada in my case, competes in all the Nations Cups, Continental Championships and World Championships. Their performances in all of those events are added up, and by April 2024, three months before the Olympics, the top 10 team pursuit teams in the world will fill the Olympic quota.
This doesn’t mean that if you were a part of qualifying the team for the Olympics that you will be going though. Each country that qualifies, then chooses their four (sometimes five if an athlete qualifies on the road, they can be the alternate for track) athletes to make up the Olympic team. Which is something we will know in May 2024. So there is the uncertainty of knowing if your country has qualified for the Olympics, and then on top of that, there is the uncertainty of knowing which athletes within your country will be chosen.
So for the two years leading up to the Olympics, everything goes towards those qualifying points, and then further, within your team, it goes to showing the coaches and the selection panel how you are riding, to hopefully end up on that Olympic Team.
So when people ask me; “So, are you going to the Olympics?”, the answer is; “I don’t know”. I won’t know for another six months. We can predict that Canada will qualify; we are currently sitting seventh in the UCI Team Pursuit rankings, so it is likely, that we will qualify our team for the Olympics. Whether I go, is another question entirely. I am doing everything in my power to optimize my training to be riding at my best, to show the coaches that I deserve a spot on that Olympic team. But in reality, I have no idea. I know I’m improving, and continuing to do so. Being fairly new to the sport, this being my second season of racing track, I’m gaining strength, skills and technique pretty much every time I go on the track. But will I have improved enough and be going well enough to be in that top four on the team in the next 6 months? I don’t know.
This is an uncertainty that athletes face in an Olympic cycle. You can do everything right; your preparations can be perfect; your training, nutrition, recovery can all be optimized, but in reality, a lot of sport is out of your control. The process is complicated and the Olympics doesn’t always accurately represent the cream of the crop in each sport. Olympic quotas per country and per sport, funding and opportunity all effect who can go. If your country has the top 8 people in the world in road cycling; not all 8 of them can go. In fact, due to quotas, only three of them will get to go to the Olympics, even though the remaining five are ranked higher than anyone else in the world.
It is absolutely my goal and my dream to go to the Olympics, whether this cycle for Paris 2024, or for the next; LA 2028. Even as I’m writing this and I am aware of how complicated the process is, getting that notification that you’re selected for the games is still one of my childhood dreams that would be so fulfilling to achieve. I am determined to get there, but as with many things in life; when that will happen is up in the air.