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Archive Record
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Metadata
Object ID |
2017.2.6 |
Object Name |
Video Recording |
Title |
Simon Whitfield Interview |
Interview Summary / Résumé d'entrevue |
Simon Whitfield, Order of Sport recipient, inducted in 2017, born in Kingston, Ontario, fondly recalls growing up in Kingston playing soccer with the neighbourhood children and talks about how he became involved in athletics and triathlon. He reiterates throughout the interview that sport is a joy and that he believes success is partly due to imagination. Simon calls imagining the various scenarios one could encounter as an athlete in a race "the ability to script." He enjoys mentoring and considers it a privilege. When asked whether he had ever felt like quitting, he admitted to self-doubt but emphasized the joy of sport. Simon elaborates on the importance of play, joy, and imagination in sport. He answers a question about structured versus unstructured play for children, and in a later question about coaching, he talks about the importance of athletes learning how to fail. Simon recalls failing to qualify for Junior Nationals. He believes parents should be present and supportive at their children's sporting events. Simon talks about his involvement with the Canadian Men's Health Foundation and his experience with KidSport. He recalls winning at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney and being the flagbearer at the Closing Ceremonies and again at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The interview also touches on Simon's advice to young athletes and young female athletes in particular. Simon is also asked about his 2012 Olympic Games Triathlon bicycle crash. 2017.2.6 Entrevue avec Simon Whitfield, 2017, MP4 d'origine numérique. Trois vidéos d'une durée totale de visionnement de : 00:44:19. Simon Whitfield, récipiendaire de l'Ordre du sport, a été intronisé en 2017 et est né à Kingston, en Ontario. Il se souvient avec plaisir de son enfance à Kingston où il jouait au soccer avec les enfants du quartier et parle de comment il a commencé à faire de l'athlétisme et du triathlon. Tout au long de l'entrevue il répète que le sport est une source de joie et que le succès est en partie dû à l'imagination. Simon dit que l'exercice d'imaginer les divers moments qu'un athlète pourrait rencontrer pendant une course " correspond à l'habileté d'écrire un scénario ". Il aime jouer le rôle de mentor et considère que c'est un privilège. Quand on lui demande s'il a déjà eu envie d'abandonner, il avoue qu'il a déjà douté de lui-même mais que la joie du sport l'a emporté. Simon parle plus en détails de l'importance du jeu, de la joie et de l'imagination en sport. Il répond à une question sur la différence entre le jeu structuré et non-structuré chez les enfants et plus tard, quand on lui pose une question sur le métier d'entraîneur, il parle de l'importance pour les athlètes d'apprendre à échouer. Simon se souvient quand il n'a pas réussi à se qualifier pour les championnats nationaux juniors. Il croit que les parents devraient être présents aux événements sportifs de leurs enfants et les appuyer. Simon parle de son engagement avec la Fondation pour la santé des hommes au Canada et de son expérience avec KidSport. Il se souvient de sa victoire aux Jeux olympiques de 2000 à Sydney et d'avoir été le porte-drapeau du Canada aux cérémonies de clôture puis une fois de plus aux cérémonies d'ouverture des Jeux olympiques de 2012 à Londres. L'entrevue aborde également les conseils de Simon aux jeunes athlètes et plus particulièrement aux jeunes athlètes féminines. On lui demande aussi de parler de son accident de vélo pendant le triathlon des Jeux olympiques de 2012. |
Scope & Content |
Simon Whitfield interview, 2017. Born digital MP4 videos. Three videos with a total viewing time of 00:44:19. TAPE 1 Take us back to when you were first involved in the kid's steel races. What inspired you to pursue athletics and triathlon in particular? 00:29.03-00:50.21It was the festival-like atmosphere. We went to the Sharbart Lake Triathlon, and it was more about the soccer and the barbecue afterwards. We went with the Hollywood family, they organized it, and to be at the park, and seeing everybody participating and doing something they love, it was fantastic. I can relive it to this day. How has mentoring athletes affected you? 01:01.26-01:42.29I had great mentors growing up. I was a keen learner, I asked a lot of questions, I played dumb. I played dumb a lot: I asked a lot of questions where people would look at me like "you really don't know the answer to that?" I was like, "Yeah, I know the answer to it, but I want to hear you say it," and so I still mentor to this day. I have a great group of mentors, a beta council let's call it, and I hope to provide the same for anyone in the same position. I went on a pro-am golf game the other day, and this 23-year-old guy from California asked just brilliant questions, and I said "it's really a privilege"…he thanked me and then I thanked him because it really was a privilege to be able to share, and in doing so learn. I was a student as much as he was. What advice would you give to young athletes to get them involved in sport? 01:52.07-02:50.27Sport is such a joy, because you get to express your most vivid and wild imagination, whatever you can orchestrate and script in your mind you get to work towards facilitating. I'll give you a funny answer, though: Read fiction. I would read, and read, and read. And I mean read. Like sit down with a book and read fiction, because your mind creates the imagery, you create the story. The author is just giving you the architecture, the patterns, the general outline. But if you're an athlete and you just read fiction, then you create in your mind the imagery, so when you go do your sport, or whatever it is your immersed in a mastery of, then you'll find the same. You'll find the same ability to conceptualize is so vivid and clear, and you're so articulate in how you create that imagery that it will translate, it transposes to sport. I would read fiction, number one. Do you think there are corollaries between reading, the stories that are given to you, and the stories that emerge from sport? Does one lead to another, do they tie in together? 03:15.03- I'm such a believer in sit and write it down, a journal and create. I played an enormous amount of Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, role-playing games as a kid. I ended up growing up on a very small street in Kingston, Ontario, and on that street one of the editors of Foreign Affairs magazine came from that street, a gentleman who was on the Privy Council for twenty years came on that street, a Greek mythology and computer science nerd who lives in Berlin came from that street, and a Princeton professor, and myself. We played endless imagination games, and we had vivid, vivid imaginations. When we went off to do whatever it was that caught our attention, we had this ability to conceptualize because as little kids, we stayed up for hours and hours creating vast worlds, and carried that imaginative spirit through to whatever it is we did. I brought that to sport; I had this ability to script. People say to me, "What were you thinking? What was it like running down the finish line?" I'm like, well, if I'm honest, I've seen it many times before. What would you say to girls about the importance of becoming active in sport? 04:55.13-05:54.28I have two daughters, so it's nothing I wouldn't count my two daughters. Embrace the theatre. There's great joy in this; the poetry in sports is beautiful. You have this opportunity to express yourself, and that's it, that's all you need. What more can you ask for? I talked to my daughter Evelyn's grade one class and I said, work toward being a centred individual through self-regulation, through your own daily rituals, so that you can give onto others, so you can express your gifts. Period. End of sentence. That's what you're offering. It doesn't matter who you are where you come from, that is what you can control. You take care of your daily rituals so you self-regulate, so you're a centred individual, and you can give to others and express your gifts. If sports are your gift, I don't know, if that where your brain creates and flowers then go do it. It's a beautiful thing to be able to express yourself. Was there ever a moment during your professional career where you felt like quitting? 06:10.28-08:45.14Yeah, all the time. I had every bit of self-doubt that every other individual has and goes through. Mostly had to do with the drama of it; human interaction is difficult. Relationships are hard. You have to save space for others to prosper. If you're not centred in your existence, and at times I very much wanted, because you're infatuated around that narrative around who you are, and your self narrative. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from and how we interact, if you're not centred in that, if you're not providing safe space for others to prosper, then you become unaligned, you become not centred. I had a lot of those moments, and in those moments, I felt like walking away from it. But I come back to just the joy and theatre of sport. My parents gave us a wonderful gift: they never asked us how we did. They always said, did you give a great effort today. They assumed that if we gave a great effort, then we were going to do as well as we were going to do, as well as we prepared for, and it gave my sister and I a wonderful freedom that we went to competitions or whatever, whatever it was the outcome was directed towards, or whatever the goal was, and we just expressed our gifts. We were processed-oriented, not outcome-fixated, and it was a wonderful gift, and I carried it out through my whole sporting career, and that's what I impart to my daughters. I'm very, very careful with the language I use with them too. I don't talk about nerves as being anxiety, we talk about having this capacity to gather energy and hold it, and that's a gift. Sometimes it gets hard to hold, and it falls off the edges, and that's that angst. That's what we call "nerves". But don't try to get rid of the butterflies, just make them fly in formation, that's what Dad said. You gather that energy and you express your gift. I watched Pippa do it at the city Track and Field Championships recently, my nine-year-old, and I was proud of her not for the race, but I was proud of her before the race. I watched her, and she got nervous, she gathered that energy, and she danced a little bit, she played drums, I watched her. She did a little Irish dance to the start line, she was smiling, she came fourth, and it was so fun to watch. When I talked to her afterwards, I didn't applaud the result, I said, "Oh kiddo, you get it!" The way she prepared, the way she got to the start line was everything, and that will serve her for the rest of her life. Do you have a message for young girls who are thinking of quitting sports? 09:03.12-10:10.15 That's a difficult one. Everybody goes through it and it's a privilege. It really is. I don't mean that from a guilt perspective, don't feel guilty for it, and just see the privilege in it. We live in Canada, we have so many opportunities and so much support, and so much infrastructure around us to express your gifts. As someone who grew up with sport, and someone who loved sport and loved the aspect of play, and then now isn't engaged in that anymore, not engaged in that mastery, that joy of mastery is beautiful. It's such a fun thing, to have your day consumed with these small, incremental gains you make toward a very specific goal. That's fun, that's a joy, so go back to that. Mastery is play, just play. The rest of it, the outcomes, the discussions, the drama, all that other superfluous stuff, it doesn't matter. Just go and play. Just go play and have fun. Play is where our imagination is. I watch my kids, their capacity to imagine is centred in play. It's not centred on problem solving. It's not centred on outcome orientation. It's centred on "Hey, let's play!" Because of it, they have these huge, broad, BROAD imaginations, and then they can find specific meaning and the ability to see very universally. We lose that: we get very structured and siloed, and has to be a certain way. What are your thoughts on unstructured play? 11:21.24-13:20.16It's a challenge, I mean it's the difference between constructive defiance and chaotic defiance, or indifference. Constructive defiance, in my estimation, is where you build structure upon the current apparatus, on top of the current structure in collaboration with others. But from there, that's where the structure can end, and you don't have to be systematic about it, but you also have to think in broad terms, so you see things from other perspectives, and that's the collaboration part. You're creative, you collaborate, and you embark in common enterprise with others. If you don't do that, you're indifferent, you're chaotic in your defiance of it, you're unsystematic about it because you're indifferent to the outcome. I see it with my kids: we balance the amount of time they're into very structured environment, to where they just get to be creative, whatever that is. That might be in the way that they write, the music that they make, and how much fun is that? We have an electric keyboard, electric drums and harmonica, and we just make up the most ridiculous music out of it. We make the most ridiculous sound, and out of it comes something: music, and that's the unstructured part, that's the fun part, is that we're outside of it a bit. I love that creativity. It's a bit of the difference between, the idea outside the pale and inside the pale. If you're inside the pale, then you adhere to a certain set of rules and structure. Once you enter outside the pale, you're on your own, but as a society and for us to grow we have to venture outside the pale, and that's that unstructured part. You're moving beyond what's accepted and you move beyond to that, to somewhat of the chaos outside of that, and that's how we grow. What would you say to parents to encourage their daughters to play sports? 14:06.07-15.51.15That's an interesting question. I've said it before, it's to embrace the theatre of it, and I really emphasize to my girls, my children, about not being about the placing, and just embrace the theatre, the poetry in it. There are many moments in sports where you see theatre and poetry. I can give my own example: In Sydney, I beat a German, I ran down a German, and eight years later I crossed the finish line in second and I had that initial disappointment, and my dad was reaching over the barrier, he pulled me in, and I said "Ugh, that was so close!" My dad said, he's Australian, he said "too bad mate, you learned the poetry of sport!" I was like, "What?" "Eight years ago, you beat a German, and inspired a young German who got you back." That's the poetry of sport, and it's beautiful, and if parents are embracing that part of it and not the competition side, let's embrace participation. This nonsensical idea where we're like, not everyone should get a medal, it just rewards mediocrity, that's nonsense. That kid who was at the back who was out there longer and completed the course, gets every bit of celebration as the kid that comes first does, and let's just embrace that. Let's move from asking "how did you do today" to "did you give a great effort". "How was it? Did you find the joy in it? Was there some little instant happened that made you smile?" Let's focus in on those things, and they will find the joy in sport, rather than the anxiety and non-accomplishment. What would share with coaches, having been a coach yourself, to help them encourage their female athletes to stay involved in sports? 16:05.16-18:32.21I don't really see it as gender specific, I mean if we just moved away from that, it would be just be encouraging, and also trust in them. I was quite happy when my daughter came fourth, not first, second, or third. I was like, "Good, she's going to learn a lot more from that." So let's just embrace that side, embrace the learning, and learn how to fail. I failed a lot as a kid, and I didn't do particularly well. I had moments where I showed potential, but I had a lot more moments where I got absolutely dusted and was out the back door. I was sixteenth at Junior Nationals out of 22 kids. I remember standing in line for the jerseys to be handed out for the Ontario team, and it was like "number 7! Number 8! All right, we're done," and I was like, 'oh man, I didn't even get close to getting a jersey." But let's embrace that side of it, there's great learning in that, in fact there is more. So that's what I would say. It's an opportunity to participate with other people, and learn how we interact as a team, and how we encourage each other, and find the theatre and the poetry of it because it's there. It's absolutely there. If you watch carefully and pay attention, that would be the last thing also. I go to a lot of sporting events, and I see a lot of parents there sitting on their phone, and I'm like "my goodness, your kids are out there playing sport! Either go play some sport yourself and be active, or engage, watch!" That would be a big part of it, is get engaged and watching, or better yet, go participate. Go run around and kick a ball around. If you go to one of my daughter's soccer games, I think my kids are a little embarrassed because they're over there playing and I'm over here with a ball playing with myself, because it's a wonderful chance to get some exercise. But I keep my eye on what they're doing because….I don't know. I got to see Evelyn's first field hockey goal, I got to see Pippa chase that girl down. I have those images burned in, and when Evelyn said "I was like Connor McDavid going straight up the middle, and shot on an empty net!" I'm like, "you did, that was awesome, sure!" What inspired you to be part of the Canadian Men's Health Foundation to encourage Canadian men to lead healthier lives? 18:51.06-20:26.10Men's health is a very interesting issue. Our health trajectory plummets after 55 if we do not have a community around us, if we do not acknowledge that we need help with it, if we don't talk about it. Men are an interesting lot: it takes a lot of pub time, after soccer that ritual of going to the pub or wherever you go, but for my indoor soccer team it's pub time, and we know to connect, and we know to have a real conversation with another man. It often happens in slow chunks with the head down, and I get it, that's part of it. But if we're not having those conversations, in particular about our health, you watch, it's statistics supported, our health plummets. You can be as fit and as lively as you want for the majority of your life, but now's now, and if you don't take care of yourself, then if you look around, you can see in particular older men having some really hard struggles with their health, and all you need to do is see that and think "oh man, I should take care of myself", because that's hard to climb. So being involved with the Canadian Men's Health Foundation was centred around that, giving awareness to that, saying "hey guys, we need to talk about this", because women hive. They share information, they talk, they communicate. Men, we retreat, but if we retreat our health….so don't retreat, talk. Why do you feel sport is important to children, and what life lessons did sport give you as a child? 20:46.10My experience with KidSport was centred around a mom talking about how she wasn't able to provide sporting opportunities for her son who loved basketball. Obviously I've been around that as a kid, but to listen to a mom stand up and talk about what it's like to not be able to afford her son's basketball, and the way that the trajectory of his life from that….you've got this kid with an enormous amount of energy that he needs to expel, and you've got this mom who needs to get this kid out of the house to expel his energy. To think that she couldn't afford to do it, and of all the opportunity and privilege that I had, I was at Bear Mountain Resort in Victoria and I sat and listened and I was like "how do I help in this situation?" because as obvious as that is that some people can't afford sport, some people can't afford sport, and the trajectory of those people, the family not just the children, is drastically different. If that young man can't afford to go sport and chooses to expel his energy in a non-constructive manner, that doesn't just affect him, that affects his whole community. If we give opportunities to young people particularly to express themselves through sport at whatever level it is it doesn't matter, it's more of an exercise of burning off energy. We don't just improve their health, we improve the community around them. What does it mean to you to be inducted in Canada's Sports Hall of Fame? 22:31.20-24:55.25I hadn't really thought about what it meant until I got the call. It made me think of Cooper Street. I grew up on Cooper Street I was born on 5 Cooper Street, Kingston, ON., and the pothole in the middle of this one street was centre ice. Adrian, Colin, Jesse, and eventually David and Faried, everybody came and we played there. The funny image I have was….imagine a six year old that some dude came down the street and said "hey boys, because of this, one of you will go on and be in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame." That imagery to me is really cool, and I'll tell you what I've learned. Ted called when I was inducted into the Hall of Fame, T ed called, and that conversation, and when I went to soccer back home in Victoria, and the boys were like, "dude, you're in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame!" That was so cool, I really felt, I said to them, "we made it", because I played soccer with that group for most of my career, and that athleticism and that theatre that goes on there, the banter of John, Don and Christian, and Craiger and Boyce, that theatre led to so much of the success that I had, so for them to congratulate me, that was cool. And then….I don't know past that, yeah it's a strange thing, I don't know. To be celebrated in anything has its other side, and I actually struggle with that a little bit. It's a huge honour, it's wonderful, it's part of being a legacy athlete in Canada. It didn't come with a lot of other sides to it, I'll just say that. It wasn't a free lunch, and it's an interesting journey, You make a lot of…..I judged myself a lot as a kid on how much I sacrificed, and I paid a price for that, so it's an interesting journey. Tape 2 00:01.18-00:09.13Hello! I'm Simon Whitfield, two time Olympic medalist, four-time Olympian, and thank you for visiting the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame. 02:53.03-03.13.24I'm Simon Whitefield, an Honoured Member of Canada's Sports Hall of Fame. Every year the Sports Hall of Fame grant the highest honour in sport to great Canadian athletes, If you have an athlete you'd like to nominate please do so by January 15th. It's an incredible thing to be on the Hall of Fame, and I look forward to see who is nominated next. TAPE 3 How did you balance your training between three different sports? 00:57.10-01:43.27I loved being outside. I reflected on this a lot, what made me an endurance athlete was I loved being outside. For a while in my life I was the guy that if you needed to get medicine for your children and it required a diverse manner which to get there, you had to go across the river, then over the fields, then over the thing and there, you would have sent me because I loved being outside and I could do it for a long time. How did I balance the three? I don't know. Coach did it. Coach said do this and do that, and I did it. What it centred around was I just loved being outside, and I loved participating in something that let me explore with my friends, and play outside. That's how I did it, playing outside. What kept you driven to win the bronze medal at the Pan-Am Games in 1999, and later the gold medal in Sydney in 2000? 02:12.23-04:08.13I don't know what motivated me. I'm just a hypercompetitive kid. I was hard to play with. I struggled on team sports. I was driven, and in 1999 I went to the Pan-Am Games and won a bronze medal, but I didn't win silver because I was trying to win gold, and a year later I went to the Sydney Olympics and won a gold medal there, and I don't know, it was a script in my head. I went to a boarding school in Australia, my dad's an Aussie. I was the first person to be on the start line for Sydney; it was announced in 1994, my San Antonio san ranch, it was the circular key, there were tens of thousands of Australians down that circular key just underneath Harbouringer City, and Wan Antonio Sanranch said the Olympics will be…the 2000 Olympics will be in Sydney. A bunch of Australians went absolutely ruckus, as Australians do, but one person, myself, just sat there and thought "OK it begins", so I walked 500 feet to the start line. I was the first person there, there was nobody else there, and I started scripting. I was the first person to stand in the start line. I graduated from high school, right at the steps of the Opera House. I was there as a 10-year-old and carved my name in the bamboo in a tree in the Botanical Gardens. I was driven, but there was some magic there, the kid that just orchestrated and I scripted and scripted and scripted that, so while I was very driven, what motivated me was I loved scripting it. I loved the orchestration of my vivid imagination was, and you need no greater evidence to know I was the first person to stand on that starting line. I had the eye on them, I had a head start. The sport of triathlon first appeared at the 2000 Olympic Games. How did it feel to be the first ever gold medal winner? 04:22.12-05:11.13It felt like I already felt it….I don't know. It felt like I've already seen it, and it felt like I was acting out something I've already watched happen. I wanted to hear the national anthem as a kid, that was one of my funny little goals, I wanted to see that maple leaf fly high. If you watch carefully, I yelled "How's that" when I crossed the finish line because I joked with my buddy Jasper Blake, who is the most athletic human being on the planet, that I was going to say that when I won, so it was one of those funny little premonitions. I felt like I envisioned it was going to feel like, as funny as that is to say. You had to slow down because there was a bicycle crash ahead of you. With your script, it has to change has you go. What was going through your mind in those moments? 05:44.05-08:20.02When I say I scripted it, it's not like I saw just that one version of it. You've mapped out one more version than everybody else has, so you have one more frame to reference, which means you get to let them make the first move. In martial arts, it would be "you show them what you want them to do, so they show you what they're going to do, so you can do what's next." If you've done the visualization, which is just to do the work, if you've prepared and seen all the sequences, you've sequenced all the dominoes in every single iterations possible, and you've done one more than the other person, then I believe that's how it happens. That's how you orchestrate whatever your vision is. I think Usain Bolt has seen that race; he's watched it more times in his head accurately than anybody else. If you watched the men's triathlon in Rio, Alistair Brownlee must have a book somewhere where he wrote that entire race down. It plays out exactly how he would have written it: I'm going to start out on the right-hand side by my brother, there's going to be a little drama in the swim, but I'm going to be out in the front pack. I'm going to get on the bike and start to wonder if I'm going to get caught, but a group of us are going to pull away, and then at the beginning of the run, my brother and I are going to make it look interesting, but then I'm going to run way and I'm going to end it. That's exactly what happened. I think he's seen more versions than anybody else, because he's done the math. He's done all the equations, and I'll tell you what. You can distinguish great athletes and how they react…it's not what happened, it's about what happens next. And if you watch a great athlete, let's talk soccer, the ball comes across, they go to hit it, it doesn't go in the net. Does an athlete turn and make theatrics and get very displayed how they come across to others? Or do they re-watch it in their mind, because they've done the math up to the point that they couldn't do the equation, but now they know the equation that didn't work, so they re-watch it in their mind as it goes the direction they want to. That's what great athletes, great performers, individuals that are immersed in mastery have that ability. They are not consumed in self-identity, they have reached past that, and they're consumed with the minor details, and they're doing the math. You can watch, watch those sporting events and watch those individuals who don't go into theatrics, they go into recalculating the math. Which particular moment as an athlete stands out the most for you? 08:54.14-10:24.08Sydney, I guess, sprinting by Stephen Vuckovic at the roundabout, I mean…Steph Vuckovic and I sat together…two buses pulled up, yellow school buses, and all the athletes jammed on, their faces pressed up against the glass it's so packed. A coach liner pulled up at 6 o'clock in the morning to the race venue. I was very patient, and I walked over and I said, "who's the bus for?' he said, for the athletes mate. I said, "oh, I'm one of them", and the other person was Stephen Vuckovic who waited, and the two of us got on this bus and were the only two people on the bus. We sat on a leather coach liner and went to the race venue. We got on the ferry and sat on this little bus stop on chairs while everybody else crowded at the end of the cold dock, and we've been joking about who, since we started racing together four years earlier, could bench press more and who could outsprint the other. Four hours later, two hours of racing later, I outsprinted Vuckovic and get to say to him, "You can out bench-press me, I outsprinted you!" That moment right there, that little exchange, Vucko and I will always have that. He's a wonderful, dear friend, and we have that moment. That was it. It's not the winning though, it's the theatre in that, it's fantastic, it's super funny. In London 2012, you were honoured as Canada's flag bearer. How did it feel to be selected and what was it like to lead Canada into the Games? 10:39.18-13:20.19 The flag-bearer experience was really something. It was very…….yeah, it's an incredible honour. I've been the closing ceremonies flag-bearer, nominated by the athletes, in Sydney, and it's amazing. The closing ceremony is very informal, it's fun. It's done. But when Canadians nominate you, beyond the athletes, you feel like you're representing all Canadians. It was remarkable, that was a remarkable thing, and it came with a responsibility that was not lost on me: what it means to be Canadian, and what it means to distinguish ourselves in both sides of that, because nationalism is an interesting thing. It's not something that can be taken lightly because you're distinguishing yourself to others but also saying you're different. I struggled with that piece of it. I don't know if I struggled with it then, but I have a very good friend who's a musician, Haxley Workman. We're from the same corner of the universe, we've marched the beat of the same drum. But Haxley pointed out to me, "that nationalism, stuff, I struggle with that" and at the time I was like, "what're you talking about? GO CANADA!" but he said, "maybe if we did a little less "GO CANADA" and we just like "go everybody" we wouldn't fight so much." That struck me. So while I was incredibly proud to carry the Canadian flag, and all that that meant, it wasn't lost on me that we were distinguishing ourselves as different from others, and in that we're creating a line or delineation that we're different. That's a fine line, so let's be careful with that, because at the end of the day, that person (or group of people) that may see things differently, at the end of the day, they are us. It wasn't lost on me what it meant, from both the perspective of pride and great celebration of what this nation is, but it comes with a responsibility. We have this beautiful land that we call home, but let's be welcoming. It's not just our land. It's our land, and that's not lost on me. What inspired you to remain active in triathlon after a bike crash in London forced you to withdrawal? 13:39.25-15:04.00I've said it a couple times now. There's great poetry in sport. I went in with a bang, and I went out with a bang: I went in as an unranked athlete to go and was the first Olympic champion, and I went out with a bit of a yard sale with my nuts and bolts all over the ground, figuratively and literally. Yeah, that's the poetry of sport, too bad, that's how it goes. It is what it is, and that's what I'm saying to parents, let's embrace the theatre in this, and if anyone can speak to that, me could be the guy that, I don't know, I won on the biggest stage, and I crashed on the biggest stage, and you gotta take the highs with the lows, and there's great theatre in that. That's the poetry of sport. That's the poetry of life, but in this case, the poetry of sport. Again, my parents, assurance of unconditional love. We don't care if you win, we don't care if you crash. We just want you to express your gifts and find great joy in it, freed me from that. I struggled with other things, but I never really struggled with that crash, and it was somewhat appropriate. |
Date |
2017/ / |
People |
Whitfield, Simon |
Search Terms |
triathlon 2000 Olympic Games Sydney 2004 Olympic Games Athens Simon Whitfield Interview |