One big goal this summer for Canada’s first Olympic men’s gymnastics team in 16 years
This article was updated on July 25, 2024
The Canadian men’s artistic gymnastics team of René Cournoyer, Zachary Clay, Félix Dolci, William Émard and Samuel Zakutney that will take to the floor at the Olympic Games in Paris has one singular goal in mind – make the team final. It’s a feat that no other Canadian men’s artistic gymnastic (MAG) team has managed to accomplish before.*
“There’s a historic result to achieve. Canada has never qualified for the team final in history. Achieving this would be a historic first, said veteran team leader René Cournoyer, after a training session with the team on-site in Paris.
And now that the Games are here, the team is dialed in on their performance–and trusting one another.
“In our team meetings, team goals always come first. The reason we focus a lot on the team is that when we all rally together, we become individually stronger. The idea is that we want to reach a team final, a top eight, which is a very big goal, and we know we can achieve it,” Dolci said after a pre-Games training session at the Paris competition venue. “By rallying around this goal together, we know that as individuals we have a better chance of performing well, reducing pressure, and thus achieving our individual goals.”
For him individually, the big goal is to make the finals on horizontal bar and floor exercise–but to do it in support of the team’s bigger vision, and the even bigger vision of gymnastics in Canada.
“Having a team goal allows us to prove to other countries and federations that it’s not just one individual who can excel on the apparatus, but a team, creating a greater impact and positivity. All the young athletes, the next generation, and other senior athletes who wish to compete in the Games are motivated by a team result,” Dolci said.
The team qualified for Paris 2024 via a fourth-place result in the qualification round for the team event at the 2023 FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium this past October. The team went on to finish seventh in the final – making their Olympic dreams a reality and their ultimate team goal seem achievable.
“When I got off the floor and I hugged everybody on the team, it was a very emotional moment,” Félix Dolci reflected. “We worked every single day for almost two years for this specific moment in time. We wanted this so bad and once it was done, you could tell that everybody had that weight off their shoulder. We could finally say ‘We are going to the Olympics as a team.’”
“We knew we had a strong team and that we could make it, but actually making it meant the world,” said Cournoyer. “I went to the last Olympics by myself but doing it with the whole team is an entirely different level of happiness and accomplishment.”
As Canada’s lone MAG representative at Tokyo 2020 after the team failed to qualify for the Games for the third straight Games (Canada last fielded a MAG team at Beijing 2008), Cournoyer knows well the heartache of not being able to pull it all together to gain that coveted team spot. As a key figure on the MAG national team since 2015, he’d been part of the unsuccessful qualification efforts for Rio 2016, as well.
“When I started, for Rio, the guys were almost at the end of their careers and I was barely starting. They weren’t taking it easy, but they were surfing a little bit on their previous success. When they retired, that left a gap in the national team and that allowed the younger guys to show up and they were really working hard, but they weren’t as experienced. We had one or two good guys, but not enough to have a whole team, so by the time we got to the Tokyo qualifiers, we had good fitness, and a little bit of experience, but that just didn’t cut it,” remembers Cournoyer of that time in his career.
The team entered the qualification phase for Paris 2024 with a new combination of experience and skills, and thanks to National Team Head Coach Ed Van Hoof–they had new belief in their ability to perform–perhaps the most important factor of all.
As the MAG Technical Director/Head National Coach for the British Men’s National Team for many years, and an Olympic gymnast himself, Van Hoof was the architect for that program’s phenomenal rise from being ranked 23rd at the 2003 World Championships to winning a team bronze at the London 2012 Olympic Games less than a decade later.
When he joined the Canadian team in July 2018, he knew the athletes were capable of delivering high level gymnastics. What they lacked was consistency in their performances and a dedication to performing at the highest levels.
“That first year, I honestly thought in the first two years that they would be capable of qualifying for the top-12 in the two world championships that we had leading into Tokyo,” said Van Hoof. “They had very good lines on the apparatus and, if anything, they were just lacking perhaps a little bit of difficulty. But it became clear that they also lacked consistency in performance and that was their biggest downfall because their gymnastics was really of quite a high level and very clear.”
Van Hoof remembers asking the team: “How many of you have ever been to a major competition and hit six for six routines?” The answer that came back was pretty much zero.
“They were always making a major error somewhere in every competition they’ve ever done. And so, I said: ‘You’re an all-around athlete. The job is to go there, do six events, hit six routines. They may not be the highest and the best that you could do, but you hit six routines – that’s what competing is about,’ and that was an infrequent event,” remembers Van Hoof.
Van Hoof implemented a couple key phrases to the team: “every go counts” and “competition reflects training”.
“’Every go counts’ means that you don’t just get on an apparatus and have a swing just for the sake of it. There has to be some purpose to every go; something that they have to focus on within their mental approach. And with ‘competition reflects training’ – it means if you’re not doing it in training, you can’t suddenly expect to do it in competition with the added pressure, or different environment and expectations.”
When the team of Cournoyer, Clay, Dolci, Émard, and Jayson Rampersad celebrated their Olympic-qualifying result in Antwerp, they did it after hitting all four routines on an apparatus that hasn’t always been their friend – the pommel horse — and putting up big numbers and clean routines consistently across the board. Clearly the renewed focus on quality and consistency has had an impact on the team. And that’s exactly the mindset they’re bringing with them to the competition floor at Paris 2024.
As for Cournoyer, having a team around him has already made Paris 2024 a very different experience from his one at Tokyo 2020.
“It’s so much more enjoyable to experience the event surrounded by others who are under the same pressure; it distributes the stress a bit. I know that no matter what happens in my routine, others will be able to encourage me and perform their own routines and work afterward,” Cournoyer added. “When it’s over, we’ll be able to celebrate as a team instead of going back alone to my room thinking: ‘Oh well, I’ve finished my Olympic Games.’
Artistic gymnastics will take place from July 27 to August 5 at Bercy Arena.
(*History lesson: The team final as a standalone event made its debut at the 2000 Olympic Games. Prior to that, team medals were awarded based on final rankings from the qualification rounds. Canada finished a high of seventh in this format at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles – a Games that was boycotted by typically strong gymnastics nations from the Eastern Bloc.)
