Disruptors

Tech Wins Gold: How Canada Can Rebuild Its Olympic Pipeline

SPEAKERS

Jennifer Heil, David Shoemaker, John Stackhouse

John Stackhouse 00:00:05

Hi, it’s John here.

When I say Milano Cortina, what jumps to mind? The Olympics, of course, but what are the images? Is it Courtney Sarault on the short track ice winning four medals or is it Mikael Kingsbury winning a silver in traditional moguls and then that unbelievable gold run in the brand new dual moguls event? The perfect ending to the greatest freestyle skiing career ever. Or is it those two amazing hockey gold medal games and unfortunately those two overtime losses to the USA? Or is it something else?

Whatever stays with you and still inspires you from the Olympics, it probably revolves around an athlete and those unforgettable Olympic moments of human achievement. Our athletes did incredibly well, even though the medal count was not what they wanted it to be. But what we probably all overlooked in this Olympic experience is the role of technology and the financial support that is essential to Olympic achievement at the level that we all know Canada is capable of. High performance technology is accelerating as fast in Olympic sports as it is anywhere else. It’s through the skis and skates that propel our athletes and yes, those remarkable BMW made bobsleds that help the Germans win gold, silver, and bronze.

Whatever the sport, technology is playing an increasingly valuable role. And as Canada thinks about the Olympics of the future, we need to think more ambitiously about the investments we can make in technology and in supporting our athletes.

This episode of Disruptors is so timely, not only because the Milano Cortina games are just a couple of weeks behind us, but because the always awesome Paralympics are well underway now and technology is just as important there as anywhere else.

Today we have two very special guests, Jennifer Heil, the Olympic champion and moguls and one of Canada’s most decorated freestyle skiers with gold in Turin and silver in Vancouver. She’s also Team Canada’s Chef de Mission for Milano Cortina 2026, and also the founder and CEO of her own tech company, Revvel Health, which we’ll hear a lot more about in this episode. And we’re joined by David Shoemaker, the CEO and Secretary General of the Canadian Olympic Committee. Before coming home to lead Canada’s Olympic movement, David spent seven years as CEO of NBA China and previously served as President of the WTA Tennis Tour. So he’s seen how the world’s biggest sports organizations build performance systems and scale them.

The world’s top Olympic programs are now running on tools that track every training rep, every night’s sleep, every hour of recovery, and feed that data into a unified athlete platform so coaches can intervene before an injury happens, but also use that data to help their athletes perform at their very best. And here’s what’s key to this conversation and frankly key to Canada for the years ahead. Other countries are funding this as infrastructure. Canada is treating it as a cost and we’re not treating it very seriously. That’s the context for today’s conversation. If we want to own the podium, we need to invest a lot more in our athletes, their support teams, and the technologies that other countries are racing ahead with. This is a moment of nation building. And as we’re seeing in Milano Cortina, there are a few better nation builders than our Olympians.

So let’s hear from a couple of our champions on what we can all do to continue to build Canada as an Olympic power. David and Jen, welcome to Disruptors.

Jennifer Heil 00:03:59

Thanks for having us.

David Shoemaker 00:04:00

Thank you for having us.

John Stackhouse 00:04:02

I’m so excited for this conversation, as I’m sure our listeners are too. And I want to start by taking us back to Milano. David, I’ll start with you, what was the standout moment for you?

David Shoemaker 00:04:13

Wow, that is definitely asking me to pick my favorite child. The saying in the Olympic sport is, “The only thing tougher than winning a gold medal is defending one.” And our women’s speed skaters in the team pursuit defended a gold medal from Beijing. So this is Isabelle Weidemann, Valerie Maltais and Ivanie Blondin. And they defended that gold medal and then they got up on the podium, and when “O Canada” was played, Isabelle embraced her teammates. And I usually try to belt down “O Canada” and I choked up after the first couple of lines. It was a really special moment for me and for everyone watching, and I’ll remember that one forever.

John Stackhouse 00:04:56

Love it. Jen?

Jennifer Heil 00:04:58

Yeah, I have two big takeaways. One is personal in that I left there inspired like the nine-year-old kid who first picked up a magazine seeing Olympic athletes. And I’ve been involved in the Olympic movement for so long. I didn’t expect it. I came back to my everyday life and I was like, “I want to be better.” And then in terms of a specific moment, I would have to say it was Megan Oldham. And that comes back to being a female athlete myself in an action sport. And these women at this Olympics across skiing, snowboard, they literally took it to new heights. And the level at which they’re competing now blew me away, left me so excited. And Megan is so tough. So she crashed really badly in her second run in slopestyle. She had so much bruising she could hardly stand on her leg. She went back up and won a bronze medal and then followed it up two days later with a gold. So for me, that’s the standout moment.

John Stackhouse 00:05:59

What wonderful Olympic memories, and that says so much about the Olympics. It is just humanity at its best. What we’re talking about today is how all of us as Canadians can do better in terms of supporting and investing in our athletes. And one of the great needs, as I said in the introduction, is technology. You’ve both been to lots of Olympics, seen lots of sports. Anything jump out at you at these games in terms of how fast technology is advancing?

David Shoemaker 00:06:29

From a viewing standpoint, the use of drones, and I guess I should be careful because it feels like two years ago when I used the word drone in public, we were talking about it in a very different context. But what it’s done if you watch some of the downhill ski racing or watched Megan Oldham in slopestyle or Kingsbury go down a mogul course and give you that bird’s eye view of what it’s like, how steep it is, how big those moguls are, how high they fly in the air and do their flips and their spins. It is really an awesome way of bringing the winter games into 30 million Canadian homes that watch these Olympic Games more than Paris.

Jennifer Heil 00:07:11

Yeah, I was totally blown away. I felt like I was on the Alpine course with the athletes, and it made me excited in the sense of really bringing people into the performance and the intensity of it. I would say what’s really interesting is ML and AI as a whole, it’s actually very good on the technical side. So it can do a very good job obviously of pattern recognition and identifying biomechanics and movements in sport. The opportunity there is immense on the judging side as someone that comes from a judged sport. I think that at a minimum, it should be incorporated into the next Winter Olympics where it’s making sure that there’s no anomalies within the judging score. I think that’s a great way to standardize what we’re seeing more and remove some of the error that just is always going to happen. So I think there’s a huge opportunity. We’re still very early in adopting that from the technical side of sport, but we know nations are working on it.

John Stackhouse 00:08:10

One of my eye-popping moments was with the bobsled and the Germans who, of course, dominate that have a program with BMW. Of course they do. They’re German making BMW quality bobsleds, and that’s not the only reason they won gold, silver, and bronze, but I suspect that’s one of the key differentiators. So just an indication of what other nations are doing.

David Shoemaker 00:08:33

Yeah. The Olympic movement will have to come to grips with whether technological advancement and innovation is something to embrace and let nations that can afford that gain from that, or by contrast, in Monobob where there are all the bobsleighs are made by one company, and while you can paint them up with your nation’s colors, it’s basically an equalizer. What do we want to see be the baseline of competition, technological advantage, or trying to have everybody start from the same starting point? And I don’t think we’ve quite figured that out as an Olympic movement yet.

John Stackhouse 00:09:11

What’s your view? It’s hard to imagine hockey players being required to wear the same skates or use the same sticks or Alpine racers using the same skis, but maybe I’m not thinking widely enough.

David Shoemaker 00:09:21

No, but maybe at least put some limits to it the way, let’s say the sport of golf has said, we need to say that the coefficient of rebound on a driver needs to be limited to a certain amount or a ball has to conform to certain specifications and then have at it.

Jennifer Heil 00:09:37

I’d like to see it broken into two things. I think it’s going to be very hard to stop AI and the use of technology to optimize performance, but from an equipment place, I think we should absolutely standardize it more and it shouldn’t be the differentiator between nations at the degree it is in some sports.

John Stackhouse 00:09:57

So if standardized or not, we’re going to need to invest. And I say want to invest a lot more in a whole range of things, but those technologies as well, they also have wonderful spinoff benefits. David, I wonder if I can ask you to speak to the request that you and the COC have made for $ 144 million coming out of the games. It seems like such a small number when we’re talking about billions and tens of billions for so many other things in society. And every dollar has a value. I’m not trying to make false comparisons, but as you said, this was Games that Canadians, regardless of the results, embraced and loved. And in this moment of national pride, it really is something I imagine most Canadians do want to lean into more, whether they’re athletes or not. What do we need to understand about where this money should go and would go?

David Shoemaker 00:10:47

Yeah, this matters so much to me. I’ve been in this role since January of 2019, and I can think of no issue that I’ve prioritized more than advocating to the federal government on behalf of our national sports organizations and in turn, on behalf of this nation’s great athletes. For clarity, and I feel compelled to mention this every time this comes up, we’re not asking for a penny for the Canadian Olympic Committee. We are almost entirely privately funded. We have 39 marketing partners who support us generously. We’ve been able to increase our investment in Canadian sport and Canadian athletes by 300% in the last 20 years, and we’re going to continue to do more. We announced a 10-year strategy where we’re going to put $500 million into Canadian sport and to Canadian athletes over the next 10 years. But what has trailed us is the federal government’s investment in the 62 national sports organizations. They have not had an increase in their core funding since 2005. These are the organizations that the federal government has entrusted with, and you can imagine what things cost back in 2005 and what they now cost in 2025.

What we’ve seen happen over the course of the last five, 10 years is as they’ve been experiencing this financial distress, the burden of these financial problems has been shifting increasingly to athletes. And so athletes are increasingly being asked to pay what are called team fees, 10, 20, $30,000. So I’ve equated it to, “Congratulations, you’ve made the national team in your sport. Here’s the invoice to be a representative of Team Canada, and that doesn’t fit my vision for the sport.” So we are trailing our competitive nations. Germany’s putting about a billion dollars a year into sport, and we need to do better. Where will it go? It’ll go into high performance sport because these athletes are a great source of pride for us, and we need to continue to support them to do what they do to unite communities around the country, but we also have to invest in linking the impact of that triumph to what happens in the communities, to getting more young people broadly across the country, lowering the barriers to access to sport and to organized sport. And that’s where the money would go.

John Stackhouse 00:13:06

Jen, tell us a bit about what this means to athletes and maybe share a bit of your own experience as an outstanding athlete, but what you had to go through from a financial perspective.

Jennifer Heil 00:13:36

So I lived through a pretty big inflection point in the sport system. So that was where Canada was hosting the 2010 Olympics and we created Own the Podium. And so everything shifted in that moment, including the culture of sport. So what did we do? We got a strategy on how we were going to build a strong system. We had the resources to support that, including innovation. We brought a lot of innovation, a lot of top minds in staff and sport into Canada at that time. And then we had this culture of winning and there was this pride and this excitement. I mean, how many books have been written on culture building and company culture? All of that came together in a way where we had our best success winning the most gold medals of anyone that year. And we’ve seen the continued effects of that. And we’re at the tail end of this now, and we are at the moment of total brain drain in our system of the best minds in sport.

When I was asked about this issue at the Olympics, I had a top sports scientist in the world who’s been to nine Olympic Games, works for Canada, be like, “Jen, I want to work in Canada. This is where my family is. This is where I want to be.” He’s like, “I don’t know if I’m going to have a job after March.” I spoke to one of the best sports nutritionists globally who lives and works in Western Canada, and he’s already had to move 80% of his time out of the country and into the US because there isn’t the funding and support. I heard from a bunch of athletes on the ground and support staff, and they said, “Other countries want to come to Canada. It is a source of pride to be able to coach and be a sports scientist in Canada.” And so it’s not that people don’t want to be here and we don’t have a lot to offer, it’s just quite frankly, we can’t afford them right now.

John Stackhouse 00:15:02

What a great point. We talk a lot about talent attraction at this point in history and how many super talented people could and should be moving to Canada. And that includes not only athletes, but all the professionals who support them. Hearing you both speak so passionately and eloquently, I think, boy, we got to move on from elbows up to pony up.

David Shoemaker 00:15:23

We have the absolute best athletes in the world who continue to do more with less. And when we see what they do and the pride they instill in us, this is a very, very modest investment when you compare it to the other nation building activities we are so committed to.

John Stackhouse 00:15:41

David, can you give us a sense of what other countries are doing? And I’m not thinking of the United States because it’s kind of in a category of one in how it approaches these things, but smaller European nations, as an example, who certainly win more medals than us. I think in Norway, obviously, but other countries that we like to compare ourselves with.

David Shoemaker 00:16:01

Our Chief of Sport, Eric Miles, often talks about the fact that in Norway or in the Netherlands, if they call a team meeting among all their national athletes, they can all get there in an hour and a half. We don’t have that advantage. But whether you measure it in absolute dollars or whether you measure it on a per capita basis, we are being out invested at the federal level five, six, 10 times more by our peers. And that makes it awfully difficult for our sport organizations and for our athletes to compete at the level that they do. Our athletes did incredibly well. But when we look at the medal table, it’s not where we aspire to be at the winter games. And we know we can do better. We know we have a thinning talent pool. We know 75% of our medalists were over the age of 30, and that’s something that we’ve really got to address.

John Stackhouse 00:16:55

Can I stop you there? I don’t think most of us appreciate this point about a thinning talent pool. And when we think, or you think certainly about 2035 and beyond, what kind of situation are we looking at?

David Shoemaker 00:17:09

Well, we can illustrate it. Maybe the best one would be our long track speed skating team who actually did marvelously in Milano Cortina, but it was basically the very same medal hopefuls that we put on the track in Beijing. I don’t want to speak for any of them in terms of what their longer term plans are for 2030 and the games of the French Alps, but that puts a lot of pressure on them to then come back four years later and continue to perform. What has happened in order for Canadian sports to continue to perform at the highest level is that they’ve been mortgaging the future for the sake of the present. And that means that when they’ve been able to put less money into the development of the next generation of athletes, athletes who are likely five to eight years out, giving them international experience, giving them World Cup experience, giving them Olympic experience where other nations are able to bring them along. And that’s where we’ll see our lack of investment in the next generation catch up with us when we’d sort of say, “Okay, who’s up next? Who’s on deck?” And we look and the bleachers are empty.

Jennifer Heil 00:18:15

We’re creating a pay-to-play system, and I think that goes counter to Canadian values and what we aspire sport to do in this country. And what the other countries who are succeeding are doing well is that they’re investing deeper into the system where that has virtually disappeared in Canada. So for example, Norway isn’t funding every sport. They don’t have 62 NSOs that they’re funding. They’re choosing sports that align to their culture and their values, and they’re going deep into that system. Canada has to make some decisions and look at that on how we can be more efficient in the way we fund our operations. That for sure has to be part of the conversation. But what I was hearing on the ground in terms of this pay-to-play system and the younger athletes is that families are saying, “We’re here for one Olympic cycle, but we can’t afford to be here for two and three.” Which is where those conversions into medals start to happen. We’re saying, “How do we create the system that works in Canada?” And our athletes will always punch above their weight. And so to your question around technology, there’s so many opportunities that are opening up there. Yes, it’s expensive to invest in it, and yes, we need to have a strategy to make sure it’s part of how we move forward, but AI offers some incredible cost savings. And the company I’m building is a performance tech company where we take the knowledge base and we work with the experts, the very best in class to basically democratize access to that knowledge. So there’s ways that if we plan for this and we look strategically into the future, we can actually reduce costs over time and get more of these expertise to more athletes as an example of how we can be efficient and save costs if we embrace this and have a plan.

John Stackhouse 00:20:00

Jen, tell us a bit more about the company and what your vision is.

Jennifer Heil 00:20:04

So the company is called Revvel, and it’s really based off of my experiences in the sports system where under the conditions that we talked about around 2010, I had the best sports science and medical team around me that anyone in the world would have. So physio, sports psychologists, nutritionists, the best of the best. And it was extraordinary and it allowed me to go on and achieve my goals, but I started to think that was normal. And so when I retired from sport, I was like, “Wait a minute, this is weird. Where is everybody?” And so my goal has always been, how can we create these structures and get this knowledge that’s in the sports system that’s best in class on the human body, human performance? How do we get that into the general population? And so I went down to Stanford with this thesis where I did a one-year MBA and was able to go and explore the technology to do this because it’s never been scalable before. And so we’re building the platform where with the experts, we create their AI knowledge base, which is like a living, breathing thing that they have to upkeep. And then through an app, you’re able to access that knowledge and personalize it to your own life context.

John Stackhouse 00:21:13

You also co-founded something called B2ten, which is designed to fill the gap between the national system and what athletes actually need. Tell us a bit more about B2ten and where it might take us.

Jennifer Heil 00:21:25

Yeah. So I mean, when we look at the sport system holistically, we need a lot of different players at the table. David has talked about the COC and the private investment. That’s a critical piece to our sports system. B2ten was really about bringing private dollars, philanthropic dollars into the system. And our donors have been with us for 20 years, have raised tens of millions of dollars, and it all comes down to nation building for them. They understand the importance of sport. They understand how sport brings us together as a country. And so we’ve been able to bring these top resources and really create these athlete-centric training programs, which is so key in terms of the culture, but also getting these expertise into the country and keeping them here. So that’s been a huge focus of it. We also have an arm of getting physical literacy into daycares and making sure that that connection from elite sport down to grassroots is happening. 2ten continues and needs to do its part in the system and making sure that the best in class are accessible to our athletes is a key part of the focus.

John Stackhouse 00:22:30

How do we get future generations more engaged? How do we support them and how do we use technology to re- up the pipeline?

David Shoemaker 00:22:39

You may have heard of RBC Training Ground, which is basically a talent identification program that has worked marvelously in its 10th year. RBC has been able to go around the country and find athletes and help them determine what sport they’re most likely to have success in. And we have some really amazing stories that have come out of that. For example, Kelsey Mitchell, who won a track cycling gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics was only five years prior to that a soccer player and had power in her legs that was off the charts. And Avalon Wasteneys, who was a rower and was identified by RBC Training Ground and was part of that Women’s Eight team that’s been so successful. I think also with AI, we can, and I’ll use Jen’s turn of phrase, democratize talent identification in the country. Imagine being able to go to youth all around and say, “Okay, here’s the new app on the phone, show us how you jump, how you run, how you throw, et cetera, et cetera and we’ll come back to you and tell you what sport you should go and sign up for at your local club.” We know that there’s efforts to do this in part of the African continent to try to get a little bit more Olympic activity out of some of those countries and Senegal in particular in the lead up to the Youth Olympic Games that’ll be happening later this year there. I’m excited about how sort of technology could help us in a country as large as Canada, tap into the talent that’s surely out there.

John Stackhouse 00:24:12

As we move towards close, I wonder if I can get both of your thoughts on what we need to strive for. I’m fascinated what other countries have done, we all know about Britain’s success with cycling, investing heavily in that. Australia’s invested more in sports science. Ireland funds a national athlete data platform for a country that’s pretty much the size of Greater Toronto. So other countries are making really interesting strategic bets. So as we think about that big vision, also what are some of the big bets we should be thinking about?

David Shoemaker 00:24:45

Well, we’ve announced a Team Canada 2035 10-year strategy that has three core pillars: podium, play, planet. And in terms of podium, we aspire to be top five in the world on a combined basis when we aggregate our summer and winter Olympic performance. In terms of play, we aspire to get a million more young people into organized sport. And that’s about linking the incredible performances on the world stage and the inspiration that creates in young people. So when Summer McIntosh ignites a world of young people to want to get into swimming, they’re not just left to wonder, how do I contact my local swim club? The local swim club is there for them and offering access at levels that are much lower than they are today.

And then planet is about our belief that we cannot achieve either of those first two pillars if our sporting environments aren’t preserved. And this is a winter problem, but it’s also a summer problem with incredible heat and air quality issues, but we do have to preserve our sporting environments with melting polar ice caps and snow issues. And technology plays a really important role there. We see more and more countries tenting snow over the summer months so that it exists for a reliable snow season going forward. And I think we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what leadership could be in that space so that the winter games are here with us in the way we see them for many, many years to come.

Jennifer Heil 00:26:13

I want to just say the athletes don’t lack ambition. And that was very clear to me in Milano Cortina, being on the ground with some of the lesser funded sports, the heartbreak there was so real of the athletes. One of the athletes in a sliding sport spoke to her coach and she was like, “I want to be better. I’ve been here for eight years. What do I have to do?” And the coach who was a former athlete said, “Well, when I was that far into my career, I had more time on the track. I had that extra training camp or two training camps every year.” And the response was, “Okay, well, how much do I have to pay?” So this isn’t the system we want to build. It’s not sustainable. I want to see that same ambition matched from the leadership of the government. I think it’s important that as Canadians, we don’t mix up humility with ambition. Our athletes are hugely ambitious. We know that Canadians like waving the flag. We saw it in 2010 when there was just this incredible wave of pride in our country and pride to stand on top of the podium. We know that to be true, but the point is is that we do need a strong functioning system to inspire the youth to get Canadians active. All of this matters and all of this can be connected, but we have a lot of work to do.

John Stackhouse 00:27:36

Well, I think it’s on all of us. We all embrace the Team Canada spirit. What do we all need to do in the next, let’s say, two years to pick up the pace towards those longer term goals?

David Shoemaker 00:27:49

I believe the linchpin here is federal funding. I believe we have a Prime Minister in Mark Carney who believes mightily in the power of sport. We’ve seen him in hockey jerseys on the campaign trail. We have confidence that he hears our athletes, but we need action in that space. We have a Minister of Sport in Adam van Koeverden, an Olympic champion, an icon who also understands the power of sport. And so we just need to get this one over the line and then deploy it in a way that makes sense, consistent with the vision in the way that Jen’s spoken so well about.

John Stackhouse 00:28:28

Maybe one last question to all the young Jennifer Heils out there today, what’s your message to them?

Jennifer Heil 00:28:34

To me, sport equals joy. And I can tell you that being an Olympian, standing on top of the Olympic podium, some of my best moments in sport were school sport, where being a part of the school volleyball team was going to the Canada winter games and meeting incredible people from Newfoundland who sent me letters in the mail for an extra decade. To me, it’s about going out and striving to be your best in a positive environment. And I think that’s what we should aspire to build, whether that’s community, provincial, national team level. That’s what we should aspire to offer our youth. But for me, it was always about challenging myself to be my best, and that kept the fire alive. Of course, I wanted to win medals, that those were the outcomes, but that wasn’t where the joy was.

John Stackhouse 00:29:25

Being our best in a positive environment, what wonderful words. That really, really is joy. Thank you both for your leadership, for your inspiration. Let’s keep at it. It’s “Go Canada” time. Thank you for being on Disruptors.

David Shoemaker 00:29:37

It sure is. Thanks so much, John.

Jennifer Heil 00:29:39

Go Canada.

John Stackhouse 00:29:43

When you think of the payoff of 30 million Canadians cheering their athletes from a distance of future generations, investing themselves in sport and all that comes with that, or the technologies that have so many benefits and applications well beyond the playing field, we need to stop putting so much burden on our athletes and start thinking more strategically on how we as a country can invest in the sports infrastructure.

And a special note for budding athletes, you heard David reference RBC Training Ground. It’s a remarkable program and is resuming its search for the next generation of Canadian Olympians. In just a couple of weeks, anyone aged 14 to 25 is invited to register at rbctrainingground.ca and come out to any of the free local qualifying events that are happening right across the country to test your speed, power, strength, and endurance. If you’re looking for more ideas and insights, visit rbc. com/ thoughtleadership. There you’ll find a whole range of critical insights on how we could all make more informed decisions in a rapidly changing world.

You’ve been listening to Disruptors, an RBC podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please rate, review, and follow us on Apple or Spotify. That helps more people find conversations like this one.

I’m John Stackhouse. Thanks for listening.