No audience
At the end of September, I was fortunate to attend the 2026 UCI Road World Championships in Montréal. I only saw the elite men’s road race live, but I followed almost every event and category throughout the week via live stream and my personal online favourite, ProCyclingStats. Although I follow cycling all year, watching a professional race in person is a unique experience: thousands of people line the roadside, waiting hours for a momentary glimpse of their favourite riders (Montréal did have a 12-lap circuit). When the world’s best are competing for the rainbow jersey and the title of World Champion, you get to see excellence first hand.
Excellence comes in many forms: athletic, academic, professional, personal. At the end of the day, it comes down to one thing. Merriam-Webster defines excellent as “eminently good.” It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, and one I think about often, both personally and professionally.
Until February 2012, excellence was a word I had heard and parroted but never fully understood. That changed after I spent a few days with the Canadian men’s rowing team at their training camp in Sacramento, California: Gabriel Bergen, Douglas Csima, Robert Gibson, Conlin McCabe, Malcolm Howard, Andrew Byrnes, Jeremiah Brown, Will Crothers, Kevin Light, and Kai Langerfeld, with coxswain Brian Price and head coach Mike Spracklen.
A few days into the camp, near the end of a long session, the squad had split into two coxless fours and a pair. Brian, Mike, and I were in the coach’s launch. With about 2,500 m left in a session of roughly 28 km, the stroke rate started to creep up. Brian was calling the rates, and I remember thinking, “These guys must be gassed. They have to back off soon.”
They never did. Two fours, made up of some of the best sweep rowers in the world, were almost racing to the end of the course, their blades finishing a few inches apart, pushing each other toward a common goal: being the best eight in the world at the London 2012 Olympics. They finished the piece at full speed.
I recall turning to Brian and asking something like, “Is this normal?” His answer was something like, “Yeah, pretty much.” Mike, in his British accent, said simply, “It was a good session.”
That was the first time it hit me what it takes to be an Olympic medal contender, and the first tangible example I had seen of what the pursuit of excellence actually looks like. I also remember thinking, “Well, now I understand what it takes. I don’t think that would be for me.”
In an age of Reels, TikToks, grind culture, gurus, and sound bites, excellence has, for many, become more performance than substance. What I watched that day had no audience. It was a February training session that no one outside that launch would ever see. Rowing is not a sport with big money attached to it; quite the opposite. Most were training full time on a federal stipend of about $1,500 a month. These 12 people had committed to a shared goal of being the best in the world at something, and it wasn’t until I saw that effort and commitment up close that I understood what the word excellence meant.
Committing to be the best in the world at something, whether athletic, academic, professional, or personal, is a lofty goal, and in many areas “best” can be hard to measure. What anyone can do is commit to excellence: doing your best each day, even when there is no audience. It may never make you a world champion, but it becomes a personal standard for how you carry yourself through life. I may have concluded quickly that chasing an Olympic medal wasn’t for me (in any event, that ship had likely already sailed), but the standard I saw that day stayed with me. Professional and personal excellence is something I strive for each day, and it has become a core part of who I am.
The highlight of the trip to Montréal was running into Ashlin Barry a few days after he won the men’s under-23 road race, along with his father, Michael Barry, a former professional cyclist. Ashlin has ridden some of the local Ontario races over the years and is an excellent (pun intended) example of someone truly pursuing, and achieving, excellence. It will be exciting to see what the future holds for him.
One thing is for sure: whether it’s a February training session in Sacramento or a solo attack through the streets of Montréal, excellence looks ordinary to the people doing it, and they do it whether anyone is watching or not.
