Biathlon Canada High Performance Director Chris Lindsay has left the organization and accepted a new job with Own the Podium in Ottawa.
Lindsay first joined Biathlon Canada in 2007 as a technical program director, and moved into the high performance role in 2010. He had planned to stay with the organization until the 2018 Olympic Games, but instead is taking a new job.
“I had in my head I would be in this role until Korea in 2018, then do a re-evaluation. But when OTP knocks on the door and says they like what you’re doing, that’s hard to turn down,” Lindsay said.
Since he joined Biathlon Canada, Lindsay said he worked to build relationships with clubs and provincial bodies, while helping the small sport flourish even while budgets were cut. He led much of the organization’s data collection and analysis work and helped many athletes reach their goals within the sport. When he joined the organization, the sport was happy to have athletes finish in the top 50 on the world cup. Now, he said, Canadian athletes are chasing Olympic medals and winning world championship medals.
“We were able to put biathlon in a new plateau, set a new bar and move up from there. I certainly want to continue my involvement with the sport at a local level, and see how the next generation are able to do moving towards 2018 and beyond,” Lindsay said.
Without any formal coaching experience, he said he succeeded by giving everyone in the organization the tools to do their job. By doing so, he said a generation of athletes were able to mature and reach their full potential.
“It was definitely the right strategy to let the coaches coach. High performance directors have a wide variety of roles. I did not come from a high performance or coaching background, so when head coach Matthias Ahrens said what to do, I was in no position to say otherwise,” Lindsay said.
Lindsay had the job of seeing talent develop steadily over the quadrennial, and stressed the amount of time and effort it takes to turn a 15 year old athlete into an Olympic hopeful.
“I really think we were able to fulfill the maturation of a generation of athletes identified in 2000. They were tagged for the Vancouver Games, and I think Biathlon Canada has done a reasonable job getting them ready, but it takes longer to mature athletes,” Lindsay said.
“We were able to really sharpen them up and see their tremendous success at 27, 28 and 29. Besides the national team, I was able to work with the development teams and develop them to do exactly what was needed to put the program in place and ensure there was a partnership between national and provincial offices.”
Although he would have loved to stick around and see one of his athletes on the Olympic podium in 2018, he said there was much to celebrate at the 2014 Games, which truly demonstrated how far the sport has come in Canada.
“The first international race I went to was a world cup in Austria. We were happy when we had athletes in the top half of the field. After the Olympics in Sochi, it was very different. We were disappointed when we weren’t medalling because we felt we were right on the edge. No one was expecting medals, but after that first day of racing, we realized it was just in our grasp. We were disappointed at the end of the Olympics not to do it.
“We missed the fact this was our best Olympics since 1994, and the best Olympics the current team had been involved with. It was the best racing we had ever had from our athletes,” Lindsay said.
He’ll end his role this week and begin his new job in Ottawa in July, where he’ll be a high performance consultant for summer sports. He said a return to Nordic sports might be in the cards one day, but he will relish the new challenge.
“I’m in a position where I will have a number of sports similar to biathlon going into Rio and out of Rio. Knowing I’ve had this challenge before and met it makes me charged up. I’ve seen one sport through, and I’m excited I can help others come through,” Lindsay said.
