Performance gaps and trust gaps: Cycling Canada’s CEO speaks on the women’s team pursuit squad’s exclusion from track world champs

On May 6, Canadian Cycling Magazine web editor Matt Hansen broke the news that Cycling Canada would not be sending a women’s team pursuit squad to this year’s world championships in Shanghai, China. With that information was an open letter by the Canadian women’s track endurance team to Cycling Canada. A letter to the athletes from the federation followed. It was also shared with Canadian Cycling Magazine. On social media, current and past endurance track athletes voiced their frustration with Cycling Canada’s decision.

Early this week, Cycling Canada offered to take questions on its decision. What follows is my conversation with the organization’s CEO, Mathieu Boucher. The topics we covered were the communication of the decision, the athletes’ trust in the organization and Cycling Canada’s plan for the women’s team pursuit program. It has been edited for clarity.

Matthew Pioro: I want to get some background first, just for clarity. In your letter to athletes that followed their letter, you say that “after conducting an in-depth performance analysis and forecasting, Cycling Canada remains of the view that it was the right strategic decision for the long-term viability of the women’s team pursuit program and Cycling Canada’s performance objectives.” The “decision” is not sending athletes to worlds this year. When was this in-depth performance analysis performed?

Mathieu Boucher: The one that led to the final decision was after the last two World Cups. But this is an ongoing process. So there was an analysis done, following the world championship last year. That was also part of how we built our plan for the following year, and also how we presented our plan for our funding application to Own the Podium. Obviously, following the first races of the season, there was another assessment that was conducted for, again, for both disciplines.

What do you mean by both disciplines?

Well, I mean, the men and the women, but there’s also the same kind of gap analysis happening with track sprint. When we come back from projects like this, we have data scientists that work with us. We look at the competition; we look at our results; we look at how our athletes are performing and try to mitigate and identify gaps. That’s the same process that we went through with the track endurance program.

OK. So it’s a process, not a one-time analysis that made you come to this decision. Is that fair?

Absolutely. I think there is the…