The athlete from Cumberland has qualified to join a list of 12 Canadians who previously competed in both the Summer and Winter Games.
Twenty-three years ago, at the age of three, Vincent De Haitre was asked if he wanted to ride a bike.
The young De Haitre glanced at the training wheels holding the bicycle upright and refused. He turned to his mom, Lucille, and said, “I’m not a baby, I don’t need training wheels.”
That inner resolve, with a hint of stubborness, has never gone away. In his journey, a terrific ride that has already put him in front of the world at two Winter Olympics, there has never been an easy way out; there’s no quit in his DNA. He has never veered from the burning desire to be better and faster. Faster than everyone. Willing to tackle the daily grind of what it takes to be the best. Unafraid of dreaming really big dreams, then figuring out how to make them come true.
De Haitre will soon join a small and select group of Canadian athletes to compete in both Winter (long-track speed skating) and Summer Olympics (cycling) when he races in Team Pursuit cycling this summer in Tokyo. He was at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi and in 2018 in PyeongChang. Only 12 Canadians — Clara Hughes, Georgia Simmerling, Hayley Wickenheiser, Bob Boucher, Sue Holloway, Glenroy Gilbert, Phylicia George, Pierre Harvey, Bryan Barnett, Seyi Smith, Lloyd Guss and Alain Masson — have pulled off the rare Olympic winter/summer crossover.
“This has been a plan, something I had on my mind since my earliest days of starting cycling,” said De Haitre, who lives in Calgary, but is from Cumberland, where his mom and dad — Lucille and Denis — still live. “A long time ago, someone said, ‘Hey, have you thought about doing both (skating and cycling)?’ I hadn’t even gone to an Olympics at that point. In my head, I was like, ‘You know what … I think I can.’ That was a 16-year-old me thinking maybe I could do it. I want to prove that I was right to believe in myself.”
Many of the world’s elite athletes — the best of the best — had geared themselves toward 2020 Olympic competition last summer. With the crippling COVID-19 pandemic turning the world upside down, the Games were postponed. It was devastating for those who had put in so much sweat equity.
“You build your season toward going to the Olympics, you’re four months out, and all of a sudden they tell you you’re a year and four months out,” De Haitre said. “It’s so unfair to the athletes, but it’s just another bump in the road. It’s like you have 10 pushups to do and you’re on the eighth one with only two left and someone tells you have 20 more to go. When you know you have two left, it’s not so hard anymore. But, when you’re on the eighth one and you’re told you have 20 more to go, it’s a little bit of a different story. But, no matter what the circumstance is, I’ll always try and and find a way to turn it to my advantage.”
“That’s life,” said Denis, who worked in law enforcement for 35 years (RCMP, Canadian Security Intelligence Service and a government intelligence program). “You have a job to do, whatever happens, you try and work with it. Just don’t give up. Brush yourself off, get up and keep going. If somebody gives you a lemon, make lemonade.”
Despite the setback, De Haitre quickly made plans to prepare for 2021.
“I felt for him, but, the minute it was official, he gave us a call and said, ‘Mom, I’m OK. I’ve already talked to my speed skating coach, I’ve talked to Cycling Canada. We’ll figure out my new training schedule so I can be the best at both when needed,” Lucille said. “So he didn’t call us to tell us how bad it was, he called us to say he had a plan, that everything was already in motion. He’s taken ownership of his path, he’s not letting other people control it.”
Now, fingers are crossed as the world, with vaccines in hand, looks to stage an Olympic spectacle. If he can also qualify for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, De Haitre would be competing at the highest level in amateur sports with only a 180-day pause between racing in two different sports. Think about the training involved in each and the dedication it would take to pull that off. Incredible. Simply incredible.
Being both a Summer and Winter Olympian isn’t lost on De Haitre. Boucher competed for Canada in the 1968 Winter Olympics as a speed skater and the Summer Olympics that same year as a track cyclist, and there were just 238 days between the closing ceremonies in Grenoble and opening ceremonies in Mexico City. De Haitre would have to do it with a cushion of 58 less days.
“I went from doing something that’s challenging and not a lot of people have done to trying to do something that nobody has done,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it’s scary, but it definitely adds a bit of stress. It adds a sense of urgency. There’s no time for messing around.”
When he was 16, De Haitre asked to move to Calgary so he could train full-time. His parents said no. They wanted him to finish high school at Béatrice-Desloges in Orléans.
“School wasn’t optional for him. I was the hard-core mom,” Lucille said. “I wasn’t his favourite mom that year, but it paid off.”
As Vincent pursued his love for athletics, his parents were never far away. Often, one parent would take Vincent’s older brother, Rene (now an officer in the navy), to the ski hill while the other would drive Vincent somewhere else. Their refreshing philosophy: Let the kids do what they do, don’t interfere.
“Too often you see parents belittling their kids because they didn’t win,” Denis said. “Why do that? Encourage them. We never put pressure on the kids. We never spoke to the coaches for Vincent. If he was mad, we told him he had to communicate for himself.”
Along the way, there have been hiccups, barriers to climb. And doubters.
“There are times when coaches won’t believe in you,” Denis said. “(Sometimes Vincent) got, ‘Oh, you’re untrainable,’ or ‘You’re too tall, you won’t make it.’ When he heard that, it fueled him to do better. If somebody tried to put him down, he worked hard to get back up again. He’s always been determined.”
De Haitre’s pursuit of excellence has meant sacrifices. He has only been home for one Christmas in the past eight years. He has missed holidays, birthdays and plenty of special occasions. It’s just the reality of trying to be not only good, but also great at what he does.
“It’s a different kind of normal,” De Haitre said. “I’ve had a very different life than a normal person my age would have. I’ve been around the world … the amount of times I have to count on two hands. I’ve made friends, some of them don’t even speak the same language as me. It’s all been very different. I didn’t get to live that normal progression: from school to university to a job.
“I’ve probably been home an average of two weeks a year with my parents, I’ve probably seen my brother for a total of two months over the past 10 years. You miss a lot of big events, but you also get to do a lot of things that not a lot people can do. There are sacrifices, but there also are a lot of opportunities. You have to keep your head on right, prioritize and know the people in your life are there because they love you. My parents are always there for me, even though they’re not physically present.”
“Being away from (Vincent and Rene) is the most challenging thing, especially at Christmas, when we know everybody has their family around them,” Lucille said. “It is hard to let them go. I’m so proud of both of them. But I feel we’ve done our job as parents if they can fly on their own. They know we’re only a phone call or plane ride away. When Vincent was doing his second race at the Olympics (in 2018), the next day Rene was graduating from the navy. Through all the time zone changes, my husband flew home to be at the graduation.”
Once the Summer Olympics are finished, De Haitre will have to meet Olympic qualification standards in speed skating. The pandemic has thrown his routine for a loop; the temporary closure in September of the Olympic Oval in Calgary (due to a mechanical issue) meant the cancellation of trials where he could have met the time standard required for international competitions. The Oval may not be operational again until this summer. There’s a World Cup speed skating bubble set up in the Netherlands, but De Haitre hasn’t qualified to be there.
“The goal we had with me coming back to skating, I was going to try and skate the fall World Cups, all the way to the world championships, but those all got postponed,” he said. “Because I haven’t skated in the past two years, I don’t have a time standard to skate in international competition. I can’t discretionarily be put on the team because my results are from too long ago. Essentially, there’s no way for me to race speed skating (right now).”
Technically speaking, he is now training for speed skating, but he’s also doing a bike block. “Everything kind of intertwines in some way.”
There will be trials for the Olympic speed skating team in the fall, then a second trial to determine the third and fourth spots on Canada’s team later in the year. On the cycling side, all the World Cups got cancelled and there will no competitions before the Olympics. De Haitre’s last race was at the world championships last February. The Team Pursuit squad had a mock Olympic build for four months to the end of November, with the real Olympic build beginning March 1.
“We set new team personal bests (in November),” De Haitre said. “As far as a team goes, Canada hasn’t qualified in Team Pursuit in a very, very long time. So the fact we even got to the Olympics is a milestone of its own. Our original goal was to try and get to the finals: a top-four finish. We’ve been going faster. I still believe there’s a chance we can get to the finals. But, at the last world championships, it took us by surprise how much everybody had improved so quickly. We changed our approach and reprioritized what we needed to work on. We saw the improvement we needed to see, we’re building confidence.
“I’m really excited to be able to show what I’ve been working on. As an athlete, you strive for the marginal gains day in and day out. You don’t really see improvement sometimes, but you know it’s there. You just have to be patient and it usually comes together on race day. Not having those race days just kind of piles on. Knowing there’s a race day coming up keeps you excited and motivated. I’m just really excited to get this show on the road.”
De Haitre began skating with the Gloucester Concordes when he was seven or eight. He stopped skating at 10 and joined Vorlage Ski Club with his older brother, a very good skier. A year later, he returned to skating. He won a silver medal in the 1,000 metres at the ISU World Single Distances Championships in 2017, following a day later with a fourth-place finish in the 1,500.
In Sochi, at age 19, he posted a top-20 finish in the 1,000 metres and was named Speed Skating Canada’s Long Track Rising Star of the Year. Four years later, in PyeongChang, a bruised heel in training right before the Olympics put him on crutches when he wasn’t on skates. He finished 19th in the 1,000 metres and 21st in the 1,500.
He joined the Ottawa Bicycle Club in 2010. He is the national record holder in both one-kilometre (KILO) time trial in cycling (not an Olympic distance) and the 1,000 metres in speed skating, breaking the previous time standard set by Jeremy Wotherspoon. He had a breakthrough cycling season in 2019-20. He was part of the gold-medal-winning Team Pursuit squad at the 2019 Pan American Championships, won another national title in the one-kilometre time trial and finished fourth in the same event in his UCI World Championship debut.
There’s been strong community support. At a 2017 golf tournament fundraiser at Camelot, $23,000 was raised along with a five-year financial and support commitment from the Marcil Lavallée accounting firm, the Sicotte Guilbault law firm and a businessman who chose to remain anonymous.
An African proverb says: “It takes a village to raise a child.” Cumberland has come through. Their child is now a man on a mission, working his tail off to make his Olympic dreams come true.
