In just five months, Nunavik ski coach makes big impact in Salluit

Guay-Vachon in Nuuk,, Greenland, coaching a member of Team Nunavik’s ski team at the recent Arctic Winter Games. (PHOTO BY STEVE DUCHARME)

Felix Guay-Vachon with two other coaches hired by the Kativik Regional Government to help Team Nunavik skiers prepare for the Arctic Winter Games. (PHOTO BY STEVE DUCHARME)

Salluit ski instructor Felix Guay-Vachon stands beside the referee hut near Nuuk, Greenland’s ski and snowshoe track last month at the 2016 Arctic Winter Games.

There’s a rumour that one of the Nunavik snowshoe athletes might have won a medal and Guay-Vachon, also a snowshoe coach, is waiting for the results to be announced.

As he waits, he spends time joking with other Nunavik staff and athletes.

It’s a clear and beautiful day in Greenland’s capital, one of the few to materialize over the week-long competition, and the group is happy to take in the sun.

Most of the staff are exhausted — the cost of chaperoning a small army of teenagers away from home.

For many, it’s their first time away from Nunavik.

Sleep deprivation aside, it’s clear to anyone that there’s no place Guay-Vachon would rather be.

But his time in Nuuk was bittersweet.

That’s because the games marked the end of his five-month contract with the Kativik Regional Government, which moved Guay-Vachon to Salluit full-time from his home in Rimouski, Que., to train ski and snowshoe athletes ahead of the competition.

“I love the place,” Guay-Vachon told Nunatsiaq News about Salluit. “When I left, I felt something.”

Actually, Guay-Vachon wants to go back. And the community of Salluit wants the same.

Guay-Vachon’s impact on the community of 1,300 during his five-month stay has been nothing short of remarkable.

“We need to find him a Salluit girl!” quips a mission staff member at the referee hut, to a round of chuckles.
Guay-Vachon smiles.

In October last year, Guay-Vachon, along with two other coaches, was hired by the KRG to train skiers in Nunavik communities.

The goal was to tap into a surprising trend — for some, at least — that’s developed over the last few years in northern Quebec.

Skiing in Nunavik is getting popular.

Nunavik has always been credited on the international stage with producing high quality athletes in long-distance sports such as marathons and snowshoeing.

But the region has struggled to field a competitive ski team: partly because of lack of interest, partly from a lack of coaching or funding.

At the 2014 Fairbanks, Alaska, Arctic games, Nunavik skiers weren’t just finishing dead last; many were crossing the finish line twenty minutes after the last skiers.

“It was enough of a bad experience that some of them didn’t want to come back,” said Conor Goddard of the KRG’s recreation department.

But since the Alaska games, a grassroots movement for skiing has taken hold in northern Quebec.

“Cross-country skiing starting taking off with different organizers, different groups in Nunavik, in that gap between the last games and now,” Goddard said.

“The culture of skiing grew on its own.”

One such event is Project Caribou, an adventure-oriented program that facilitates multi-day ski excursions between Nunavik communities.

And as interest grew, some skiers said they wanted to try competitive racing.

The KRG responded by investing in full time coaches and equipment for those athletes ahead of the games in Nuuk.

In Salluit, Guay-Vachon’s arrival was the beginning of its ski program.

“Salluit had nothing — no skis, no infrastructure, nothing. It was new, so we started from scratch and I’m very happy where the athletes are right now,” he said.

What Salluit already has is a strong fitness culture, spearheaded by running clubs organized at the local school by one of its teachers, Maggie MacDonald.

It was the perfect fit.

“The thing I brought was more structure and training and I helped them to push a bit harder and to make them dream about the AWGs,” Guay-Vachon said.

Guay-Vachon visited the local school every week to post his ski schedule.

More people started signing up for the program and many of the skiers started training five days a week.

Guay-Vachon’s passion for skiing, and his team-first mentality, caught the attention of the parents and the community as a whole.

“I made a lot of goodwill relationships with the parents, with the community… there was good teamwork,” he said.

News of Guay-Vachon’s impact in Salluit made its way to the KRG office in Kuujjuaq.

“In Salluit especially, it was really neat to see how engaged the coach was with the athletes, and also with the community. In return, the community really rallied behind them,” Goddard said.

As hard as it is to believe, many Nunavik athletes are smokers.

It’s an unfortunate reality of life in the North — with one of the highest proportions of smokers per capita in Canada.

But as athletes bought into Guay-Vachon’s program, many started curbing the habit.

“He’s got athletes that were smoking a pack of cigarettes a day down to one a day,” Goddard said.

Guay-Vachon recalls his favorite memory of Salluit, when he took the team out on the land to a cabin offered up by one of the athlete’s parents.

“The parents followed us on snowmobiles. We ran 18 kilometres to get there, we ate lunch and came back after. It was a perfect dream,” he said.

Heading into the Arctic Winter Games, Goddard said the Salluit athletes rallied behind their instructor like never before.

“It’s a joy to watch him work, he channels the kid’s energy, very positive,” he said.

And while Nunavik’s new ski team failed to reach the podium at the games this year, they improved nearly all of their race-times.

Salluit’s mayor, and the rest of the community, held a celebration when the athletes returned home from Nuuk.

As for the future of KRG’s ski program, much of that will be decided in the coming months.

Goddard said Team Nunavik-Québec wasn’t expecting to medal in an event as competitive as skiing right away, but the overall improvement brought by Guay-Vachon and the other coaches is hard to ignore.

“There’s so much improvement in such a short period of time, I can’t imagine how good we’d be [in the future],” he said.

“We’re still one of the underdogs, and we still will be for quite some time, but it’s a start in the right direction.”

As of April, the KRG recreation department will begin drafting their future strategic plan for the ski program.

“There definitely will be some big recommendations for change,” Goddard said.

One of those changes may be to bring Salluit’s beloved coach back to the community.

“Definitely, he would love to come back, he loved the experience and we’d love to have him back if we can as well. Its just a matter of seeing where things go in the future,” said Goddard.

“All I can do is make suggestions and hope for good answers.”