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Nicholas Gill

Nicolas Gill is one of Canada's sporting heroes. Canada's most decorated judoka competed at four Olympic Games in a row, winning the 86 kilogram bronze medal in 1992 and the 100 kilogram silver medal in 2000. He has one silver and two bronze world championship medals, two Pan American Games titles, a Commonwealth Games gold medal, and 10 national titles to his credit. His accomplishments were recognized when he was chosen to be Canada's flag bearer at the 2004 Olympic Games, singled out both for his athletic accomplishments and for his character on and off the mat.

Now officially retired and well launched into his coaching career, Nicolas describes his new profession as a natural evolution. “I enjoy practising judo and wanted to stay involved and the best fit was coaching.” In fact, his two passions overlapped and for several years he was both athlete and coach. The coaching began in 1998 when he spent eight months recuperating from an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. His coach at Montreal's Club de judo Shidokan, Sensei Hiroshi Namakura, suggested that he might like to help out, and Nicolas agreed. It wasn't long before he realized that coaching was the career for him and so he started working on Level 4 of the National Coaching Certification Program (NCCP) with the legendary Nakamura as his master coach.

In the fall of 2005, Judo Canada signed Nicolas to a contract as head coach of its world championship team. A few months later he landed another contract, this time to serve as high performance coach up to and including the 2008 Olympic Games. To date, he says, the experience has been “very pleasant.” Nor has the role switch required a lot of adjustment. “My lifestyle is similar to when I was competing. It's basically the same schedule with a lot of travelling, except that my role has changed.

“It's good to know that I will definitely be preparing the team all the way to Beijing. It's good to be involved for most of the quadrennial cycle. There shouldn't be many changes from the world championship team to the Olympic team so having all this time to prepare the athletes is a great opportunity and good experience for me.”

As consumed as Nicolas is with coaching, he does have other interests, including ownership, since July 2002, of a company whose main product is judo uniforms. Attracted by the competitive side of business and intrigued by the challenge of starting a company from scratch, Nicolas says that the decision also arose from his needing to make a living. “These days it is easier to be an elite athlete in Canada, but athletes of my generation had a rougher time financially. We had to be creative. Lots of us wanted to be full-time athletes, but our sports didn't provide enough support financially so we had to find other ways.”

One way was to land sponsorships, and the requisite self-promotion can be a challenge. But, says Nicolas, “it's a good experience to try to sell yourself and what you learn from doing that can be transferred to other endeavours.”

Nicolas envisages a lengthy coaching career, although not necessarily in his current position. “It requires so much travelling and so much time abroad that I'm not sure I'll want to do that for the next 30 years. I would like to do another cycle after Beijing, if everything goes right this time around. Then I would be interested in concentrating on the club level and on developing the sport.”