Scott Radley: Stoney Creek’s Talia Hoffman is one step closer to the Olympics
Less than 24 hours earlier, she'd wrapped up her fifth university rugby match in less than a week at the national championships, driven from Kingston to Toronto and then waited for the pain of all those on-field collisions to kick in.
It did.
So, as she began to warm up for a physical test that could change her life, she looked like anything but an elite 22-year-old athlete. She was exhausted. There were bruises on a good percentage of her body. And when she tried to squat, her swollen knee was creaky from a hard collision the day before.
Everything was sore," Talia Hoffman says. But nothing was broken."
If you're a rugby player, that's the bar. If a bone isn't sticking out, you're good to go. They're the athletic equivalent of Monty Python's black knight. So, she got after it. The broad jump. The triple broad jump. Speed work on the stationary bike. Endurance tests there. And pushups.
There was, after all, plenty at stake.
The RBC Training Ground is a six-year-old program that evaluates exceptional athletes from 14 to 25-years-old to see if they might have skills and physical gifts that are transferable to an Olympic event they may never have considered. Possibly leading them to compete for Canada some day. A powerful football player might be perfectly suited for bobsled. A soccer player might be cut out for cycling. Whatever.
And what might a rugby player become?
I was open to anything," says the Saltfleet District High School grad and now fifth-year environmental sciences student at the University of Guelph.
About a year ago Hoffman had been training in Halifax - pretty much everything was shut down in Ontario because of COVID-19 but she could continue in Nova Scotia - when she was taken by a coach to what she was told was a fitness test. It turns out it was the first round of the RBC Training Ground. She didn't realize it at the moment but she was one of more than 4,000 athletes across the country who were trying out.
Apparently she did well because she was invited to be one of the 100 finalists to come to the next round in Toronto.
But her Guelph Gryphons had made it to the USports championships in the week leading up to that. And if you know anything at all about rugby - especially at a championship level - you know the toll it takes on a body. Mashed potatoes take less of a beating. Getting out of bed the day after a match is tough. Strenuously working out the day after five matches? Ridiculous.
Because of that, she wasn't sure how she'd done. By her own assessment, the endurance challenge was particularly painful and not all that good. That could be a deal breaker at this level. With nobody else around to compare herself to (COVID rules had everyone doing their thing alone in a room with the staff) she wasn't holding out great hope.
But then, a few weeks ago, the email arrived. She'd made it. She'll be one of the 30 people in the program, receiving funding to help her possibly become an Olympian.
Which is really cool. Did they tell her which sport she'd be pegged to learn? Rowing? Boxing? Ski jumping?
Rugby."
Rugby? The game she's most passionate about is the game that wanted her? Perfect.
Apparently, that's not all that uncommon. The program's national technical lead, Evan McInnis, says sometimes the tryout simply exposes an athlete to the sport's bigwigs.
Hoffman says she had reason to believe she'd been scouted before this but this clearly pushed her over the top. A few days ago she moved out to British Columbia to train at the national developmental academy which is home to the national senior team.
This now gives her a chance now to pursue a dream. In a sport she loves. As opposed to, say, being told she was going to be trained as a 90-metre ski jumper. Or a luger. Which she would've tried. But ...
I'm definitely grateful," she says.
Scott Radley is a Hamilton-based columnist at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sradley@thespec.com