Adam van Koeverden.Photo illustration The Globe and Mail. Source photo Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press
In the summer of 2004, kayaker Adam van Koeverden was a 22-year-old preparing for his first crack at the Olympics, a fortnight that would ultimately transform the trajectory of his career and make him a household name in this country.
The native of Oakville, Ont., claimed one sixth of Canada’s medals at the Athens Summer Games, most memorably winning gold in the K-1 500-metre sprint, before being chosen the flag bearer for the closing ceremony and ending the year as the winner of the Lou Marsh Trophy (now called the Northern Star Award) as Canada’s top athlete.
Since then, van Koeverden has dabbled in a multitude of vocations. Following his retirement as an athlete after the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, van Koeverden worked as a broadcaster and in management consulting, before successfully running in the 2019 federal election and being elected as a Member of Parliament for Milton, Ont.
If the world was your oyster and you could do any job or any profession what would you choose?
I kind of felt like the world was my oyster after the Rio Olympics, right? I’m not a student of philosophy by any stretch of the imagination, but I really liked this little diagram I saw in a Japanese text about purpose. And it’s called Ikigai. What Ikigai is, imagine a Venn diagram with four circles that intersect in the middle. And the four circles are, what you’re good at, what you love, how you can make money, and what the world needs, and when you find the thing that checks all four boxes, that’s called your Ikigai. After the Olympics, I thought about it a lot. It was sort of like a two-year process of self discovery, just to think about who I want to become if it’s not a guy who goes kayaking for three or four hours a day. And I realized that the world needs honest leaders who want to step up and ensure that we’re heading in the right direction as a country and as a planet.
Who are your heroes in real life?
I often tell people that mentorship is like a cafeteria, or it can be. You don’t have to sit down and order one thing off the menu. You can walk through and you can say, well, I’d like, you know, a little Caesar salad for lunch and a lot of fish and chips or something like that. Maybe a Jell-o. So when it comes to politics, I really like Barack Obama. But then when it comes to athletics, I know that he likes basketball, but I also know the guy smoked cigarettes, so maybe he’s not somebody that I necessarily look up to when it comes to lifestyle. I really like Steve Nash when it comes to his approach to teamwork, co-operation and sportsmanship. He’s always somebody that I’ve admired. David Suzuki, from the position of somebody who’s always learning but then also finding a way to communicate what he’s learned and what he knows in a very effective manner that’s not condescending, but it is very informing and it encourages you to have an opinion.
Are you a reader at all?
I love reading and I love writing and unfortunately, reading for fun in this job is a fleeting opportunity. I read a lot on vacation. Bring a book or two when we go somewhere after Christmas or around the holidays but when we’re sitting, there’s always stuff to read.
When you do find the time, who are your go-to authors?
Well, when I was travelling with the national team, I almost always had a Kurt Vonnegut novel with me. So now on our bookshelf at home, it looks as though I read Kurt Vonnegut voraciously, but it’s because I was on the national team for 18 years and every time we went overseas, I brought one of those books with me. I think I bought Hocus Pocus in an airport in 2001 and I liked it so I just kept reading Kurt Vonnegut on every trip.
You’re well known for your Olympic medals, and obviously now winning your seat. But what do you consider your greatest achievement?
Empirically, I think winning the Olympics. I have to just be a little bit logical here. Winning the Olympics is really, really hard. It’s hard because it requires the confluence of happenstance, luck, hard work, and then a whole bunch of other people can’t get lucky at that same time. But I don’t know if winning the Olympics is the thing that I’m most proud of. It’s my biggest success for sure. Winning a seat in a federal election; so many people asked after that election, ‘Oh, what was harder, winning this or winning the Olympics?’ And I sort of was agape. Like my mouth just opened. I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? You know how hard it is to win the Olympics?’ I’m not trying to downplay democracy or anything like that; winning an election requires a lot of effort, but it’s nothing like winning the Olympics. I have a really great partner named Emily and we have an awesome relationship and we’re both pursuing our passions and careers. She’s doing a PhD at U of T and I’m trying to lay the bricks on our wonderful country. We support each other and I think that’s probably my greatest success.
When and where in your life were you happiest?
In 2011, in a book that I had, I wrote down ‘The Happiness Project,’ and I wrote down all the things I needed in order to be happy. I love cooking. I like gardening. I like reading. I like playing music on my guitar, even though I’m not very good at it. But I just pursued happiness very intentionally. I went to Sweden that summer. I just had a really good year and then I won the world championship in the 1,000-metre K-1, which was my favourite event, after more than a decade of trying. I had never won an Olympic gold or world-championship gold in the 1,000-metre K-1. But – it sounds like I’m bragging I guess – I didn’t just win it. I had a perfect race. I executed it perfectly. And I won by 3 1/2 seconds. As I crossed the finish line the British commentator said that he could time the distance between first and second with a calendar.
What is your greatest extravagance in your life?
I love food and I love cooking. But I suppose actually my greatest extravagance is the time that I dedicate to making sourdough. It’s not very expensive, it probably costs me $15 or $20 a week. To make sourdough three times a week requires quite a few hours and I don’t have a ton of spare time. But I spend a little bit of time every day either preparing the levain or mixing bread dough, or going to buy a new kind of flour that I want to try. And it’s because I just like making bread. It’s fun, and I like eating it and it tastes good.
What do you most dislike?
Social media. I abhor it. It just consumes so much of our time and energy. It provides us with little valuable information. It’s highly addictive. It’s toxic.
Do you find that you have to use it?
I participate on all platforms. I do most of it myself because I know that my team have their own lives and I want it to be an authentic voice but it’s good to keep in touch with people. Remember when Instagram first started it was just about a clever photo with a filter? Now it’s just literally about everything that we do. It’s almost like there’s this obsession with every eight hours you’ve got to put something out there and demonstrate or show people what you’re up to.
On what occasions do you lie?
I lie to myself when I say that I’ve got enough time to do things that I want to achieve when really there’s just not enough time in the day.
What is your greatest regret?
Sport’s very competitive, obviously and I don’t think I took the time on a regular basis to thank the people that were helping me because I was so self-centred and focused on my own performance.
What is your most treasured possession?
I guess that’s my dog. I know he’s a living thing, but dogs are also like projects, particularly rescues. And he’s not been easy. He continues to be a real challenge. But he’s like an exercise in imperfection. And he’s taught me to love unconditionally. It’s weird to think of a dog as a possession but I don’t care about worldly items. I don’t care about my kayaks or my Olympic medals or anything, I don’t care about any of that stuff. Or even anything that I’ve inherited, like I have my grandmother’s dining set that I really love. I think it’s beautiful, but it’s just made of wood, you know? Whereas Cairo is a good boy. He’s not actually a good boy. He’s a bad boy. But he has my heart.