Canadian Olympic boxer Ariane Fortin works out in Montreal on July 14, 2016.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Ariane Fortin's road to Rio began with a detour into defeat. It was the lead-up to the London Olympics four years ago, and she was knocked out of a spot on the Canadian boxing team. Fortin was so dejected she almost gave up – on Canada, on her Olympic dreams.
"She was depressed, she was discouraged," long-time coach Mike Moffa recalls. "I was worried about her."
Fortin had lost her chance to compete for Canada to her then friend Mary Spencer, and down went her hopes of fighting in the historic launch of women's boxing at the 2012 Games. Spencer's fame exploded in a flurry of billboards and make-up ads. Fortin fell into a funk and pondered her options.
"Her world was crumbling around her," Moffa says. "The only thing I could tell her is that four years go by fast, so get back to the gym and stop crying."
Fortin got out the Kleenex and, marshalling grit and a prodigious work ethic, earned a berth on the team heading to Rio, with a shot at a medal. For the 31-year-old native of Lévis, Que., the lead-up to Rio looks an awful lot like the road to redemption: A loser in 2012, she's now the comeback kid – a place on the podium is all that's missing from the narrative.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," she said recently after a sparring session at Montreal's Claude Robillard sports complex. "I learned to let myself have moments of weakness, moments of sadness. Also, I honestly never stopped believing I'd go to the Olympics. That might seem boastful. but it's inside me and I believed it."
No one gets to the Olympics without a positive attitude and strong self-belief. Fortin, who is as voluble as she is now upbeat, is first to say it: "Hope is an inexhaustible source of energy."
Fortin, along with Mandy Bujold from Kitchener, Ont., is hoping to end Canada's 20-year medal drought in Olympic boxing. (Arthur Biyarslanov of Toronto is the boxing team's lone male qualifier.) Fortin, a two-time world champion who fights in the 75-kg category, has won medals at the Commonwealth and Pan Am Games; Bujold, two-time Pan American champion, fights in the 51-kg class.
To Daniel Trépanier, high-performance director at Boxing Canada, Fortin's current drive may well have been planted in the soil of disappointment before London. Fortin had expected to secure a spot in her weight class against Spencer. During the bout to determine which of the two would qualify for the sole Olympic slot in the woman's 75-kilogram class, Fortin was ahead going into the third round, only to ultimately lose by six points.
She was so crushed that she explored the possibility of competing at the Games for another country. She also considered the idea of turning pro.
In the end, however, the setback seemed to only push her Olympic dream further.
"It gave her a lot of determination – I think she felt she deserved her place at the Olympics in 2012 and wanted to prove to the world she was right," Trépanier says. "So she rolled up her sleeves and wouldn't feel sorry for herself."
The roots of Fortin's resolve reach back to her rebellious high-school years in Lévis, near Quebec City, when she went to a movie called Girlfight. Its storyline revolves around a teenager from the projects who discovers boxing and, through it, a sense of purpose and direction. The film captured Fortin's 16-year-old imagination. "Wow. That's different," she said to herself. "A girl. Boxing."
She began training at a gym and soon came up against the resistance of her parents – Roger, a locomotive engineer, and Evelyne, who works in education. Neither had ever quite pictured their girl engaged in a blood sport like boxing. But then they noticed their teen had given up some bad habits and taken a new turn.
"At first her father and I didn't think it was a good idea," says her mother, Evelyne Brochu. "But we saw how she put in the effort. She stopped smoking, there was more discipline. We saw she was serious."
Her parents were hardly wrong about boxing's brutal side – their daughter's flattened nose is the legacy of an insufficiently cautious male training partner more than a decade ago. Brochu still finds it "stressful" to watch her daughter in the ring, but she and her husband have booked their flights to Rio to see her compete at the Olympics.
"She's worked so hard," Brochu says. "I'm very proud of her, especially proud of her as a person, her way of getting back up after defeats, of finding the courage to do the things she does."
She also brings something more than the force of her fists into the ring, highlighting a difference with male boxers. Fortin says women in the ring tend to rely more on technique than brute strength. "Women have to be a little more cerebral."
"Yes, it's satisfying to land a good punch during a fight. That's our sport," she adds. "But it's so much more than that. What I get off on in boxing is the mental game."
Fortin is competing for a podium spot with a titan in her weight category, Claressa Shields of the United States, the reigning Olympic and world champion who is 10 years Fortin's junior.
Moffa, her coach, says bluntly that Fortin doesn't possess the raw talent of some rivals. "She's limited in her talent, athlete-wise," he says. But she makes up for it with something perhaps more valuable. She has a drive that has her train like a perfectionist and spend hours watching videos of her opponents.
"She has that will," Moffa says, "to find a way to win."