A Climate of Fear in Boxing Canada

He was one of 121 boxers who removed their boxing gloves to write a letter to federal sports minister Pascale St-Onge calling for the resignation of Boxing Canada’s high-performance director.

I encourage other athletes to speak up and I hope others will have the courage to do so, he explained to Radio-Canada Sports. The truth must be told. You have to describe the truth.

The truth is what he describes as a climate of fear that has reigned in Boxing Canada for so long, he says. And the creator of tensions and unhealthy climates is Daniel Trépanier.

He should leave the office immediately, the 38-year-old said. I’m confident the boxing community will get through this, but it has to go away. Athletes can no longer.

Not only did we not trust him, but fear entered, Da Silva said. It is not physical fear, but it is fear. You always think about your actions, the things you say. It’s hard to say and hard to admit that you’re scared when you’re an arrogant athlete. When one is not free to speak, it is an atmosphere of fear.

Boxing Canada responded to Radio-Canada Sports that it had not elicited a reaction from Daniel Trépanier in response to the letter. The principal concerned did not respond to our message.

However, Da Silva’s statements were confirmed by Stéphan Larouche, president of the BoxeMontréal.com club where Da Silva trained for a long time.

He led a regime of terrorism and when you talk too much, you are sidelined, Larouche describes. Our gym made some champions join the national team and we realized they were sidelined, because we weren’t in the right gang.

The work climate is unfavorable, it does not view athletes as they should and leaves them to themselves, he added. Communication is zero, it is spoken via email. He threatened his athletes of suspension if they did not fill out the paperwork.

Larouche also questioned Trépanier’s management style and attacked the subjectivity of evaluating the athletes selected for the national team.

He uses his right to scrutiny at the expense of qualifying tournaments because he wants obedient athletes who don’t challenge decisions and that is extremely unhealthy. You can’t go to a boxing gym if you’re not happy to be there.

One of the Larouche club’s boxers, Cedrick Belony, believes he was unfairly ranked 4th in the final national team selection process. A process that relies on battle videos and a contest of push-ups and frog jumping, commonly known as burpees.

Belony, however, claims to have recently defeated boxers who ranked higher than him.

I saw that he was incompetent, slice the young man of 23 years. If you want to win Olympic medals, you have to choose people correctly. How many years has it been since Canada had an Olympic medal? We played three games with him without a medal. He is not competent. There is something wrong.

Stephan Larouche accused Trépanier of putting the heinous setbacks of Canadian boxing behind athletes.

We thought he was going to jump after the disaster at the Tokyo Games, but the board was afraid of him. Everyone protects their buttocks. He justifies his results in front of Own the Podium by displaying graphs depicting data on the strength or speed of athletes. Every poor performance, we blame the athlete and even three Games are like that.

Canada has not won a boxing medal since the 1996 Atlanta Games.

Myriam Da Silva’s Tokyo nightmare

Myriam Da Silva has almost no memories of her visit to the Tokyo Games last summer and the months that preceded what would be her dream in life. He felt Trépanier had broken what should have been an unforgettable experience.

She kept her Olympic clothes, but she can’t remember she received them.

The months of June to September were a black hole for him. They were no longer in his head. After his defeat, he remained confined to his room for 24 hours without eating or drinking. He wanted to continue boxing, but decided to retire, broken and exhausted.

When he joined the national training center, Da Silva had to mourn his longtime coach, Danielle Bouchard. Then, a few months before the Games, Boxing Canada fired the coach where it started working and built a relationship of trust.

His successor, John Mbumba, was expelled from Tokyo by the national federation after making persuasive statements about the athlete delegations on social media after their defeat.

Daniel Trépanier makes all the decisions internally and that creates isolation by removing coaches which we feel for no reason, Da Silva denounced. Then, do nothing when told that it doesn’t work. It is always up to the athlete to adapt to the functioning area. We are not listened to.

In particular, Da Silva said he was forced to deliver rounds of training with Tammara Thibeault who was 15 pounds heavier than him, endangering his physical and mental health.

Then when I asked not to train alone because things weren’t going well with my trainer, I wasn’t listened to, she adds. I was alone in the gym with a trainer who had poor bonding. This is certainly not the best preparation for the Olympics.

With this cry from the heart, Myriam Da Silva hopes for a better power sharing between the national federations, the Canadian Olympic Committee and the other mechanisms put in place to defend the interests of athletes.

He feels he and his colleagues are the biggest losers when a federation is both judge and jury.