Dozens of athletes have Matt Jordan to thank for their Olympic success

Matt Jordan arrived at the University of Calgary in 1992 to study kinesiology and train as a competitive weightlifter at the Olympic Oval. Since then, he’s completed a master's degree in exercise physiology, a PhD in medical science focused on neuromuscular testing for athletes with knee injuries, and has coached dozens of athletes to compete in six different Olympic Games.

“I had athletes in 1998 in Nagano. I was in my 20s and a budding strength coach at the time,” says Jordan, adjunct professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and director, sport science at Canadian Sport Institute Calgary, a UCalgary partner and one of Canada’s premiere Olympic training centres.

“Salt Lake City was the first time that I saw athletes through the entire four-year prep period and I’ve been working with athletes every Winter Olympics since," he says. Jordan counts Clara Hughes, Kristina Groves, Chandra Crawford, Cindy Klassen, and Jeremy Wotherspoon among the medal-winning athletes he's worked with.

Jordan and his team (which includes many UCalgary kinesiology faculty and alumni) often develop eight-year-long training programs to get athletes ready for the Olympics. “That’s how far out the planning needs to go to really grow an Olympian,” he says. The training programs aim to improve the athlete’s technical abilities and address a list of other factors that “could impair or enhance performance” — nutrition, mental performance, physical health, strength, power and aerobic fitness.

“All of these things together come into this kind of cohesive training program,” says Jordan. “Visualize a video game and you have five or six layers of different types of things that have to be optimal in order for you to succeed. It’s not just one thing or another.”

For the Pyeongchang Games, Jordan is helping athletes competing in alpine ski racing, bobsleigh and skeleton. And while events can be similar, the athletes are definitely not. “Every individual is going to have their gaps,” he says. “You might have someone who is super fit but who doesn’t sleep well, so they’re going to need a sleep plan and program that’s going to support them.”

For Pyeongchang, Jordan provided athletes recommendations on everything from the best flight times to Korea and how to cope with jet lag to a nutritional analysis and occasional veto of some of the meals served at the Olympic Village.

This is the first time in years Jordan won’t be at the Olympics with his athletes, but he will be available 24/7 on Skype. “I am keeping my phone on,” he says. “It’s obviously extremely tough to anticipate what might happen. It might be super smooth with no issues. But sometimes things happen, external threats like illnesses, people getting hurt, there’s a distraction. There could be all kind of things that you cannot plan for but you have to have the ability to respond to.”

And Jordan will, of course, watch all of his athletes compete, but he’ll be taking in much more information than the usual fan. “I am more analytical. I tend to watch the data,” he says. “We have really good performance analytics capabilities and online dashboards for looking at details. I want to make sure they’re on track and we’re doing what we can to get Canadians on the podium, healthy and safe.”