OLYMPIC SNOWBOARDING hopeful Michael Lambert took a bit of a gentle ribbing from his teammates during a recent phone interview from Switzerland.
“Jasey [ Jay Anderson] is here, and he’s really giving it to me about the attention that I’m getting,” he says and laughs. “He’s calling me a rock star. He could just be jealous.”
But Anderson, Canada’s top men’s slalom snowboarder, may just have reason to be envious in the coming weeks. Local boy Lambert, star of Over the Bolts, an MTV reality series chronicling the lives of the country’s top snowboarders as they vie for 18 spots on the Olympic team, is Toronto’s best hope for bringing home snowboarding gold in Vancouver, especially after claiming gold at a major race in Nendaz, Switzerland, in January.
Overall, Lambert has put up stellar placement numbers on the FIS Snowboard World Cup Tour’s parallel giant slalom category as the 2010 Games inch nearer and nearer.
But none of it would be possible, he notes, without the strong connection to his Village friends, family and coaching staff who have supported him over the years.
A particularly special moment came for Lambert last December when he carried the Olympic torch through Hamilton. “My mom was really proud of me that day,” he says. But at the moment, Lambert is focused solely on one goal: Vancouver.
“I’m excited to go because I want to represent the people who believed in me and helped me to get there,” says Lambert, 23. “People like my mother, my sponsors, my coaches. The last couple of years weren’t amazing for me, and they believed in me and fought for me to no end. I’m excited to race well for those people, the ones who helped me truly get there.”
Lambert spent the greater part of his childhood around Lower Forest Hill — calling Austin Terrace, near Casa Loma, home up until a recent move — the oldest of three children born to athletic parents.
He regularly works out at the University of Toronto and continues to have his hand in quite a few sporty activities.
During his time off, you can find him hanging around Yorkville, in particular Sushi Inn and MBCo. (Montreal Bread Company), two of his preferred places to grab a bite.
As a student of Royal St. George’s College, he played on the rugby and soccer teams. “I definitely wasn’t the star,” Lambert says of his tenure as a footballer, though he says the sports he loves most were never associated with school.
His summer pastime, sailing, often finds him out on Lake Ontario. Lambert calls it a good way to stay in shape and a refreshing break from intense, hard-working winters on snowy hilltops.
Though for Lambert, these pursuits match neither the prowess nor the passion he has for tearing it up on the slopes. His first brush with the sport came at the Caledon Ski Club when, at the tender age of two, pint-sized Lambert was put on skis and towed downhill.
Developing a need for speed and a damn-the-torpedoes style, Lambert gave his worried dad reason to slow his son down but, in the end, ended up only speeding him up.
“I was a reckless skier, apparently,” says Lambert. “You know, when you see someone going down the hill and you’re just waiting for them to crash, to explode? I was definitely one of those kids. So my dad gave me a snowboard to slow me down a bit. He [had] had enough of me being reckless. That’s actually how I got into snowboarding. I didn’t so much as ask for it as it was presented to me.”
It was arguably an exercise in futility on the father’s part. The pastime became the beginning of a budding career in 1998 when Lambert took part in a snowboarding championship series at Caledon.
“I got my first exposure to actual racing then,” he said. “There were three kids in my age category, and I won, but for me it was just about going fast again, you know?”Lambert started doing provincial tours every other weekend, then moved on to races in Quebec, then Colorado. “I think a lot of this stuff, you don’t really know how it happens. I was doing it because it was fun. You don’t plan for it to be your job, but when you do well, you have coaches around and opportunities start to spring up,” he says.
Following his graduation from Royal St. George’s, Lambert went full-time on the board, training 220 days a year at various Canadian locales.
The key to victory isn’t so much physical as it is mental, he says. One might memorize a hill to familiarize oneself with the unexpected, but it does little good when weather conditions change over the course of a 10-run day.
Focusing in the midst of such changing conditions can be difficult.
And indeed, concentration problems combined with a tendency to overthink have hampered Lambert in the past. Meditation and scripting his every move up until he comes out of the gate have helped address those issues, he says, and adding the use of one-word mantras centres his focus during his runs.
“I’ll keep repeating ‘Attack, attack’ in my head,” he says. “And if I need to speed it up or if someone gets in front of me, I repeat, ‘Believe, believe.’ Everyone’s got their own system, and I find this is the one that works for me.”
So far, the training appears to be paying off. January’s win, plus a second-place finish behind Jasey Jay Anderson (currently ranked number one in the world) at a race in Telluride, Colorado, means Lambert is hitting his stride at just the right time.
Lambert, however, doesn’t sweat the pressure of the Games bearing down.
“I want to perform my best, obviously,” he says. “I hope I’m not heartbroken. It’s a dangerous thing to do, to make a link between performance and happiness. It’s a very bad place to be, and unfortunately a lot of people think that way, and they think that it’s OK to think that way. It’s no way to live your life, that if you don’t do well you don’t deserve to be happy. And not thinking like that has been bringing me some great results, knowing that life is bigger than the race, bigger than the medal. At the same time, I’m not a flaky racer. I can put it together when I need to. But I’m going to be happy no matter what happens.”
