I have been a canoeing coach for half of my life. Over those years, I have made small mistakes, medium-sized mistakes, large mistakes, and even immense ones. Some resolved themselves, others required time and learning, and some I still carry with me—like scars that remind me of who I once (sometimes) was, and who I never want to be again.
Of all those mistakes, the ones that hurt the most today are not the technical or strategic ones: they are not choosing the wrong training method, planning a season poorly, or making a bad tactical decision at a key moment. Those mistakes can be forgiven, understood, discussed, and eventually archived.
The mistakes that truly weigh are the ones that affect the human dimension of the coach.
A coach is a crucial node, a meeting point for multiple vectors. Through us circulate technical, physiological, logistical, emotional, institutional, and social elements. Expectations, doubts, hopes, pressures, and information flow in and out. We are translators (ever since working with a translator, this metaphor comes to mind constantly) between the athlete’s inner world and the external demands of competition.
Yet in the midst of all these forces, in the mesh of tasks and responsibilities, it is easy to forget something essential:
we work with human beings.
Human beings who feel, who imagine, who fear, who doubt, who trust.
Human beings who place something priceless in our hands: their vulnerability.
My worst memories as a coach are tied to those moments when, out of fatigue, pressure, ego, or narrowness of perspective, I abandoned the humanist view.
When I speak of humanism, I mean Humanism with a capital H: a way of being in the world that places dignity, respect, and the self-realization of each person at the center.
It is not about “being a good person” in some generic way. It is about recognizing the other as an end in themselves, never as a means.
In sport, this is crucial.
We might believe that the result is what matters most.
But the result is only an instant.
What remains is who we become along the way.
Coaching, understood through this lens, is not a technique.
It is an ethical stance.
It means understanding that before we have paddlers, athletes, or rising talents in front of us, we have human beings in the process of becoming. And our task is not to mold them according to our own ideal, but to accompany them as they shape themselves.
When we lose that perspective, training becomes mechanical, hierarchical and cold.
When we regain it, sport returns to what it should never have stopped being:
a space for personal growth, discovery and encounter.
Today, when I look back, I am not proud of what little I may have won, but of what I learned to not lose:
The humanity in others.
And in myself.
Because in the end, beyond times, podiums, and chronometers, coaching is a humanism.
Or it is nothing.
P.S. Dedicated to all those who, through action or omission, may at some point have felt outside the center of my attention.
