Three of Ontario’s Finest Coaching at Tokyo 2020 Olympics

Canada’s Olympic rowing team will be at the start line this week to begin the Tokyo 2020 Olympic rowing regatta at the Sea Forest Waterway in Tokyo Bay. Behind team of 29 athletes is a support staff with five Olympic team coaches, including three from Ontario – Michelle Darvill, Phil Marshall and Terry Paul.

Darville, Marshall and Paul are all rowing lifers who developed through the Ontario rowing system and have been coaching at the national level for many years. For Paul, he’ll be attending his seventh Olympics, including competing in two as an athlete, while Marshall will be coaching at his second straight Olympic Games. Darvill will make her Olympic coaching debut this year.

Mississauga’s Darvill transitioned to coaching after a successful athletic career that saw her compete for both Canada and Germany at the international level. She was a competitive swimmer in her youth before taking up rowing while she was attending the University of Toronto. She rowed for both U of T and her hometown Don Rowing Club during the early stages of her career and would go on to win five World Championship medals (3 gold, 1 silver, 1 bronze) in three different lightweight boat classes between 1992-2000.

Following her athletic career, Darvill transitioned to coaching and has since coached at many different levels of the sport, including high school, junior, U23, senior, masters and para. She has coached at the national level since 2004, serving in both assistant and lead coach roles with Canada’s Senior and NextGen women’s teams. At the 2007 and 2011 Pan Am Games, the crews she coached won a total of eight medals and she has led numerous crews to podium finishes at World Championship and World Cup events, including a silver medal by the senior women’s eight at the 2017 World Championships.

Marshall has over 30 years of high performance rowing experience, which started at his hometown Brockville Rowing Club. He’s coached at many different levels during his coaching career including the club, university, provincial and national levels. At the university level, Marshall was an assistant coach on an OUA Championship winning team at Western in the late ’90s before heading south of the border. At Syracuse University of the NCAA, he was the freshmen men’s rowing coach and recruitment coordinator, implementing in-season and off-season training programs that focused on technique and injury management. He was also the first full-time rowing coach at Queen’s University (2016-18), where he helped lead the Gaels women’s team to a silver medal at the OUA Championships.

At the provincial level, Marshall developed and managed the province’s rowers in advance of the Canada Games and National Rowing Championship, in addition to organizing a talent identification and selection process for both athletes and coaches. He is also a former senior coach at the National Development Centre – Ontario and head coach of the national U23 lightweight men’s team. After coaching with the Olympic women’s team in 2016, Marshall was hired in a full-time senior coaching role with the women’s national team by Rowing Canada Aviron in 2018.

Paul got his start in rowing when he was in grade 9 at Peterborough Collegiate. He soon joined his hometown Peterborough Rowing Club and would go on to row at Brock University during his university career before moving on to the national team in 1986. He made his Olympic debut in 1988 at the Seoul Olympics as a coxswain in the men’s four. Four years later he was back in the coxswain seat, this time in the men’s eight, and coxed the crew to a gold medal at the Barcelona Olympics.

Since retiring from the national team, Paul has been a coach for almost 30 years, all of which has been spent in the Canadian sport system aside from a two-year stint at Cornell University (1993-94) and time spent coaching with the Swiss national team (1999-2000). He attended his first Olympics as a coach in 1996 in Atlanta where he coached the men’s eight to fourth place finish, and at his next Olympics in Beijing 2008 he coached the men’s pair to a silver medal. This will be his fourth consecutive Olympics with the Canadian rowing team after coaching the men’s pair and four in London in 2012 and the men’s quadruple sculls in Rio in 2016. Paul was inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Canadian Rowing Hall of Fame in 2017.

Visit World Rowing for the full Olympic rowing schedule and for more information on rowing at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

Visit CBC for the full Olympic rowing live streaming schedule.