I'll admit it… I know almost nothing about soccer (football, if you're not from North America).
But watching Canada's historic run in the 2026 World Cup definitely caught my attention — and the reason why might surprise you...
When Canada started making headlines, I didn't really care beyond a "wow, that's neat.” But that changed when I heard about Alphonso Davies.
The Canadian superstar missed almost the entire group stage with a hamstring injury, then made his World Cup debut off the bench in Canada's win over South Africa — the same game Stephen Eustáquio scored the historic, stoppage-time winner.
Davies later admitted how mentally draining it was, doubting himself the whole way through that recovery.
Hearing that, I realized it wasn't the winning that pulled me into Canada’s run at the World Cup…
It was Alfanso’s story of resilience.
So I went on a bit of a dive and put together a list of 9 stories of Canadian athletes and resilience with the hope of helping you (and myself) understand that sometimes the lesson isn't in the win, it's in everything it took to get there.
Let’s go.
Hughes is one of the only athletes in the world to win multiple medals at both the Summer and Winter Olympics, racking up six medals across cycling and speed skating over four Games.
From the outside, her career looked like one long string of wins. From the inside, she was sinking into depression — no matter what she won, she's said, she still felt a void she couldn't shake.
She kept it from almost everyone, including her own mother, partly because mental illness already ran deep in her family and she didn't want to add to the weight.
Years later, Hughes became the national face of Bell Let's Talk and rode her bike 12,000 kilometres across every province and territory in Canada to talk about it openly.
The ride, and the conversations it sparked, helped push Canada's biggest mental health campaign into the mainstream. (More on her story via Team Canada.)
Hirsch played goal for the New York Rangers during their 1994 Stanley Cup run and won Olympic silver for Canada — the kind of résumé most hockey players only dream about.
The whole time, he was hiding severe OCD and crushing anxiety, including intrusive, frightening thoughts he didn't have a name for and didn't dare tell anyone about.
At his lowest point, in 1994, he drove to a cliff outside Kamloops, BC, and came close to not stopping.
Hirsch eventually got the right diagnosis and treatment, and in 2017 wrote about it publicly for the first time, in an article that's still one of the most-read pieces in its outlet's history.
He's since written a memoir, co-hosts a mental health podcast, and speaks to hockey teams and companies about getting help before it gets that dark. (Read more on NHL.com.)
Laumann's the rower most Canadians already know: ten weeks before the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, a training collision tore the muscle off her shin bone.
Five surgeries later, she somehow rowed her way to a bronze medal — still one of the most replayed comeback stories in Canadian sports history.
What most people didn't know until years later, when she published her memoir Unsinkable, was that the leg was never the real fight.
Laumann grew up with a mother whose undiagnosed mental illness made home unpredictable, and she carried anxiety, depression, and disordered eating into adulthood, especially after becoming a parent.
She eventually built a platform called We Are Unsinkable, where everyday Canadians can share their own stories of what they've overcome, alongside real mental health resources.
Andreescu beat Serena Williams to win the US Open at 19 years old, becoming a household name almost overnight.
The years that followed were rougher than the highlight reel suggested: injuries, isolation during the pandemic, and a growing sense that she'd tied her entire sense of self-worth to whether she won or lost.
By late 2021, she was close to walking away from tennis for good, and announced an indefinite break to focus on her mental health.
She came back in 2022 with real tools in place — therapy, mindfulness, even martial arts — and a clearer sense of who she was off the court.
Today, she's an ambassador for Tennis Canada's "Mental Timeout" initiative, built specifically to help young athletes develop better mental health habits before they hit a wall like she did.
At just 16, Oleksiak became Canada's most decorated Olympian at a single Games, winning four medals at Rio 2016 and becoming the youngest Canadian gold medallist in nearly a century.
What came next wasn't in any of the highlight packages: years of depression and anxiety that she navigated almost entirely on her own.
There was no real playbook for what happens to a teenager after that kind of overnight fame, and for a long time, she felt like she was figuring it out alone.
She's since been open about how much pressure went unspoken at the time, and how different it feels now that she's learned to listen to her body and ask for what she actually needs.
She's still swimming, still chasing more medals, and says she's finally doing it because she wants to — not because she has to.
Wiebe won Olympic gold in wrestling for Canada in 2016, the kind of result that's supposed to answer every question an athlete has about themselves. It didn't. She's written candidly about the months leading up to that win, including one training session so brutal she stood at the top of a stairwell weighing whether falling down it might be an easier way out than finishing the workout. Even after the gold medal, she's spoken about the identity crisis that followed — if she wasn't "the wrestler" anymore, who was she?
Wiebe now works at the Canadian Olympic Committee in athlete relations and safe sport, helping build the kind of support system for current athletes that she didn't always have. (She wrote about it herself for CBC Sports.)
Girard finished a heartbreaking 4th place at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, just off the podium, and the disappointment sent her into a depression that took real time and work to climb out of.
She rebuilt, made it to London 2012, and walked away with what she believed was a bronze medal.
Years later, after her competitors at both Games were caught doping in retested samples, Girard was awarded gold from London and bronze from Beijing — becoming Canada's first-ever Olympic weightlifting champion, in a ceremony with her three kids watching, years after she'd already retired.
It wasn't the moment on the podium she'd once imagined, but it was proof that doing it the hard, clean way still counted.
McMorris is one of the most decorated slopestyle and big air snowboarders in the world.
In 2017, a backcountry crash near Whistler nearly ended that, and nearly ended him: he broke 16 bones, ruptured his spleen, and collapsed a lung, and lay in the snow for over an hour not sure he'd ever move freely again, let alone snowboard.
Even his own medical team wasn't certain how quickly, or whether, he'd be ready to compete again.
He's said recovery from an injury like that is at least half mental — learning to trust his body again, one small milestone at a time.
Less than a year later, he was back competing for Canada at the Olympics, and he's added more Olympic medals to his collection since.
In the summer of 1990, 14-year-old Waneek Horn-Miller was on the front lines of the Oka Crisis, protecting Mohawk land near her community.
While carrying her four-year-old sister to safety, she was stabbed near the heart by a soldier's bayonet. The trauma left her with PTSD — the kind, she's said, that many in her community deal with by self-medicating in ways that hurt them further.
Horn-Miller channelled it into swimming and water polo instead.
Exactly ten years after the stabbing, she walked into the Sydney 2000 Olympics as co-captain of Canada's first women's water polo team — the first Mohawk woman ever to compete at an Olympic Games — and now speaks across the country about trauma, resilience, and reconciliation.
What gets me, looking at this list, is how different the paths are. Some of these athletes found their way through therapy. Some through time off.
Some through telling their story publicly, years later, entirely on their own terms. None of it looked tidy, and none of it happened on a deadline.
In my years training peer supporters, this is one of the things I come back to again and again: the goal was never to "fix" the hard part fast. It's to find one small move forward, then another, and to let someone else witness it with you.
Every athlete on this list had people around them — coaches, teammates, family, eventually the public — even when, from the outside, it looked like they were carrying it solo.
If you're in the thick of your own quiet struggle this week, my free guide, The Front-Line Worker's Guide to Managing Overthinking, might help you build a small, repeatable way through it:
For more stories and mental wellness tools, head over to https://thejeffturner.ca/
Remember to take care of yourself — however that looks for you.