Lepage

SEPTEMBER 2023 UPDATE:

Pierce LePage became the first Canadian to win gold in the decathlon at the 2023 World Championships. He captured a silver medal at the 2022 World Championships.

In his Olympic Games debut at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, LePage finished 5th.

Pierce LePage opened eyes to his athletic abilities during the 2016 RBC Training Ground Regional event in Toronto where he was named the winner of the combine. With his talent identified by Athletics Canada, his decathlon career began an upwards trajectory.

As part of LePage’s RBC Training Ground win, he travelled to Rio to take in the Olympic Games and more importantly witness his future teammates compete alongside the world’s greatest athletes. The atmosphere inside Olympic Stadium not only motived him, but pushed him to be better and helped prepare him for what was ahead.

In September 2016, he broke the 8,000-point barrier for the first time to win bronze at the Décastar meet in France, which gave him the belief that he could become an Olympian. In May 2017, he attended the famed Hypo-meeting in Götzis, Austria, for the first time where he accumulated 7,894 points. Later that year, he became Canadian and NACAC champion in the decathlon.

LePage competed at his first multi-sport games in 2018, winning decathlon silver at the Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia, but he was unable to build on that success as he tore his right UCL, sidelining him for several months. He attempted a comeback to competition at the Décastar meet in September, but ended up tearing his hamstring mid-way through the 10-event competition forcing him to withdrawal from the meet. He focused that off-season on ensuring his body was fully recovered and ready for 2019.

In his first decathlon of 2019, LePage scored a personal best 8,453 points to win the Décastar meet in June. That also gave him the decathlon qualifying standard (8,350 points) for Tokyo 2020. In August, he won bronze at the Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, sharing the podium with teammate and gold medallist Damian Warner. In October, LePage made his debut at the World Athletics Championships where he finished fifth overall. He had been ranked second after the first day of competition, bolstered by first place finishes in the long jump and 400 metres. On the second day, he held the lead heading into the last two events but dropped off the podium after the javelin.

With limited competition opportunities in 2020 and 2021, LePage refined his technique in the 10 sports that make up the decathlon in a series of high performance meets in the Toronto area, setting a new personal best in the discus throw (47.41 metres) and indoor shot put (15.42 metres) along the way. That extended training period paid immediate dividends in his first meet of 2021, setting a new personal best score (8,534 points) to finish second to Warner at the Hypo Meeting in Götzis at the end of May.

Looking back on LePage’s RBC Training Ground experience and what he’s accomplished over the past four-plus years, the Tokyo bound decathlete said “This was totally unexpected. In high school, I didn’t even do track. I was that kid who sat inside and played video games all day. If you told me I was going to make the Olympics and be competing for Canada, I’d be ‘like no, it’s not happening.’”

Now, he’s hungry for it. “If I compete like I know I can compete – I know I can run faster, throw better and jump higher than all of the other competitors” – the 25-year-old has a shot to land on the podium in Tokyo.