Mark Tewksbury
French immersion at 35: An Olympic trial
By Luc Boulanger
World-class swimmer Mark Tewksbury, who retired shortly after winning gold and bronze medals at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona
, had many accomplishments in his life, including a silver medal he won at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. But on a personal level, Mark’s ability to understand and converse in both of Canada’s official languages is one of his proudest achievements.
In 2002, when Montréal won the right to host the 2006 World Outgames, Mark decided to move to la belle métropole. The Olympic swimmer wanted to be involved in the lead-up to the Games on a daily basis, and he was extremely excited about the opportunity to finally learn to speak la langue de Molière. “Growing up in Calgary in the 1970s, my exposure to Canada’s official languages was overwhelmingly English focused. It was time to change that,” he says.
Beginning with a three-week introductory course at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and then living in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighborhood, Tewksbury was certainly in the right place. “I began my French immersion at 35, which I have to admit was completely overwhelming at first. But with patience, hard work and time, I slowly began to understand what was being said around me.”
“Where I had thought that learning French would enable me to participate in meetings and get by in daily life, speaking a second language opened so many opportunities I could have never anticipated. For example, when travelling the world, I could now communicate with Portuguese-speaking Brazilians who didn’t know a word of English but, like me, had French as a second language.”
A whole new world literally opened for him. “Some of my favourite conversations came at parties when Francophones practised their English with me, and I would practise my French with them. The effort to be better, the sharing of language and the discovery of words was sheer joy.”
“Mayday,” the international distress signal, suddenly took on a new context for him because “m’aider” means “help me” in French. “Where language had once seemed to put up barriers between me and French-speaking teammates, I now became much more aware of how it connects us in ways we might not realize.”
“When the 1st World Outgames were delivered in 2006, I was the official spokesperson. I did close to 150 interviews in 10 days, and at least 70% were in French. Where four years earlier I couldn’t converse in French at all, I now found myself running from a morning radio interview, to a press briefing, to an appearance on the hottest late-night live talk show—all in my second language.”
Photo credits: Olivier Samson Arcand
