Sylvie Fréchette

Speaker, motivator, motivation conference

This consummate athlete and businesswoman has soared to great personal and professional accomplishments thanks to clear objectives and extraordinary tenacity. Discover how she managed to achieve success during her conferences on team work, leadership, motivation and change.

Who is Sylvie Fréchette:

She discovered synchronized swimming in 1974 and this sport has been her passion ever since. With her only coach, Julie Sauvé, she devoted herself to this sport for close to half a century.

She won gold at the Commonwealth Games in 1986 and five years later, she recorded five perfect 10s at the World Aquatic Championship in Australia to become world champion with a new world record. From 1988 to 1992, she came first in all the international competitions in which she participated, always in solo.

Sylvie Fréchette went to the Barcelona games with a troubled mind. First, her grandfather passed away a few months before the grand event, then her fiancé committed suicide one week before the start of the games. Despite her grief, she insisted on pursuing her Olympic dream. But that is not all. While she put up the   best performance of her career, a judge's technical error pushed her to fourth place in compulsory figures, while she finished second in combo. What a disappointment! She had to wait 16 months and a review of her file for her to be finally awarded the gold medal by the IOC during a ceremony televised from coast to coast.

Almost two years later, Sylvie resumed training with seven other members of the Club Montréal Synchro . As a team, they won silver at the Atlanta Olympic games in 1996 after which Sylvie retired from amateur sport.

Sylvie Fréchette basks in several awards and honours. She was the Canadian athlete of the year in aquatic sports from 1989 to 1992. In 1993, the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sports and Physical Activity awarded her the Grace Under Pressure award. In addition, Prince Albert of Monaco awarded her the Per Ludos Fraternitas award of the Association internationale contre la violence dans les sports . Also in 1993, the Canadian Sports Awards created the Sylvie Fréchette Trophy that is awarded to the athlete who has overcome a difficult situation. Sylvie, together with Silken Laumann and Yves Laroche were the first recipients of this award. In 1994, together with four other athletes, Sylvie received the very first Ordre Olympique du Canada award. In 1999, she became a member of Canada's Sports Hall of Fame.  

Despite her long training hours, she succeeded in completing a Baccalauréat en éducation physique (B.A. in Physical Education) from Université de Montréal and in 1993, she published her autobiography entitled Gold at Last . Apart from her numerous projects, she is the spokesperson for the National Bank and she worked in Las Vegas with the Cirque du Soleil to develop a show called "O" in which she was artist, choreographer and trainer.

Today, armed with her personal and professional experience, she is seeking to motivate those she comes in contact with to overcome the challenges of daily life and to never quit so as to attain their objectives. As an athlete and businesswoman, Sylvie Fréchette is a speaker who never leaves anyone indifferent!