Ontario poet laureate Randell Adjei on what artists and Olympians share in common

Poets and athletes have more in common than you'd expect, according to Ontario's first poet laureate, Randell Adjei. He was commissioned to write a new spoken word piece to help kick off CBC's Paris 2024 Olympic coverage, in collaboration with former three-time Olympian Phylicia George.

(George is one of those rare athletes who's appeared in both the Summer and Winter Games, having competed in hurdles in 2012 and 2016, and then in bobsleigh at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games, where she won a bronze medal.)

In an interview with Q's Tom Power, Adjei says he didn't have a ton of experience in co-writing, but when he first met George, he knew they could work together.

"We really talked more about getting to know one another's journey," he says. "Me being an artist, her being an athlete, that kind of went out the window, like, 'Let's just get to know each other as people if we're going to collaborate on something so big and so grandiose and really understand each other's journey.'"

He adds that one thing artists and athletes have in common is an intense level of determination, or what he calls "a purpose inside of you." Adjei says both he and George dedicated themselves to their craft at an early age and pursued it at the cost of other things.

There's something about dedicating yourself to your craft and dedicating yourself to what you love to do, even when you don't want to do it.- Randell Adjei

"We figured out what we love to do at an early age," he says. "And in the meantime, we lost people, we lost friends. Life happened to us, but it led us to becoming the people that we are."

In both cases, there's a huge amount of work that goes into an artist or athlete's success, and that's what most people don't see. It's that behind-the-scenes effort that he wanted to emphasize in the spoken word piece, titled The Gold Within.

"[I'm] waking up each day in the morning and writing," he says. "Not sure what I'm writing, but I'm writing. [Athletes are] waking up each morning and lifting weights. You're running on the track. There's something about dedicating yourself to your craft and dedicating yourself to what you love to do, even when you don't want to do it. There's days I don't want to write, but I've got to write. I've still got to do it. People are expecting a first draft…. And so those are the similarities we both saw … and that's what we wanted Canadians to feel."

CBC will broadcast the opening ceremony live on TV and on Gem, starting today at 1:30 p.m. ET. Tune in 10 minutes before that time to catch Adjei's performance of The Gold Within.

The full interview with Randell Adjei is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Randell Adjei produced by Glory Omotayo.