Resident Spotlight: A Former Olympian’s Journey from Canada to Rio to Daybreak

By Justin Adams

Daybreak resident Hugh Smith says he would be happy to live here for the rest of his life, which is saying something, considering he has lived and traveled all over the world as a professional gymnast.

“You name a place, I’ve probably been there,” he says.

Smith grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, in the city of Halifax. “It’s a small place but it’s a really beautiful place in the summertime. There’s a rich culture of live music. There’s great seafood. We grew up eating lobster like it was peanut butter.”

As a kid growing up in Canada, Smith was unsurprisingly pushed towards the sport of hockey, but he never really enjoyed it.

“I didn’t like the cold. And I was a little guy, so all the equipment was oversized. I just didn’t get it,” he says.

What he did enjoy was running around jumping and doing flips. So his parents signed him for a gymnastics program near their home at the age of five.

“I just fell in love with it. I liked learning cool things that I could show off at school,” he recalls.

Smith showed real potential early on, winning a national competition at the age of 14. He started training with the Canadian national team, with a goal of competing in the 2004 Olympic games. There was just one problem. He also had a desire to serve a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“My coach was a realist,” Smith says. “He told me, if you go, you’re not going to be able to get back on the national team. It’s too demanding to take two years off.”

He ultimately decided to serve a mission, but with a goal of proving his coach wrong and returning to elite competition afterwards.

That proved challenging, since he gained a bit of weight during his two year mission in Mexico, and obviously was unable to train his gymnastic skills.

“I got home from my mission and for the next ten months, I ran five miles to the gym, trained, and then ran five miles back. And this was in the cold Canadian winter, so it was not easy. Those were some hard times, where I really learned a lot about myself.”

That hard work paid off though, as he was eventually able to make his way back onto the Canadian national team. From there, he went on to enjoy a ten year professional career, which included qualifying as an individual competitor for the 2016 Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro.

The highlight of his career, though, was being able to compete as a team in the 2015 Pan-American Games, held in Toronto.

“We were really trying to qualify as a team for the Olympics, but we didn’t make it, which was very unfortunate. But being able to compete together as a team, and in front of a home crowd in Canada, that was special,” he says.

After retiring from his Olympic career, Smith started working with Cirque du Soleil. He did an internship in Saudi Arabia and then started helping them with the development of a new show in Montreal. After nearly a work of preparation, they were nearly ready to launch and then COVID-19 turned the world upside down. Suddenly, Smith was out of a job.

He decided to spend some time in Utah, where several of his siblings had relocated over the years. After years of high-level competition and a short but stressful stint with Cirque du Soleil, spending some quiet and relaxed time in Utah with family turned out to be just what he needed. So he ended up staying longer than he intended… he fell in love with the mountains, met his wife, and settled down in Daybreak, which he loves.

“The people here are so friendly. I love the lake. I jog around it a lot. It’s clean and safe. It’s just a good little neighborhood. It’s well taken care of,” he said. “I really just want to stay within Daybreak.”

That’s quite a compliment coming from someone who has lived and traveled all over the world.

These days, Smith stays busy coaching gymnastics at a gym in Woods Cross. He’s also working on starting a life-coaching business and is interested in getting back into public speaking, something that he did pretty often in Canada. So for any schools or sports organizations that would like to have an Olympian come share his story with them, he encourages them to reach out.

Have an idea for who we would should feature next in our Resident Spotlight series? Send us an email at mtviewchronicle@gmail.com.

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