RBC Training Ground Sends Four Cyclists to the Paris Olympics
RBC's 'Kelsey, Lauriane, Sarah & Jackie' is a July 2024 Canadian film campaign created by agency Battery that follows four athletes — Kelsey Mitchell, Lauriane Genest, Sarah Orban, and Jackie Boyle — who discovered cycling through the RBCTrainingGround program and qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The campaign centres on a narrative of transformation and discovery. According to Strategy Magazine, none of the four featured athletes had previously tried cycling before being identified and supported through RBC Training Ground, a program designed to not only fund emerging Canadian talent but actively find it. That origin story — a bank reaching beyond its conventional role to uncover athletic potential in unexpected places — gives the film its emotional core and its strategic distinction.
Published in Canada in July 2024, the campaign arrives at a culturally charged moment: the weeks immediately preceding the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The timing is deliberate. By anchoring the RBC brand to a team of real Training Ground alumni on the verge of competing on the world's largest sporting stage, Battery frames RBC's long-running athlete-development program as something consequential rather than merely philanthropic. The athletes' cycling journeys become proof of a broader institutional commitment to human potential.
The campaign comprises one primary film asset among a broader suite of three Olympic-themed spots RBC released for Paris 2024, as reported by Strategy Magazine. Those spots, including 'Here Together,' focused specifically on Canada's women's sprint track-cycling team. The broader RBC Paris 2024 campaign distributed content across CBC, Radio-Canada, Google, YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, RBC-owned channels, and employee channels, according to Strategy Magazine, giving the narrative substantial reach across the Canadian media landscape. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100.
RBC Training Ground operates as a talent-identification engine. The program's strategic premise — that future Olympians may not yet know which sport they belong in — gives RBC a distinctive and defensible positioning in Canadian financial services, where the five largest competitors, TD Bank, Scotiabank, BMO, CIBC, and National Bank of Canada, compete fiercely for brand differentiation beyond interest rates and branch access.
TD Bank has long positioned itself around the tagline 'Canada's Most Convenient Bank,' emphasising accessibility and customer service. Scotiabank holds longstanding sponsorship rights to Hockey Canada. Against that backdrop, RBC's alignment with Olympic athlete development — particularly in a sport like track cycling that sits outside mainstream Canadian sports consciousness — represents a deliberate effort to occupy emotional territory that competitors have not staked out. By pairing the financial institution's resources with a talent pipeline that reaches individual Canadians before they reach elite status, RBC builds a brand story rooted in discovery rather than transaction.
The cultural timing reinforces this positioning. The 2024 Paris Olympics generated substantial national attention in Canada, and the lead-up to the Games created an extended window of audience receptivity to athlete-centric storytelling. Strategy Magazine, in its July 15, 2024 coverage titled 'Why RBC spotlighted Training Ground grads in Olympics campaign,' noted the strategic rationale behind featuring athletes whose journeys began with RBC's intervention rather than athletes already at the pinnacle of their sport. That editorial framing confirms the campaign's core insight: origin stories are more emotionally compelling than arrival stories, and RBC's brand is most powerful when it appears at the beginning of a journey rather than at its celebration.
In Canada, financial services advertising competes in a saturated environment where institutional trust is assumed and differentiation is difficult. By anchoring the RBC narrative to verifiable human outcomes — four named women, one specific sport, one global stage — Battery provides the campaign with a specificity that broad-brush banking advertising rarely achieves.
Battery produced the film campaign for RBC. The creative approach is grounded in narrative specificity: four real names, four real sporting transitions, one shared destination in Paris. That structural choice resists the abstraction common to financial services filmmaking, where metaphor and aspiration frequently stand in for concrete evidence.
The film follows Kelsey Mitchell, Lauriane Genest, Sarah Orban, and Jackie Boyle — each an RBCTrainingGround alumna — through a story of athletic reinvention. According to Strategy Magazine, the athletes had not previously competed in cycling before the program identified their potential and redirected their training. That biographical fact is the campaign's creative engine: the drama does not come from podium moments but from the decision to begin something unfamiliar and the institutional support that made that beginning possible.
Production credits for 'Kelsey, Lauriane, Sarah & Jackie' are not fully publicly documented. A trade report cited by Strategy Magazine attributes elements of RBC's broader Paris 2024 campaign production to Dentsu and Holiday Films, creating an unresolved attribution question alongside Battery's confirmed agency credit for this specific film. No verified director credit for this particular asset has been confirmed through publicly available sources including those reviewed by Clapboard.
Battery's creative relationship with RBC extends across multiple campaigns and programs, according to reporting on Little Black Book. The agency's co-founder and chief creative officer stated in 2025 that the partnership had lasted more than eight years, implying a working relationship dating to approximately 2016 or 2017, as reported by lbbonline.com. Previous work includes the 'Forgotten Suitcase' campaign for RBC Avion in August 2021 and campaigns supporting RBC Future Launch, a program helping Canadian youth prepare for a changing workforce. That accumulated institutional knowledge of RBC's programs — their mechanics, their human outcomes, their brand role — is visible in the specificity and confidence of the 'Kelsey, Lauriane, Sarah & Jackie' execution.
Verified campaign performance data for 'Kelsey, Lauriane, Sarah & Jackie' is limited in public disclosure. The film accumulated 2,110 views and 7 likes on the platform where it was archived, as recorded by Clapboard. Those figures reflect the asset's performance in a specific archival context and do not represent total campaign reach across RBC's full media distribution, which, according to Strategy Magazine, included CBC, Radio-Canada, Google, YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, RBC-owned channels, and employee channels.
No independently verified metrics for total views, reach, brand-lift, or conversion have been made publicly available for this specific film. The broader RBC Paris 2024 campaign received positive editorial coverage from Strategy Magazine on July 15, 2024, which represents a qualitative signal of industry recognition within the Canadian market.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on several durable creative choices. The use of four named, verifiable athletes rather than composite or fictional characters gives the RBC brand claim — that Training Ground finds and funds Olympic potential — empirical credibility. The cycling narrative, focused on a sport unfamiliar to most Canadian audiences, creates genuine surprise and curiosity without relying on manufactured drama. The campaign's placement in the lead-up to the Paris 2024 Games ensured contextual relevance at maximum audience engagement. Together, these structural decisions position the film as a credible brand-building asset, even in the absence of disclosed performance metrics.
The campaign follows four Canadian athletes — Kelsey Mitchell, Lauriane Genest, Sarah Orban, and Jackie Boyle — who discovered cycling through RBC Training Ground and qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics. Created by agency Battery and published in Canada in July 2024, the film positions RBC as a discoverer and funder of Olympic talent rather than a conventional financial sponsor.
The four featured athletes are Kelsey Mitchell, Lauriane Genest, Sarah Orban, and Jackie Boyle. All four are RBC Training Ground alumni. According to Strategy Magazine, none had previously competed in cycling before the program identified their potential and supported their transition to the sport ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Battery created the campaign for RBC. The Toronto-based agency has maintained a creative partnership with RBC for more than eight years, according to reporting on lbbonline.com. Previous Battery work for RBC includes the 'Forgotten Suitcase' campaign for RBC Avion and multiple campaigns supporting the RBC Future Launch program in Canada.
RBC Training Ground is a program designed to identify and fund Canadian athletes who show potential in sports they have not yet formally pursued. The program discovered Kelsey Mitchell, Lauriane Genest, Sarah Orban, and Jackie Boyle as cycling prospects. All four went on to represent Canada in cycling at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, as documented by Clapboard.
According to Strategy Magazine, RBC's broader Paris 2024 campaign ran across CBC, Radio-Canada, Google, YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, RBC-owned channels, and employee channels. The 'Kelsey, Lauriane, Sarah & Jackie' film was one of three Olympic-themed spots RBC released for the Paris Games, with the broader media placement managed across the Canadian market.
The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the film's structural strengths — named athletes, a verifiable origin story, and culturally timed release ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympics — balanced against limited public performance data and an unresolved production attribution between Battery, Dentsu, and Holiday Films, as noted by Clapboard.
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