Watch Canadian speed skater Denny Morrison closely before his races in Vancouver next week, and you will notice a pattern that borders on the obsessive.

Precisely 20 minutes before the gun goes off, the 24-year-old Canadian gold-medal hope will lace up his skates so tightly that it will cut off the circulation in his ankles.

After a few warm-up laps, he will untie his skates with 10 minutes to go, and sit quietly as the blood rushes back into his feet.

Then, with exactly five minutes remaining, he will retie them tighter than before.

You could set your watch to his routine.

"I can almost tell you what time I'll be going to the bathroom," said Mr. Morrison, who is from Fort St. John, B.C.

He's not kidding. Even bathroom breaks are carefully planned.

It may sound like superstition, but his routine is a coping mechanism. As the world descends on Vancouver, Canada's athletes are about to face more pressure than most of them have ever experienced before.

Strict adherence to his schedule will keep Mr. Morrison focused, even when the city is going crazy around him.

While hometown advantage has its benefits, an army of sports psychologists has been counselling Canadian medal hopefuls on how to deal with the dark side of competing at home: the avalanche of stress and distractions that threaten to consume them on the day of competition.

The potential disruptions are manifold: from raucous crowds that can get the heart pumping too fast and the mind racing too quickly, to being recognized on the street and asked to pose for a photo on the way to a race.

"The first thing we do is make sure there is a plan. So if there is a distraction or something happens that is not expected, you can adjust," said Jean Côté, a sports psychologist at Queen's University who has worked with Olympic athletes.

"If I have an equipment malfunction, or the weather is colder than I expected, how am I going to react to this?"

From skiing to sliding, from hockey to figure skating, Canadian athletes have been honing their game-day routines for months to keep the pressure in check. While the Olympics kick off in a matter of days, the mind games began as many as three years ago.

In some ways, the strategy of developing routines - which has been drilled into Canada's competitors - is designed to make a competition in Vancouver seem no different than one in Norway or Japan.

It takes many forms: Freestyle mogul skier Jennifer Heil will routinely grab a half-hour of sleep before competing to calm herself. And the entire downhill ski team will be seconding itself to private accommodations away from the athlete's village.

But the tactics to handle sudden spikes in pressure go further.

In some quarters of the Canadian camp, athletes are quietly using biofeedback machines that measure heart rates, breathing levels and brain activity to tell them whether they are too tense on competition day, even if they are unaware of it.

Merely being in Vancouver, among the crowds, can be enough to get an athlete's heart pulsing and adrenaline pumping without them recognizing they are under stress.

When competing, athletes want to be at what is called the "optimal state of arousal," a middle ground between rest and exertion where the body is poised to perform, but not overly tense. Being told by the machine to relax could mean the difference of crucial seconds in a race or points on a landing.

"You get feedback right away on how you feel, your emotions and your stress levels, so you can try to handle that," said Dr. Côté. "For some athletes, it is something that you can use."

How they cope can be the difference between who is on the podium and who is forgotten. While some plan to tune out the stress, others will embrace it.

"I'm scared of not doing well, yeah," said freestyle skier Veronikav Bauer. "But I definitely feed off the pressure. When it doesn't matter so much to me, I don't do well."

Alpine skiers face some of the biggest challenges, since they must also confront variables beyond their control. Sudden changes in the weather, deteriorating conditions on the mountain and equipment malfunctions can play havoc with confidence.

Since the mind is complex, one errant screw in a binding can be enough to send doubts into even the most mentally fine-tuned competitor.

Canadian downhill skier Emily Brydon plans to make sure she is focused enough that any unexpected adversity can be handled as it comes.

"In this sport, I can't control a certain percentage of what goes on, so I can't be in control of the gold medal," she said, pointing out a difference between what she allows herself to feel pressure over, and what she tries her best to shrug off.

"My goal is to go into my race 100 per cent satisfied and confident that I've done everything in my power to prepare."

Speed skater Jeremy Wotherspoon began honing his pressure strategy almost three years ago, putting together his race-day routine with psychologists and coaches. His plan includes the garden-variety visualization techniques that most athletes use.

In addition, Mr. Wotherspoon has a strategy outlining how he'll refocus if he gets caught in a crowd - a very real threat in congested Vancouver. Breathing exercises - and an iPod to eliminate the din - will allow him to tune out the rest of the world and prepare mentally.

"Skating isn't about just pushing hard, it's about having rhythm and flow," Mr. Wotherspoon said. "So you have to find those balances."

It is what the psychologists have been preaching for months.

"Everything that is done physically has to be done mentally first," Dr. Côté said.