BELO HORIZONTE—When Canada’s women’s national soccer team readies for Tuesday’s Olympic semifinal (3 p.m., ET, CBC), coach John Herdman will unspool a pre-match message from a Canadian sporting legend.

Georges St. Pierre, the UFC fighter, will offer words of inspiration via video in the moments before the Christine Sinclair-led squad takes on Germany for a berth in Friday’s gold-medal game, the coach said. Herdman, an aficionado of the mixed martial arts, arranged the pep talk because he loves the blood sport’s lessons of passion and perseverance. He said he’s been exposing his team to occasional doses of UFC footage “whether they like it or not.”

And the message has been received by the players, albeit while sometimes watching through fingers.

“To be honest, UFC makes me cringe a little, so I look away sometimes. But it’s the mindset he’s trying to teach us,” Canada goalkeeper Stephanie Labbe was saying Monday. “It’s the idea that whoever you’re stepping out there against on any given day, you have to have the belief you can beat them. And this team — we have that right now.”

Why shouldn’t Canada have it? With a flawless 4-0 record at these Olympics, including a group-stage win over the Germans, they find themselves with two games remaining in a five-ringed journey around Brazil that’s been magical to watch. A win Tuesday against Germany means they play for gold in Rio on Friday. A loss, and it’s Friday in Sao Paulo for a chance at repeating as bronze medallists.

If Herdman spent part of Monday’s news conference trying to position his team, ranked 10th in the world, as rabid underdogs against the No. 2 Germans — framing the opponent as a “juggernaut” and insisting “it’s theirs to lose” — the coach allowed that his team’s success, after a revamp that layered youth beneath a proven core, isn’t exactly unforeseen. (To that end, German coach Silvia Neid insisted Canada “should be the favourite.”)

Said Herdman: “Quietly, behind the scenes, we knew what we were capable of. We weren’t going to say that publicly. But we knew this team could push. We had a four-year plan in place . . . And we’re starting to see the fruits of that, for sure.”

The fruits aren’t produced without some bruising, mind you. Herdman said building this team, in some ways, has been an exercise in building collective toughness. While some on the newer additions to the roster are preternaturally gritty thanks to early-life hardship — Herdman cited the revelatory likes of 21-year-old skill machine Janine Beckie, who lost her father to cancer at age eight, and Kadeisha Buchanan, the 20-year-old defender who “dealt with a lot of things young” in a single-parent home near Jane and Finch — others have required more recent hardening.

“That’s one of the challenges with the modern-day athlete. Many parents aren’t exposing their kids to enough adversity,” Herdman said. “That means they fail for the first time in a major championship and can’t cope.”

Hence the introduction of some UFC splatter into their lives. And hence the positive spin that can retroactively be put on a quarter-final flameout against England in last summer’s World Cup, where Canada lost its way in front of 54,027 supporters in Vancouver.

“These women don’t want to experience (a loss like that) that again. These are the moments that really define people,” Herdman said. “They go through that, and they get stronger.”

Herdman is facing with at least one game-day call Tuesday; the status of Canadian backliner Allysha Chapman and her injured left shoulder remains in some doubt. Her pain tolerance is not in question. Shelina Zadorsky, the Canadian defender, named Chapman the teammate most likely to have a post-soccer career in the UFC, perhaps because at the World Cup, Chappy, as she’s known, played with a torn oblique muscle that required two pre-game injections of medicine.

Given that the coach described Chapman’s form in Monday’s training session as “a good news story,” is wouldn’t be a surprise to see her out there. But with back-four veteran Josee Belanger also suspended, Zadorsky will be an option, as will Rhian Wilkinson and Rebecca Quinn.

The stakes are high. The coach said a place on the podium, given Canada’s medals-for-dollars sporting reality, would mean a level of funding that would “keep the program moving forward so we can do it again and again and again.”

“We’ve got one of the biggest talent pools in the world,” Herdman said. “We’ve just never had the system to produce it.”

That’s why there’s been so much poured into hardening this team for this moment. The system is in place, in Herdman’s view. It just needs to be sustained. That’s part of the reason why Herdman said each of his players has undergone “hundreds of hours” in front of bio-neural feedback software meant to train the brain to cope better with the stress of competitive chaos.

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“They know (their brain) is as strong as their quadriceps, their hamstrings, their biceps,” Herdman said. “It’s all about knowing, ‘I’ve done the work here.’ Have the Germans? That’s the question.”

Herdman said he expects Canada and Germany will be “gritting it out” in much the same way Canada and the U.S. stood toe to toe in that classic 2012 semifinal that went the wrong way. In other words, it’ll be a fight, albeit in a cage that’s more metaphorical than St. Pierre would be comfortable with.

“I think it’s cool that John wants us to share that fighter mentality,” said Zadorsky. “We definitely have taken the message away, while maybe not enjoying the face-smashing quite as much as John does. But to each their own.”

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