HEAVY TURNOVER ON TEAM CANADA
It’s not uncommon for elite athletes to take a break from their sport after Olympic year
Consider it the gap year for Olympians.
The competitive season that immediately follows the Games is always the most tumultuous of the quadrennial cycle. Athletes step away for good or for a year for any number of reasons. They tend to turn the page on the previous Games, turn their eyes away from the next one, turn priorities upside down and, for a change, find a way to fit their sport within the context of everyday life.
“Honestly, it’s the hardest part,” luger Kim McRae said of Year One. “I remember this from Sochi. It’s difficult. I got the same result in Pyeongchang as in Sochi (fifth), so I’m coming in with pretty much the same mental frame. ‘Hey, I was there, how am I going to get better and is four years going to make the difference?’
“So I’ve had a lot of discussions with friends, family, coaches, everybody and I’m like, ‘what should be my goals going forward and how do I get there?’ But a big thing for me this quad is getting an education so I have something on the outside.
“The last eight years have been dedicated strictly to luge because I knew if I didn’t put the time in, then I wouldn’t get better. It’s just the fact of it. Going forward, I need to take that step back so that I can have the mental side open up.”
The 26-year-old, who put off university for luge, is studying nursing at Mount Royal in Calgary and will slide at just two World Cup stops: Lake Placid and Calgary.
With luge and most other World Cup schedules kicking into high gear this month, Canada’s Winter Olympians and the sport bodies they represent are officially in the throes of gap-year upheaval.
Here’s a partial list of the Pyeongchang Olympians who are either gone for good or a good time: figure skaters Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, Patrick Chan, Kaetlyn Osmond, Gabrielle Daleman, Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford; bobsledders Heather Moyse, Kaillie Humphries, Phylicia George, Bryan Barnett, Lascelles Brown, Jesse Lumsden, Seyi Smith and Neville Wright; lugers Sam Edney and Alex Gough; skeleton slider Barrett Martineau, freestyle skier Mike Riddle, snowboarder Mercedes Nicoll, long-track speedskater Josie Morrison, short-track speedskaters Marianne St- Gelais and Francois Hamelin and ski cross racer Dave Duncan; and cross-country skiers Devon Kershaw, Graeme Killick, Jesse Cockney, Russell Kennedy and Anne-Marie Comeau.
Many have retired.
Some are simply taking time off to reload.
“I just want to take a year for myself and re-evaluate what I want to do next,” Osmond said last summer.
She’s having a blast while skating exhibitions on the Thank You Canada Tour. She’s there with confirmed retirees Chan and Duhamel and Radford. Virtue and Moir will be announcing their retirement eventually, while Daleman tried to train for this Grand Prix season, but withdrew for the sake of her mental health. Gap-year upheaval hits figure skating and bobsled harder than any other sports.
“We knew we were going to have a year like this coming up,” said Skate Canada high-performance director Mike Slipchuk. “With our veteran team that was together for so long, we knew post-2018 there was going to be change . ... I think it’s going to take us at least the next two seasons to get a really good sense of how everyone is tracking as we set ourselves up for the next Olympics. But yeah, it’s a season where every corner we turn something seems to come up.”
The turnover has already had an effect on Grand Prix results, as Canadian skaters won two bronze and a silver in the first two events, Skate America and Skate Canada, compared with three gold and a silver in the same two events last season.
Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton is in a different, though no less complicated, situation. With women’s monobob debuting as an official Olympic sport at Beijing 2022, former brakemen Cynthia Appiah, Melissa Lotholz and Catherine Medeiros have moved from the back seat to the front, hoping to take control of their own sliding fates. That means both the men’s and women’s teams will have to break in a fleet of brakemen.
And in October, Humphries announced on Twitter she was stepping away. She wrote: “I have been pushing limits 16 yrs straight & for this yr I am stepping away from racing. My goal is Beijing 2022 Olympics & 2026 in Calgary. With my recent engagement I am wanting 2 build a strong foundation for my marriage. Thanks for support & stay tuned as my journey continues.”
Athletes mash life and sport together and make it work, but there is a cost.
“Maturing,” said McRae. “I feel just being in school the last month I had so much growth opportunity. Just going to school and learning about current events and things I could be up to date on, but because I was so exhausted from training, I would just go home and sleep. My sole focus was sport. It created this little bubble and I never expanded from there.”
Now, she can’t wait.
“Now there is so much more I want to learn. I’m sitting in stats class thinking I want to do six more stats classes.”
And she will finally have the time.