Canadian lugers haunted by near-miss in Sochi
Chance of belated medal pending re-testing of Russian athletes
Deep down, Tristan Walker holds out faint hope of one day receiving an email or maybe even a phone call to tell him the heartbreak of the 2014 Winter Olympics never really happened.
The official results sheet from Sochi shows the Canadian contingent of Walker, Justin Snith, Sam Edney and Alex Gough finished an agonizing fourth in the luge team relay — missing the podium by a mere 10th of a second.
But last month, the International Olympic Committee pledged to re-test all urine samples from Russian athletes at the Sochi Games amid allegations of state-sponsored doping and tampering. Russia won silver in the team relay, which means Canada could possibly move up to bronze if the re-tests come back positive for any of Tatiana Ivanova, Albert Demchenko, Alexander Denisyev or Vladislav Antonov.
Just imagine the celebration, given Canada has never won an Olympic medal in luge.
“There’s an outside chance,” Walker said Wednesday at a media event to mark the start of the winter sport season at Winsport’s Canada Olympic Park. “But it’s hard to tell. It’s hard to prove. It would be very nice to have that bronze medal, which probably should be ours. If the accusations are correct, it sounds like anyone who was on the (Russian) national team was involved with this.”
Those accusations might never be proven despite a World Anti-Doping Agency report that detailed a state-sponsored doping system in Russia, replete with an undercover agent posing as a sewage and plumbing employee and lab techs switching out dirty urine samples through a mousehole in the middle of the night in Sochi.
“At the end of the day, we still finished fourth,” said Snith, who also placed fourth with Walker in the men’s doubles. “If you look at the results, it is what it is. You have to move on. It’s just one of those races. You just keep looking forward. We’re preparing for what we can actually change.”
The Canadians may have no control of the IOC investigation into the Sochi results, but another podium opportunity looms with the countdown clock to the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea sitting at 497 days. Every workout in the gym and every on-ice training session is dedicated to finding that extra 1/10th of a second that left the Canadians “gutted” in 2014.
Edney was only able to watch the video of the Sochi relay in its entirety this summer.
“A 10th of a second, I’ll never forget that number,” says Edney, 32. “It’s definitely something that took a couple of years to get over. It was tough to watch the race, because I noticed a number of things that I did personally. I hadn’t really looked at what my individual run was like and the little things I did wrong.”
Breaking down the film, Edney sees how he lost valuable time due to driver error, and he questions the choice of runners given the changing condition of the track.
“I think we got carried away in some of the events of the Olympics,” Edney said. “After looking at that, I’ll be much more prepared for PyeongChang.”
With Edney off the team to attend school in Victoria, Canada won three World Cup medals in the 2015-16 season. Alex Gough competed only part-time to focus on her engineering studies at the University of Calgary, but she still won individual bronze in Igls, Austria.
The relay team, with a changing cast of characters, won silver and gold at stops in Altenberg and Winterberg, Germany, along with bronze at the world championships.
“We’re moving forward,” said Gough, who is taking just one engineering course this semester so she can take part in all the World Cup races and world championships. “Everything is focused on what happens next.”
One of these days, the IOC will announce the results of the Sochi re-testing. And while he knows a belated bronze medal is a “possibility,” Edney says he won’t waste energy thinking about something that’s ultimately out of his hands. He likes to believe luge is a clean sport, but he’s not naive enough to assume his moral code is shared universally.
“If something comes up, that’s a bonus,” he said. “If somebody is cheating, they deserve to be caught. If they are cheating, get that medal out of their hands. But I’m not counting on it. I’m going out there now and doing everything I can to win a medal in PyeongChang.”