She finally did it
Alex Gough brings home a bronze, erasing memories of earlier near misses
To understand what PYEONGCHANG it meant to Alex Gough to be about 46 seconds from a first Olympic medal after 12 years of trying, only to see it almost slip through her grasp, listen to those close to her.
With Gough in third place heading into her last of four luge runs down the Olympic Sliding Centre, she needed to just hold her spot to erase the memories of two fourthplace finishes in Sochi, and the disappointment of a disastrous 18th place on a home track in Vancouver back in 2010.
Instead, she came up less than five one-hundredths of a second behind Germany’s Dajana Eitberger. With two Germans still to come, both of whom were ahead of her after their first three runs, Gough was staring another fourthplace finish in the face. When she saw her time as she slid across the track, Gough, the 30-year-old from Calgary who is competing in her fourth Olympics, hung her head in dejection.
“I was ready to go behind that wall and puke,” said Wolfgang Staudinger, the longtime coach of the Canadian luge team. “I don’t want to use the F-word right now, but I felt bad.”
“I was incredibly sad,” said Kimberley McRae, Gough’s teammate who slid to a fifth-place finish on Tuesday. “I was really hoping — as soon as she came off the track, I said, ‘Anything can happen.’ ”
And it did. Tatjana Huefner, holding down second, started her last run. A medallist in three straight Games, including a gold in Vancouver, she seemed an unlikely candidate for a final-run wobble.
Back to Staudinger, as he watched Huefner’s time in her final run: “Holy s--t! It starts to turn around, and so it did, and I am extremely happy.”
Huefner’s total time of 3:05.713 was less than seven one-hundredths of a second behind Gough’s 3:05.644. The Canadian was back in the medals.
After Natalie Geisenberger, another member of Germany’s luge army, cruised down her final run to win by the equivalent of a blowout — 0.36 seconds — Gough had that long-awaited medal in her hands.
“Elated,” said Gough after securing Canada’s first Olympic medal in luge. (A team medal from the Sochi Games remains in dispute because of Russia’s ongoing doping scandal.)
“Just so over the moon. And especially to come from that gutwrenching feeling of being behind Dajana and probably being in the fourth spot again, and to have that flip around for me and to be suddenly in a medal spot is just so, so amazing.”
Gough said she couldn’t really describe what she felt like when she thought she was going to be fourth again, other than disappointed. She said she heard what McRae had told her about waiting to see the other two Germans take their runs, and she was trying to stay positive.
Gough didn’t quite say it, but it didn’t sound like she had a lot of success trying to stay positive. And then — bam — bronze medal. She collapsed into the arms of her teammates and coaches, as Canada’s luge team finally got on the board. It was a spontaneous Canadian party at the bottom of the luge track, all jumping and hugging.
“The result says it all. I don’t really want to put any more words to it,” Staudinger said. “It’s unbelievable. Ten years of grinding, hard, tough work, a lot of ups and a lot of downs, and finally winning that first Olympic medal for Canada.”