AT LONG LAST
Gough wins first luge medal for Canada at the Olympics
PYEONGCHANG — To understand what 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 who are 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 fourth-place 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 fourth-place 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 fifthplace finish on Tuesday night. “I was really hoping — as soon as she came off the track, I said, ‘Anything can happen.’ ”
And it did. Tatjana Huefner, holding down the secondplace spot, started her last run. A medallist in three straight Olympics, 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 gut-wrenching 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 did not sound like she had a lot of success trying to stay positive. And then, bam, 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 athat first Olympic medal for Canada.”
Aside from the mayhem caused by the Germans swapping places from run to run — Eitberger and Heufner traded second and fourth spots between them through each of the last two runs — the night was briefly stopped when American Emily Sweeney was involved in a scary crash. She lost control halfway down the track, fishtailed all over it, bounced feet-first off a wall and looked for a moment like she would land on her head. She ended up off her sled, but eventually was able to leave the track under her own power.
“Some of the Americans shouted, one of them cried actually, and I asked Dajana what happened and she said, ‘Don’t look, you don’t want to see it, whatever happened you’ll find out afterwards,’” Geisenberger said.
She said she used the delay to focus on what was to come, knowing that a couple of nights earlier, in men’s singles, her countryman Felix Loch blew his final run to drop from first to fifth.
There wasn’t anything quite that dramatic on Tuesday night, but all the late movement ended up working in Gough’s favour. Right up until it happened, there was reason to wonder if Gough would ever catch an Olympic break.
Eight years ago in Vancouver, she was considered a serious medal threat, especially because as a member of the Canadian team she had the ability to train at the Whistler track repeatedly and become very familiar with its twists and turns.
But much of that familiarity was lost when the track was shortened during Vancouver 2010, a decision made for safety reasons after the death of a Georgian luger in a training accident. She ended up a non-factor in Vancouver, before the multiple fourth-place finishes, the most painful of all Olympic results, at Sochi 2014.
She said after arriving in Pyeongchang that her many Olympic experiences had all provided lessons, chiefly that things change at every Games.
“The last few weeks have been a reminder for me of things that happened in Vancouver, and reminding myself that all I can do is control what I can control and go out and do my thing,” Gough said.