NO HILL TOO STEEP
Canadian Marie-Michele Gagnon chases Olympic glory in alpine combined, including high-speed downhill racing that was outside her comfort zone. Now? “It’s always: Woo-hoo, I want to do this again.”
When athletes talk about how they prepare for competitions, maintaining a single-minded focus on their very next run — whether it’s on skis, speed skates or in a bobsled — is almost always one of the keys to success.
But Canada’s Marie-Michele Gagnon doesn’t have that luxury.
So, before a World Cup downhill race, when she’d like to do all her training runs with her long speed skis, she’ll strap on shorter technical skis and practise her slalom. It’s far from ideal, but for an athlete who competes as often as she does there’s little choice.
Gagnon is Canada’s only elite all-eventer who races the gamut of speed events (downhill and super-G) and technical ones (giant slalom and slalom) and, when it’s on offer, the combined event that includes a race from each discipline.
It makes for a challenging training program and a hectic competition schedule with an enormous number of air miles accumulated getting to races on two different World Cup calendars.
In an era of increasing sport specialization, it’s not the easiest road for a skier to take, but it’s the road Gagnon wound up on through a combination of early talent for speed and a broken leg which led her to rehabilitate through the tech events and discover she was even stronger there.
Now, she hopes, the years of multiple event racing will put her in contention to win a medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games in alpine combined, which includes one run of downhill, the fastest speed event, and one run of slalom, the most technical event.
“I’m always switching from one disciple to the other, but over the years I’ve had enough experience that I can switch easier, hopefully,” said the 28year-old skier from Lac-Etchemin, 100 kilometres southeast of Quebec City.
“My best chance to win an Olympic medal is in combined. That’s where I have the most consistency . . . That’s why I keep doing everything,” This may be her last chance. A version of combined was the first and only Olympic medal in alpine skiing when the sport made its debut at the 1936 Winter Games, and the upcoming 2018 Winter Games may well be the last where medals are awarded in combined.
FIS, the sport’s international governing body, has not included combined events on the World Cup calendar past the 2019-20 season.
That doesn’t mean it won’t continue, but coaches who were at the FIS council meetings this past spring were left with the impression that it was on the chopping block to make room for a more dramatic parallel event, where skiers race head-tohead on shorter courses that can be built in the middle of cities to draw in new audiences.
“They force more and more of the parallel events and I can imagine that will replace the combined event (at the Olympics),” said Manuel Gamper, Alpine Canada’s head women’s coach.
“But we’ve seen a few times that the combined was almost dead and it got restarted. We’ll see. To lose it would be sad in my eyes, but I understand alpine skiing needs to be promoted and you need to follow people’s interests.”
With the International Olympic Committee’s restrictions on adding to the overall number of athletes at a Winter Games, a sport that wants to introduce a new discipline — one that is broadcast friendly and will, hopefully, draw a younger audience — has little choice but to cut a less-popular classic event.
Over the years, interest in combined has fluctuated among top skiers, but it picks up in advance of the Olympics where a medal is on the line.
On the women’s side, Mikaela Shiffrin, the reigning Olympic champion in slalom, and teammate Lindsey Vonn, the most decorated skier in American history, have both said they’re racing combined this season.
To give herself the best chance at a strong performance — this will be Gagnon’s third Games — she has approached this season differently.
“(Before) I never trained speed in the summer. I never trained speed disciplines at all. I just showed up at World Cups and hoped for the best,” Gagnon said.
“That happens a lot, because if you’re technically pretty strong you can kind of hope that it happens, but to really perform you need more mileage.”
So, this past summer, she trained with the Canadian speed team and other downhill skiers, including Vonn and Slovenian world champion Ilka Stuhec, in La Parva, Chile for two weeks.
“It was the first time in10 years I did any speed training and it was so much fun, I loved it,” Gagnon said, still smiling at the memory months later.
The speeds are greater in downhill, and with the terrain and jumps to navigate it takes experience and time to develop a feel and comfort with it.
“There are times when you’re a little uncomfortable and you’re like, this is kind of getting me nervous, but it’s never like: Oh my god, I don’t want to do this again. It’s always: Woo-hoo, I want to do this again,” Gagnon said.
“I never really have that fear factor because I love adrenalin; I love bungee jumping and jumping out of planes and all that. That fuels me.”
Gagnon’s two World Cup wins have come in super combined, which includes a slalom and super-G race, but at the Olympics the speed portion is raced on the faster downhill course.
“For me to achieve that medal it will be much more important to focus on the speed, because the slalom is already much more my discipline,” she said.
She went to the last Olympics carrying the heavy expectations of Canadian ski fans after she won a super combined World Cup just before the Winter Games.
But Gagnon fell on the slalom run of the combined, the first of her four medal races at the Olympics, and dislocated her left shoulder. She still went on to compete in her other events and managed to pull in a top-10 finish in slalom.
Other than Jan Hudec’s bronze medal in super-G, Gagnon’s ninth place in slalom was Canada’s top result in alpine skiing at the Sochi Olympics.
Slalom remains her best event and that’s something she knows she’s putting at risk in the short term, with her longer term goals.
In her summer training block when she would normally have done 25 days of slalom training, she only managed to fit in six.
“Which is like nothing,” she said. “I know that my results probably won’t be as good, but it’s for the greater picture — the Olympics is the big goal. I have to keep that mindset.”
But it’s difficult for any competitive athlete to stay positive and confident when they’re not getting the results they’re used to.
“It’s going to be hard, for sure,” Gagnon said in an interview just prior to starting her race season. So far, it’s been mixed. In Soelden, Austria, the first tech race of the season, she was 24th in giant slalom after a small mistake on her second run; in Levi, Finland she competed well for 10th in slalom.
She has one more giant slalom in Killington, Vt., on Saturday before her first downhill — and only Canadian stop — in Lake Louise next week.
That will be the first indication of whether her gamble is paying off.
“I want to be able to perform, but the worst thing you can do is start to make excuses . . . You have to live with your decision and trust your plan and, hopefully, my staff will be able to keep me in a strong state of mind, but a lot of it comes from me.”
“I never really have that fear factor because I love adrenalin; I love bungee jumping and jumping out of planes and all that.” MARIE-MICHELE GAGNON