CANADA’S X FACTOR
Trailblazer Alex Harvey cracks the cheat code with cross-country breakthrough in sight,
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— What does Alex Harvey mean? Listen to his teammates talk about him for a start. He is Canada’s greatest ever men’s cross-country skier at age 28, the first North American man to ever win the 50-kilometre world championship, a pioneer. He is just five courses short of the law degree he started in 2008, and he is just one of the races of his life from being the first Canadian man to reach an Olympic podium in Pyeongchang. What does he mean?
“I’m at the same training centre as Alex, so I get to see him pretty much all year long, and it’s really inspiring for me to see what he can do,” says skier Cendrine Browne, from Barrie. “And it shows us that we can be at that level, that Canada can be great. And that’s something that’s so hard sometimes, because we’re still in development, and it’s sometimes discouraging. But when you see performances from Alex and these guys, it shows one day we’ll be there too.”
“It’s been really inspiring to see the level: We know they can be at the top level, so one day we’ll be there as well,” says Emily Nishikawa of Whitehorse, in her second Games. “It’s very inspiring, and it’s so easy to learn from the best, and they’re right here.”
“It’s a wonderful journey,” says Devon Kershaw, in his fourth Games. “And to see Alex turn into the skier he’s become from 2013-14 to now, it’s been one of the highlights of my career to not just follow along as a fan, but be a part of that, so it’s been a wonderful experience.”
Sometimes, as an athlete, you have your moment. Harvey and Kershaw were fourth in the team sprint in Vancouver back when Harvey was a 20-year-old wunderkind, and Kershaw and now-coach Ivan Babikov both had fifth-place finishes, in a sport owned by Norway and Sweden and Russia and Finland and Italy. As Harvey puts it, “It made us believe that we could be on that podium.”
Then came Sochi, and it turned out the game was rigged.
“Sochi was maybe the closest thing you could find to a climb,” said Harvey. “There was two kilometres of climbing just before the finish. So it looked like they built it for athletes that have way more endurance than anybody else in the world. And they were skiing very strong, the Russian skiers.”
It was a course built for racers with extra juice, and three of the five medals the Russians won in crosscountry in Sochi were stripped as part of the Russian doping violations that flooded those Games. Kershaw had to think long and hard about whether he wanted to continue in the program: Cross-country is a sport that is so much about eating pain, and he had been doing it a long time. But he kept going, and Harvey was a huge reason.
“I had to really think hard about it after Sochi, if I wanted to continue my career, for sure,” said Kershaw. “And the biggest draws for me were the distance relay, and being a part of a program that could get an Olympic medal.”
And now Harvey is the centrepiece of that best chance. His 2017 world championship is proof; he was also fifth in the 30K, and Canada came sixth in the team sprint. He and Kershaw differ on the state of doping here; Harvey is pleased that the IOC hit Russia as hard as it did, and says, “I think it’s one of the most clean Games we’ve seen in a few years, so that’s a good motivation.”
Kershaw, meanwhile, despairs for the state of Olympic sport, saying “as a current athlete, you’re a pawn in this whole game. The 30 seconds before the race goes off . . . I’m terrified in a way, because this is gonna hurt so badly, and are my skis OK, and your mind isn’t really on that, at that moment. That said, when you come fourth, when you come fifth, it’s in the time afterwards that it can be very discouraging, and very disheartening. And then pick up the paper and read that athletes have been cheating, or a system has been caught cheating.”
But Alex Harvey is the Canadian man with the lungs and the legs to beat them all. Beckie Scott was the Canadian woman who did it in 2002; Harvey could do it here. As the program has ascended, an Olympic medal is the one thing Canadian men have never done.
“The beauty of cross-country skiing is that people who cheat, it’s still possible to beat them,” says Harvey. “It’s not like cycling where you just cycle up a mountain for one hour and everybody’s bike is the same weight and there’s not much going on other than your fitness. In skiing there’s your technique, there’s your equipment. So it’s still possible to beat people who are cheating, and that’s what I’ve been telling myself my whole career.”
He has said this will be his last Olympics; that he does not want to be an athlete who has passed his peak, or as he put it once in French, at the top of his art. This is Alex Harvey’s moment. We’ll see what that means.