Humphries has hill to climb for third medal
Trouble with ninth corner leaves top Canadian team in fifth place after two runs
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— Kaillie Humphries and Phylicia George got to the bottom of the track, pulled their bobsled to the finish area and ran over to stand in the leader’s box.
That’s certainly where Humphries, the two-time Olympic champion, had hoped to be coming into these Games. But on the first day of racing, their stay in that box was a brief one. The next sled down the track bumped them to second place.
And with each subsequent sled Tuesday, they dropped another spot until they were sitting fifth after two runs.
But this Olympic bobsled track is producing incredibly close times — as Canada’s Justin Kripps and Alexander Kopacz discovered a night earlier when they tied for gold — so nothing is settled yet. Humphries, from Calgary, and George, from Toronto, are 0.34 seconds from the top spot heading into Wednesday’s final two runs, and just 0.04 from the podium.
Humphries isn’t where she wants to be, sitting behind two German sleds and two American ones — piloted by the same women who won silver and bronze at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. But she has spent her entire adult life pursuing speed in a bobsled, so she’s not panicking.
“This is part of racing,” the 32-yearold said. “Neither of us (is) going to look back on tonight and say, ‘I wish this, I wish this.’ And we’re not going to look forward or ahead at results and what could or should happen.
“I have 15 years of racing under my belt so I’m smart enough to know that tomorrow is a whole different day. This track yields very close competition . . . There’s two more runs and a lot can happen.”
Humphries arrived here a two-time Winter Olympics champion looking to three-peat, being pushed by a twotime Summer Olympics sprinter looking for her first medal. George put her speed — she made the Olympic final in the 100 hurdles — to good use here and the duo had the secondfastest start times on both runs.
“I’m just looking forward to finding some more hundredths at the start because I know she’s going to drive the hell out of the track,” George, 30, said.
Humphries, renowned for her consistency and driving skills, said she struggled on the track’s tricky ninth corner and that error accounted for some of their lost time.
“I knew that one right away but in the moment there’s nothing you can do,” Humphries said. “Unfortunately, in bobsleigh, you make a mistake . . . it’s about reacting and fixing it as fast as you can but you can’t change what’s gone on in the past. Bobsleigh is a good representation of life in that sense — you need to live in the present moment.
“Fix the things we can fix, focus on our start, focus on the drive, talk with the coaching staff about the equipment and put our best foot forward tomorrow, and that’s it.”
Humphries knew her experience would help her in Pyeongchang but she expected it would only go so far because “every Olympics is completely different.”
This one is especially so with Humphries driving one sled and Heather Moyse, the brakeman who pushed her to gold medals the last two Games, joining Olympic rookie Alysia Rissling in another. Moyse and Rissling were seventh after two runs.
Canada’s third sled with Christine de Bruin and Melissa Lotholz was eighth, a sign of how deep the country’s bobsled program is right now.
Moyse’s abilities to push a bobsled incredibly fast, even at 39 years of age, is a skill as celebrated as Humphries’ ability to drive a bobsled. She and Humphries took the lead in the first run at the 2010 Vancouver Games and never let it go. Four years ago in Sochi, the pair was just behind the American sled piloted by Elana Meyers Taylor after the first day.
But an Olympic bobsled race of four runs over two nights — rather that the World Cup format of two races on the same day — can produce unpredictable and dramatic results. There are more chances for someone at the top to make a big mistake and open the door for others. That’s what Humphries and George are counting on now.