Trailing Russians hurts for Harvey
Canadian fourth in specialty to cap disappointing Games . . . time to get back to work
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— In his final Olympic race, Canada’s greatest male cross-country skier sprinted — after 50 kilometres of hard skiing — to the finish line, giving everything he could.
But, unlike his exhilarating sprint at the last world championships to win gold, this sprint was for fourth place.
“It’s all I had today and there’s no regrets, but fourth is hard to accept. But I’ll just have to accept it, eventually,” Harvey said after his race.
That acceptance is just a little harder, though, given the makeup of the podium.
Finland’s Iivo Niskanen — the class of the field — took the gold in 2:08:22 and behind him were two Russians. Alexander Bolshunov won silver, his fourth medal here, and Andrey Larkov the bronze.
“You want to believe in the new generation of Russians, so you’ve got to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to be fourth with two Russians ahead of me, I’m not going to lie,” Harvey said.
“I do believe that these younger guys are doing it clean, but with everything we’ve seen — even here we’ve seen some doping cases — (so) . . . in the back of my mind, of course, there’s a bit of a doubt. That’s just being human.”
Russia was officially banned from these Games for running a statesanctioned mass doping program, but 168 Russians, deemed to be clean by a special panel, were allowed to compete here under the banner Olympic Athletes from Russia. Two have failed doping tests — mixed doubles curler Alexander Krushelnitzky, who was stripped of the bronze medal he won with his wife, and bobsledder Nadezhda Sergeeva, who finished 12th in the women’s event.
In the 50K cross-country race, Niskanen took the early lead and set a blistering pace that only Bolshunov and Kazakhstan’s Alexey Poltoranin were able to maintain. Harvey was in a chase pack 21⁄ minutes back.
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The podium seemed set until Poltoranin started to falter and the chase pack — Harvey, two Norwegians and Larkov — knew they were battling for bronze. Larkov tore up the final hill of the course for the bronze, and then Harvey out-sprinted the rest to finish fourth in 2:11:06.
“It’s an amazing performance,” said Louis Bouchard, Harvey’s coach. “He was perfect. You cannot control the other players, but he controlled himself and it was the best.”
But still not quite enough for an Olympic medal.
Canadian women — Beckie Scott, Sara Renner and Chandra Crawford — have won Olympic medals in cross-country, but no Canadian man has, and that’s the burden Harvey carried into these Games.
The 29-year-old from St-Ferréolles-Neiges, Que., had planned to compete in six events here and, after dropping one, his tally before Saturday’s race was: a seventh, two eighths and a 32nd.
Adding an Olympic medal to his substantial collection of World Cup and world championship hardware was the goal, and Harvey was certainly disappointed to leave without one given that it’s the simplest expression of excellence in sport. But he also knows what he’s already done for himself and his sport.
“We were able, with my teammates . . . to raise the bar for men’s crosscountry skiing in Canada,” he said.
“To have realistic expectations of believing in a podium was something that was never really done before, so I think that’s good for the future generation, to believe that it is possible to fight for the top 10, the top five, week in and week out — on the World Cup and (at the) world championships and even the Olympics — so that’s something I’m really proud of.”
Asked what he’d do after his gruelling race, he said he had to pay a visit to anti-doping control and he had a lot of food in mind, but that he’d skip the massage table.
“Maybe we give a break to our massage therapist, because he’s been working so hard on us and we have a week before the next race,” Harvey said.
Most athletes end their season at the Olympics, exhausted by the physical and mental strains of getting here and performing on this stage, but not cross-country skiers such as Harvey.
He’s already thinking about his next World Cup race in Finland and the one after that in Norway — another 50-kilometre event — and then it’s on to Sweden.
“We train twice a day, basically every day from May 1 until Nov. 1 when the season starts, so when the racing season starts that’s what you’ve been training for all year, so we like to race for sure,” he said.
“I’m in a good position for the overall World Cup now and the distance World Cup, so this is motivating.”