Bucsis wants to skate, not protest
Anastasia Bucsis sees her sexual orientation as but one part of her identity as an athlete, as a person.
So while the openly gay Calgary speedskater understands the pending fuss over her quietly qualifying to represent Canada at the Sochi Olympics, she wishes it wasn’t so.
“I’m not going to Sochi to make any political statements or to protest or anything,” Bucsis said late Saturday night, dripping with sweat and breathing heavily in the depths of the Olympic Oval. “I think the best statement is to represent your country well and show that you’re a normal person, because there’s so many stereotypes in the gay community.
“Why don’t we just break down those barriers and be the normal human beings that we are?”
Bucsis, 24, hardly heads into her second Olympics as a Canadian favourite to grace the podium like Mikael Kingsbury, in moguls, Erik Guay, in downhill skiing or Kaillie Humphries, in bobsled.
But given the international furor over Russia’s anti-gay laws, Bucsis may very well become the involuntary poster child for Canada at these Olympics.
In fact, the treatment of gays in Russia threatens to overshadow the Games themselves after Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced legislation earlier this year banning the “promotion” of homosexuality to anyone under the age of 18. Seemingly in response, American President Barack Obama announced he will not attend the Games, but instead send a delegation that includes three openly gay former athletes in tennis player Billie Jean King, hockey player Caitlin Cahow and figure skater Brian Boitano.
In qualifying for the Games, Bucsis joins a select group of active athletes — including American figure skater Johnny Weir and New Zealand short-track speedskater Blake Skjellerup — to openly talk about their homosexuality in advance of competing in Russia.
“I think the best thing I can do is go there and speedskate and be happy to wear the Maple Leaf,” Bucsis said, “and just be myself.”
Battling nerves, battling doubt, battling fear, Bucsis needed two stellar 500-metre races Saturday to book her ticket to Russia. Before a couple hundred people huddled in the stands, Bucsis ripped around the track in 38.31 seconds for a secondplace finish in the first race. Legs burning, heart pounding, she followed that up with 38.61-second loop to place third in the second race.
In a combined time of 76.93 seconds, she finished third overall behind Christine Nesbitt, of London, Ont., and upstart Martha Hudey, of White City, Sask.
Canada will not officially name the 10 women selected to compete in Olympic long-track until a formal news conference Jan. 22. But thanks to Saturday’s performance, the announcement, for Bucsis, is mere formality.
The oppressive pressure to qualify? Mercifully gone.
“Oh my God, I have not been skating well,” Bucsis, 24, said of a turbulent last four months. “I’ve had a few things in my personal life that weren’t super conducive to making me a fast skater. I’m just so happy I tackled a lot of demons today … I’ve lost a lot of races this year, but I’m happy to come away with a personal victory.”
Bucsis considered it a personal victory two years ago when she told her family, friends and teammates about her sexual orientation, and came out to the world at large in September at Calgary’s Gay Pride Parade.
“I’m proud to be from Calgary, I’m proud to be an athlete, and I’m proud to be gay,” she wrote on Twitter.
Looking back, she has zero regrets about her decision to go public, but the ensuing media storm proved challenging to navigate. And then, with all eyes on her, a disastrous performance at the Canadian trials in October knocked Bucsis off the World Cup team all together.
“I was incredibly sick,” Bucsis said. “I don’t want to say I had the flu. I had a sinus infection, and I was also on some medication that wasn’t super conducive to having quick twitch and co-ordination. And when you’re going 60 km/h on a half-millimetre blade, it kind of affects things.
“So not to make excuses, but I wasn’t i n top shape, for sure.”
Turns out she wasn’t i n top shape physically or mentally.
“I feel like I’m going to be the spokesperson for a few things,” she said. “I’ve definitely dealt with a little bit of anxiety and depression in the past, which sucked. It can strike anyone.
“I’m a huge perfectionist, and I didn’t see my skating going as well as I wanted to. So I can get really down on myself.”
Clara Hughes is open about her struggles with depression, and Bucsis turned to the retired speedskating legend for support.
I wasn’t a dark horse, I kind of felt like a dead
horse ANASTASIA
BUCSIS
“I just hope that nobody thinks that’s a stigma,” Bucsis said. “Clara Hughes, I’m really lucky to have her in my life and just good mentors ... It’s a sport. I love it. Win, lose or draw, it’s shaping me into a better person, and I kind of lost that perspective.”
She lost that perspective and, in the process, lost her skating legs.
“I had no momentum,” she says. “I wasn’t a dark horse, I kind of felt like a dead horse. I got my ego handed to me time and time again this whole fall. I have been on the World Cup circuit since Vancouver pretty consistently, so to not make it two months out of Olympic trials, I was like, ‘oh my God.’ ”
On Saturday, with her MP3 player on shuffle before the race, Bucsis felt a sense of calm wash over her when The Climb, by Miley Cyrus, came on.
“I was like, ‘you know what, I have no regrets, even though I’ve been completely defeated and felt like a failure for not being able to skate fast sometimes,’ ” she said. “I skated with heart. I let it go. I let it flow.”
Proud of the way she lives her life, proud of the way she knows she can skate. Bucsis heads to Sochi as a two-time Olympian with an eye to seriously upgrading her 34th-place performance at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.
And maybe, just maybe, she’ll help someone else struggling with his or her sexual identity — or perhaps even battling depression or anxiety — in the process. “The Olympics is so amazing, and it’s a celebration of humanity,” she said.