Soulmates on a slippery slope
TORONTO Canadian ski-cross teammates Kelsey Serwa and Marielle Thompson work well as a team, whether it’s racing down a ski hill, or finishing each other’s sentences.
“I just gave her enough room to get around and then hoped that she was behind me because you never know,” Thompson said. “But if it was anybody else ...,” Serwa interjects. “If it was anybody else, I would have gone,” Thompson adds.
“Tight,” Serwa said, finishing her teammate’s thought.
Following a national ski team gathering in Toronto this week, the pair were recounting their 1-2 finish at the Sochi Olympic Games. The story goes that during the final run, Thompson, who won gold, heard Serwa, who took silver, yell “inside, inside” during the pivotal first turn, prompting her to leave her teammate the necessary space. Clearly, it paid off.
“It’s a race when it comes down to it, but obviously we want each other to do well,” Thompson said.
That, however, was some 20 months ago and Thompson and Serwa haven’t raced together since. Injuries — a blown knee for Thompson and a multitude of ailments for Serwa — saw them both miss significant time last season. But with both skiers healthy and the first World Cup event of the season approaching in little more than a month, they’ll finally be back on the snow competing together.
“You go from being on top of the world to absolute ground zero in a matter of seconds,” Serwa said of a season-ending injury. “It’s definitely a hard blow to take, but there’s nothing more that we want than to get back in racing.”
Ski cross is an unpredictable sport. A wild sprint on snow with four competitors jostling for position amid tight turns and towering jumps. It’s the chaotic, exciting, think-on-the-fly nature that drew these former alpine skiers to the sport.
“What I compare it to is when you’re really little, you’re skiing and you’re right side-by-side with your friends racing down the mountain, it’s kind of like that,” Thompson said
Both Serwa and Thompson have been threats on the women’s ski cross scene for the last several years. Combined, they’ve won 17 World Cup events and while Serwa, the veteran at 26 years old, won a world and X- Games championship in 2011, the 23-year-old Thompson, who joined the team out of high school in 2010, has won the year-end Crystal Globe as the overall World Cup champion twice, in 2012 and 2014.
Recently, though, injuries have plagued Serwa’s career, perhaps none worse than tearing her anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee twice in a 14-month span.
It took a frantic push to recover in time for the 2014 Olympics after the second tear, and as a result, Serwa decided to take the following year off to give her body time to heal. In the meantime, she moved back in with her parents in Kelowna, B.C. — “I think they had a harder time with it than I did,” she joked — and enrolled at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan to study human kinetics in the hopes of one day pursuing a career in physiotherapy.
“It’d be cool to go and be a physio for a team. Maybe a summer sport team to mix it up a bit,” Serwa said.
Thompson, originally from Whistler, B.C., also was on a break last year, though it was less planned.