GREAT DIVIDE
EVEN IN NEW COLOURS, HUMPHRIES REMAINS PART OF CANADA’S BEIJING STORYLINES
When it’s time to snap podium photos at the Olympics, the gold medallist will often wrap her arms around runners-up right and left, everyone will lift their medals and smile for the cameras.
American Kaillie Humphries, who won runaway monobob gold on Monday, chose to hug her current teammate and silver medallist Elana Meyers Taylor, but leave bronze medallist and former Canadian teammate Christine de Bruin on her own.
Humphries controls everything she can, right down to the photo op. It was a small thing, a petty thing that likely points to lingering bitterness more than two years after Humphries and Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton went through an acrimonious split and she took her talents to USA Bobsled.
Her departure came more than a year after she accused Canadian coach Todd Hays of harassment; citing loud, recurring and sometimes public arguments that the two had in the buildup to Pyeongchang 2018 over issues like athlete selection, track strategy, snow pants and massage time. She also claimed BCS president Sarah Storey and high-performance director Chris Le Bihan were aware of the harassment and did nothing.
With that elephant in the room, Humphries sat out the 2018-19 World Cup season. BCS was loathe to release a winning driver, Humphries equally loathe to slide for Hays. The standoff continued through the spring of 2019, when Humphries issued a list of demands that if met, would result in her staying with the program. They included $21,180 in retroactive carding money for the season in which she declined to compete, her own full-time pilot coach/ head coach at an extra cost to BCS of $75,000 annually, her own part-time push coach at an extra cost of $20,000 per year for two years and then full-time in the Olympic year at $70,000, her own therapist at a cost of $50,000 in the Olympic year, and a liaison, so she would have no direct contact with Hays, Le Bihan or Storey.
BCS declined to fill her laundry list, Humphries
sued to force their hand, BCS issued her release letter and the lawsuit was terminated in the fall of 2019. Years later, outstanding issues remain. Hays sued Humphries for defamation, she filed a counterclaim. A second investigation into her harassment allegation is still grinding along, after an arbitrator decided the first one — which found that none of her claims could be substantiated on the evidence presented — was not thorough enough.
All the while, these Olympics have loomed, sure to be a reckoning of her Canadian past and American present. And it was there for all to see on the monobob podium. She dominated the event and may well add a two-woman medal later this week.
She’s a win-at-all-costs performer; great for the trophy case, not so much for the team bus. At one point during an argument in December 2017 with Hays over massage time that she wanted
to take, Hays said it was reserved for a teammate. According to the report of the arbitrator, Humphries told Hays she didn’t “give a f---” about her teammates.
Several of them are still with the Canadian women’s bobsled program, which has been rebuilt in her absence, and de Bruin is at the apex. She’s 32. Alysia Rissling won every single monobob race in North America this season but didn’t make the Olympic team. She’s 33. Cynthia Appiah, who finished eighth in the monobob here, is 31. Melissa Lotholz is 29. However, the corps of brakewomen is younger and 26-year-old Bianca Ribi sounds like the lead pilot of the future.
“I wouldn’t say it’s stronger or weaker,” said de Bruin, when asked how the Canadian program has fared after Humphries. “I think that we’ve had some really good girls coming up through the program, some very strong brakemen who have now turned into drivers. I’m kind of like the in between generation
but I think we’ve been able to still continue to grow.”
De Bruin and brakewoman Kristen Bujnowski were fourth overall in the two-woman rankings and will be in the hunt for medals later this week. Appiah will slide with Dawn Richardson Wilson in that event, while Lotholz and Sara Villani team up. And the three sleds are very much a cohesive team. The sharing of track information and sled resources is at the centre of the team’s culture shift, which came about after Pyeongchang.
Humphries said she and Meyers Taylor do not share that kind of proprietary knowledge.
“We’re both competing for the country, and individually, so we don’t share lines or secrets, things we develop individually,” said Humphries. … “Elana and I have been through very different journeys over the last four years and this year has definitely been challenging being teammates. We share a lot of resources, which we’re not used to doing. And so we’ve really had to come together as a team.”
That apparently hasn’t been easy for either one of them.
“You know, we’ve had our differences as teammates now,” said Meyers Taylor, as warm and engaging a person as there is in a cold, brutish sport. “I think it was actually easier when she was competing for Canada to be friends because we’re not competing for resources, we’re not competing for brakemen and all these different types of things. But I have so much respect for her and she’s done incredible things for the sport.”
Humphries was not a mentor to young Canadian sliders. She was always far too focused on her own needs and performance, her own brand as it were, to help anyone else. Meyers Taylor, on the other hand, sounds interested in outreach that will guarantee the health of their sport.
“I really try to be true to myself as a person, so regardless of who’s on my team, I’m going to try to be the best teammate possible, but also I’m going to try to be the best human possible to the other girls as well. … I’m going to try to lift the whole sport up while I lift myself up as well.”