RECORD HAUL FOR CANADIANS
Four medals in first two days ties 1932 mark
The hamburgers, Scotch and nicotine of the old Dire Straits song aside, Canada’s Olympic team is running on heavy metal
fuel.
After a historic start to the first day of competition of the Sochi Games — where the free-spirited kids of winter won gold, silver and bronze at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park — their teammates down the mountain in Sochi added another on Day 2 with a silver medal in the Olympic debut of team figure skating.
With reigning world champion Patrick Chan watching rinkside with his teammates, No. 2 Kevin Reynolds landed three quads — one in combination — to finish second behind only Evgeni Plushenko of Russia, securing a silver medal with two events still to go.
More medals should follow soon, with Canada sending the top two moguls stars in the world — reigning Olympic champion Alex Bilodeau and reigning world champion Mikael Kingsbury — to the hill.
Four medals in the first two days ties the record set in 1932, when Canadians had one silver and three bronze.
And the haul on Saturday made it the most successful opening day for Canada at the Winter Olympics.
The gold and silver came from the remarkable Johane Dufour-Yves Lapointe family of Montreal, whose youngest and middle daughters — Justine and Chloe Dufour-Lapointe — held hands on the victory podium so that, as Justine said later, it would “feel more like home.”
They’re only the third pair of sisters to win gold and silver in the same event at the Winter Olympics.
The Dufour-Lapointe collective may have set another record, this for the dampest and most poignant Olympic finish.
The medallists’ big sister Maxime, who finished in the top 12 but didn’t make it to the final, was standing at a remove, watching her sibs celebrate and taking in their joy, when the great Canadian Jean-Luc Brassard, a four-time Olympian and now assistant Canadian chef de mission, spotted her, roared like a bull through the line and past security to present her to her parents.
“The way they reacted,” said Postmedia’s Vicki Hall, who was right beside the family, “it was like Maxime won the gold medal.”
It was a brilliant and moving day for the family and the country whose colours they wear.
It followed Canada’s first bronze of the Games, won earlier in the day at the same place, then in brilliant sunshine.
Snowboarder Mark McMorris, born and raised on the Saskatchewan prairie yet improbably the top-rated slopestyler on the planet, earned it the way so many of Canada’s international hockey teams get their wins — in the toughest, most pressure-filled manner.
Exactly two weeks before the Olympic debut of the sport he loves, McMorris broke a rib in his back at the X Games. Nine days later, he was medically cleared to ride again.
The careening from favourite to underdog continued through slopestyle training. McMorris would fall on his first of two runs, crank up the pressure so he was left with just the one shot, emerge triumphant — only to have to do it all over again.
He called it “the most draining week of my life.”
But at its conclusion, he had a bronze — the first one for slopestyle in the Olympics — in hand.
After that rocket of a start for the Canada, it was entirely predictable that Day 2 would pale in comparison, and it did a little, but not through any fault of the athletes.
If Canadians had decent chances in a couple of events — Erik Guay in one of the oldest Olympic sports, the men’s downhill, and Spencer O’Brien in the newest, women’s slopestyle — what mere mortals forget is that the difference between a gold medal and fourth place is but a fraction of a second, an imperceptible error, a lucky draw of start numbers, even the way the sun may light a part of an enormous mountain course for one athlete or how a shadow falls for another.
O’Brien was left shattered and tearful by her performance. “I’m really sad that I let Canada down,” she said, a sentiment born of the misplaced sense of responsibility these young men and women feel to their countrymen. O’Brien is 26. The Saturday medal contingent — the Dufour-Lapointe sisters and Mark McMorris — have a combined age of 61.
Collectively, the three are five years younger than Canadian Olympic Committee president Marcel Aubut.