Once considered to place in the top three, the Canadian sliders were gutted by their fourth-place finish.
Sliders gutted by third fourth-place finish in three days
‘I’d lie if I said our group was holding their emotions in check. They wanted to have the distinction of winning the first luge medal for our country ...’
WALT COREY High-performance director
KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia
Alex Gough, Sam Edney, Justin Snith and Tristan Walker were gutted.
Expecting — and expected — to win at least the firstever luge Olympic medal for Canada, maybe two, they had to settle for a trio of fourths on three cruel Russian evenings in a row.
In their three races, the collective difference between medal and no medal added up to little more than half a second.
Gough was fourth the first night, the doubles team of Snith and Walker finished fourth the next, and now, in the brand-new Olympic event of team relay, with their veteran teammate Edney, here they were again. Their Olympics were over.
They shouldered the responsibility, of course. They had the nuts to wear it. Offered an out — lady luck — Edney declined.
“I think today it’s a little bit more on us,” he said.
“This is the Olympic Games. You’ve got to be the best in the world to be on the podium, and I think when we can look at some video and break down our runs, we can sit as a team and really see where we think we lost it ...
“I know that, did we each perform to our absolute best tonight? I don’t think we did. Otherwise we’d be standing on the podium, absolutely.”
The team had won silver at the 2013 world championships, and bronze the year before that.
Gough, who wept after her own individual race, said this was worse.
“It sucks, it’s terrible. To come fourth by a 10th (of a second) and to know that we had it in our hands, and that each of us didn’t have the runs we would have liked to, that we could have had it ... I think we all feel that we let each other down.”
Their wonderful head coach, Wolfgang Staudinger, struggled afterward to speak honestly but not harshly. Someone told him the athletes of whom he has become so fond had said, straight out, that they didn’t have their best runs.
“No, they were not,” he said. “Not the best runs.”
A little later, he said: “I’m happy that they judged themselves so ... tough, so I must have done something right, because in the past it was the opposite — they didn’t recognize the mistakes and now they actually do.”
That said, Staudinger said the track at the Sanki Sliding Centre dramatically slowed down over the course of the night.
Canada started second to last in the field of 12 and all the teams on the podium — the powerhouse Germans on top with gold, Russians with silver and the Latvians in bronze — started earlier, the Russians in the first unseeded group. It gave them an advantage, Staudinger said.
“The further we went down, the slower we got, and that’s a clear sign that the track slowed down dramatically. And we just couldn’t keep the speed.”
If it was a body blow to Canadian luge — the program was aiming for two medals and would have been satisfied with one — and felt like the end of the world, what should not be lost is how dramatic the team’s improvement has been and how very much it is now in the mix of the best luge nations on the planet.
In Vancouver four years ago, Edney’s seventh-place finish in men’s singles was the best placing Canada had ever had in that event. No Canadian woman had ever done better than seventh, no doubles team better than fifth.
As high-performance director Walt Corey put it, “to be basically breaths short in three disciplines out of four is pretty solid sliding.”
And, yet, he admitted: “I feel our group is gutted, absolutely. You don’t do all the blood sweat and tears and come here and say, ‘well, we’re happy with fourths.’ That’s not the dream.”
The athletes, most of whom he coached as 10-year-olds, need no “magic on it,” no happy-face spin.
“They’re devastated,” he said. “To be just a little bit shy is a wound that’s going to hurt for a long time.”
The thing about sliding sports, he said, is that “when you can strike you want to strike, because you never know what the next season looks like, the next injuries, the next athletes.
“This was a really big time. Of course, we’re extremely proud, but I’d lie if I said our group was holding their emotions in check. They wanted to have the distinction of winning the first luge medal for our country ...
“This is evidence that winning isn’t easy, and that there’s a price. I feel ... that our athletes and staff have paid that price.”
As Staudinger said, “This is badass. There’s nothing else to say. This is brutal.”
He lives with them six months a year, has watched them grow and mature into the fine young people they are.
After all of it, he said: “We can look each other into the eye when we have spoken a couple of hard tough words and move on.
“But that brands that team, that brands that program — honesty and direction is very important, and they can handle the honesty and that has moved them into the spot where they are now.”
The brand, at least, is intact, if not the hearts.