Pendrel looks beyond London letdown
MOUNTAIN BIKING: Crushing finish at Olympics becomes rallying point for Pan Ams
TORONTO — It took some time for Catharine Pendrel to realize that perhaps there wasn’t an answer for the lowest moment of her brilliant athletic career.
That in her sport, as in life, sometimes you might not have it on a given day and that any search for an explanation is best left behind on the hill.
For Pendrel, one of the best mountain bikers in the world over the past eight years, picking herself up after a crushing ninth-place finish at the 2012 London Olympics was excruciating, given the gold-medal expectations that trailed her to England.
“It was definitely a blow,” Pendrel said Tuesday as she prepared for the Pan Am Games and her latest lofty expectations of being one of the first Canadians to win gold on home soil. “I lost confidence in my racing for a little bit. But you can let a bad result deprive you of the joy of what you do, or you can let it fire you up.”
Eventually, Pendrel chose the latter and at age 34, is still in the prime of her career and the peak of her sport.
A win on Sunday at the Hardwood Mountain Bike Park in Oro-Medonte won’t atone for her Olympic disappointment, but it could well continue Pendrel along the path to success at next year’s Games in Brazil. And it sure sounds as though the Kamloops native and reigning Commonwealth and world champion is focused on making her third Olympics a medal-winning one.
In fact, like many Canadian teams competing in Ontario over the next week, Canada’s four-person mountain bike squad is treating the Pan Am Games as a serious prep event for Rio de Janeiro.
“Our focus is to do all the little things right — master the process and the fundamentals — so that Rio is successful next year,” Canada’s mountain bike head coach, Dan Proulx, said on Tuesday. “Our focus is actually on training capacity for this year and making sure we are as fit as possible going into that Olympic year. We’re even willing to sacrifice some results to make sure that happens.”
Pendrel readily admits that a missing Olympic medal is the major gap in her career resume and the recovery from the London miscue took time.
After finishing fourth in Beijing in 2008, she headed to England as the reigning world champion and one of Canada’s top golden hopes. Instead, her showing left her stumped for the better part of a year.
“There are so many things that go into having a good performance,” said Pendrel, who won gold at the 2007 Pan Ams in Rio. “One hundred per cent will I know what happened (in London)? No. My body just shut down. Hopefully I have the tools now that if I were to get into that same situation, maybe I could turn it around.”
Like Pendrel, the rest of the Canadian team struggled in London. Emily Batty, an up-and-comer at the time and now a fellow Pan Am medal contender, suffered a broken clavicle two days before her competition. It was a disaster almost from start to disappointing finish.
But after using 2013 as a year to regroup and recover, the results have picked up. Both Pendrel and Batty feel they gained strength from the London struggles.
“A lot of the highest achievers in any field, they come through adversity,” Proulx said. “I don’t think we had that as a team until London. This was a pivotal moment for us and it did kind of take about a year to work through as a team to figure out what did it mean and how do we move on and get better from that. I think it’s going to help us in Rio because we have a new perspective and a new maturity that we didn’t have.”
No one is trying to hoodwink you into believing the Pan Ams are the Olympics, but for athletes, even a lesser multi-event Games has some simulation value. Factor in the pressure and excitement of having the competition on home soil and it adds to the significance.
“There’s nothing quite like a Games even in terms of the pressure you put on yourself,” Pendrel said. “I felt a little susceptible to that in London, where it became very much about a medal and that didn’t allow me to find my best performance on that day. Hopefully I am able to maintain that headspace going into Rio next year. There’s still things left undone in my career. I’m happy with what I’ve done, but I’m excited about another opportunity.”