RIGHT ON TRACK
Speedskater Kim Boutin wins a second bronze medal, adding to Canada’s haul from Pyeongchang and capping a roller-coaster week for the Quebec athlete, who became the target of online threats.
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— The bitter with the sweet.
Because, while Canada may have found itself a prince and princess of short-track speedskating — gold and bronze within a dramatic half-hour at the Gangneung Ice Arena — the king and queen are this close to abdicating.
Earlier than they might have reckoned at the XIII Olympics.
To put it bluntly, Charles Hamelin and his own sweetheart, Marianne St-Gelais — royalty of the genre, their fingerprints all over a nation’s soft-track glory in the last decade-plus-plus — have been lapped. Elbowed, in a rude elbows-up sport. And they have mentored their own usurpers, the heirs apparent that their passion and influence have spawned.
On the podium for the men’s 1,000 metres: Samuel Girard, the 21-year-old with the valiantly-trying moustache and the retro mane bush of hair. Hamelin, meanwhile, was disqualified in the semi- finals for a move that actually involved Girard.
On the podium for the women’s 1,500 metres: Kim Boutin, collecting her second bronze of the Games. St-Gelais got the DQ-heave in the semis for impeding an opponent, contact that sent St-Gelais grimacing to the ice and crashing into the mats.
“Yes, I fell and I’m disqualified. But I think the pass (on a Korean skater) was good and if I didn’t put a toe in (the ice), I think I would have been in the final. I was there physically, mentally and tactically.”
The 28-year-old — her birthday on Saturday — had been likewise penalized in the quarters of the 500 on Tuesday. Hamelin committed a fatal error in his final in the 1,500 last weekend, penalized and dropped to ninth.
Girard had just missed that podium with a fourth-place finish.
It didn’t take long for the long, lanky native of Ferland-et-Boilleau, Que., to scale the podium triumvirate, though, as he applied the hard lessons learned to his second final in Pyeongchang.
There have been other lessons learned as Hamelin’s roommate at the athletes village, his shadow at the Games and on the sport’s circuit in the past few years, which includes, for Girard, a world championship at this distance in 2017.
“I think I’m not realizing right now,” an over-the-moon Girard told reporters in the mixed-zone after his race. “For now I’m just enjoying the moment. For my family, my coach, I’m really, really happy right now.”
For his girlfriend and teammate Kasandra Bradette too. Romance flourishes inside the tight world of short track.
Hamelin had said to him, as they lined up for the semi: “Let’s go, you can do this.”
“He gave me a tap on the back,” Girard said. “We train together, all the team was behind me on this medal.”
But Hamelin, at his fourth Games, was the odd man out of that race, a possibility after short-trackers take to the starting position, in a sport likened to roller derby on ice. As Hamelin had often mused about his sport: Short track can raise you to glory one day and plunge you into heartbreak the next.
As Girard has said of his elder and hero: “I want to continue what Charles has started.”
Girard had yet to look at the video which would explain how the tangle had thwarted his beloved teammate. “Every medal has a story. I showed I earned my place in the A final.”
He did it with a time of 1:24.650, fending off American John-Henry Krueger in what had turned into a two-man contest in the bell lap.
Girard had been leading for much of the race in front of a hometown crowd gaga-loud for their two South Korean finalists, in a country that is an Olympics short-track colossus. But a crash just as the skaters entered the final lap took out three of the five of them, though the Koreans eventually crossed the finish line. Krueger took silver, Seo Yira the bronze.
“It was a pretty good race, a fast race,” said Girard afterward. “I took the first place right away. Something happened at the back. I don’t want to be there when those things happen. So I really want to be in the front.”
That was the strategy, slickly executed.
“Everyone wanted to be out of the trouble. I was the guy at the front putting on a good pace, trying to put everyone in trouble so they had to fight to try and pass me. I managed it pretty well, that was the key.”
He heard the crash in his wake but never saw it.
“I just heard a big boom in the mats," he said. "After that I was just thinking about my race and what I had to do.”
In triumph, Girard joined Hamelin and Marc Gagnon as the only Cana- dian men to win an individual gold medal in short track at the Olympics, making it nine for his country since the sport entered the Winter Games fray in Albertville, equalling the total for freestyle skiing and speedskating. Only hockey has won more for Canada — 13.
In the women’s 1,500, South Korean 19-year-old Choi Minjeong became the sixth teenager to win individual short track gold for Korea at the Games. They’re tiny ladies but fierce. China’s Li Jinyu took silver.
For the 23-year-old Boutin, from Sherbrooke, Que., double bronze in Pyeongchang makes her the first Canadian woman to win multiple individual short-track medals at a single Games.
A fast time bunched at the front, with Boutin clocking 2:25.834 to Choi’s 2:24.948.
“Well, my nickname is Kimmy Gonzales,” she laughed.
There was poignancy to it, with St-Gelais waylaid. “Of course. She’s my inspiration.” St-Gelais was there at the end, to share her teammate’s joy.
“It takes a lot for her to be there and to celebrate with me the medal. Because I know she really wanted this medal. She really deserved the gold medal.”
That’s short track, as they say, a cruel mistress.
Preparing for this race, Boutin was still upset over the hateful social media messages — death threats even, although surely these were just grumps popping off — that she had received after Choi had been DQ’d in the 500-metre final, with all of Korea apparently blaming the Canadian for what happened, although the officials saw it differently.
“I heard some things and it hurt me a lot,” Boutin admitted. “But I have a pretty awesome team and they told me I didn’t have to care anymore about this situation because it’s under control. But of course it was hard. After my warmup today, I cried. It was a lot of emotion. I had to come back here to do a race.
“I was just scared. I was just scared for my security.”
CBC, meanwhile, reported that someone “may have been arrested” for the Twitter threats.
St-Gelais said the whole team had taken Boutin under their wing to distract her from the Twitter river of vomit.
“We decided to just put it in a positive way. February 13 was the day she won her first Olympic medal and that’s what we’re going to focus on. That’s what we’re sharing. Honestly, we don’t really want to know the whole story, the whole details. What we want is Kim as focussed as she is right now.”
Because there’s another event racing toward them — the 3,000metre women’s relay on Tuesday.
“I’m lucky I got to race the three distances,” said St-Gelais. “I have another chance.”
“After my warm-up today, I cried . . . I was just scared. I was scared for my security.” KIM BOUTIN STILL SHAKEN BY TWITTER THREATS