Medals a long time coming for Girard
Her family was there. Her three children, all 4 or younger, who didn’t really know what it meant. That didn’t matter, though. Her husband, her parents, her friends; her old training partners and coaches. The people, she said, who carried her. They were all there to see it.
“I had so much joy, so much love obviously,” said Christine Girard, after a ceremony in Ottawa awarding her a gold medal in weightlifting from the 2012 London Games, and a bronze from Beijing 2008. “To share that moment with them was so powerful … it was really wonderful to be able to share that with everybody. I’m so proud and so happy.”
It was such a long journey. She started weightlifting at 9 because her older sister started, and Christine was the youngest of four and she did what her older sisters did. She was powerful. She went to Beijing. She finished fourth, three kilos short.
“It was really hard, because it was the biggest failure in my life,” she says. “I came back devastated with that result, but decided that I would change that result four years later. And that’s what kept me going for those four years that were the hardest of my life.”
Her future husband, Walter, got a job with the RCMP in suburban Vancouver and they moved. She felt burned out. She barely spoke English. She was depressed. Money was tight, because who sponsors fourth place? Her old coach told her she was too old, and her athletic dreams were over.
“And I was there, and trying to keep believing because I made a promise to myself,” says Girard.
“And so many times I wanted to give up. It would have made sense, you know?”
It would have made sense. In early 2010 she suffered a bad back injury; her coach back in Quebec didn’t believe it was bad. He said she was too old. She couldn’t walk her dog.
He asked for more money and she couldn’t afford it, so they parted ways. She was so lonely. It felt like too much.
But those three kilos haunted her. Christine’s father came across the country and they turned a carport into a makeshift gym. She lifted. She would sometimes have trouble falling asleep because her hips and legs hurt, as the weights piled up. She hated making weight, because she loved to cook. She would cut her diet ruthlessly. She would cut out fruit because of the sugar. She lifted. And she went to London and she finished third in this oh-sodirty sport, and got to stand on a podium. She did it. She had her first child a couple years later.
The calls came. Weightlifters who finished ahead of her had been caught in the retroactive net, tested positive. Her fourth in Beijing turned into bronze because a Kazakh got nailed for doping. A different Kazakh and a Russian were disqualified from London, years after the fact. She’s Canada’s second gold medallist from London. It took all these years, but Christine Girard is an Olympic champion.
And Monday they gave her the medals in front of the people she loved, and it was the greatest thing she could imagine.
“I thought of (a gold-medal podium moment in London), but I wouldn’t say a million times,” says Girard, 33. “For me, 2012 was a great result. Like, I proved to my younger self that it was possible to win an Olympic medal as a weightlifter. So to me it was a huge win, even though it was third place … and seriously, after being on the podium today, looking at all my family, all my friends, people I trained with, some of my coaches — I don’t think there’s anything that can equal that. So I guess now I’m lucky because I have two really wonderful podium moments to cherish.” When it was announced Girard was getting her medals, Beckie Scott called. Her crosscountry bronze in Salt Lake City became a silver, and eventually a gold. She is one of the strongest voices in the antidoping movement, a crusader who fights for the right thing, against powerful tides. They talked about how emotional the journey is, when the apparatus somehow works.
“It’s easy to get frustrated and disappointed and lose faith in the system,” said Scott, on the phone from an anti-doping conference in Tokyo. “I think moments like these, while they are complex because of the circumstances, and you wish — of course it’s not ideal, and you wish that everyone who was the rightful owner of that Olympic medal got their moment at the Games, in front of roaring crowds and family and friends. But this is the next best thing. Sometimes life isn’t perfect and things aren’t ideal, but it’s a redress.
“Sometimes, every now and then, by staying true to your values and doing the right thing, justice prevails.”
Girard isn’t bitter, she really isn’t. She’ll explain it to her kids when they’re older. She’ll tell them to believe in themselves and believe in their dreams, and she will tell them it won’t be easy, because nothing worthwhile is.
“I got invited to go speak to an anti-doping symposium in London last week, and to be able to share my story and say here, look, this is what Canada did years ago — because those medals aren’t just mine anymore,” says Girard. “They’re our country’s medals, right? They’re our values. It’s because our country chose to believe in clean sport that I actually can have a gold medal today.
“And my story, I get to go in London and tell all the people that are working on the WADA code to say, this fight is worth it. This fight is worth fighting. And I wouldn’t have done that if I had my medal in London, right?
“So obviously all the money, I lost probably a lot of sponsors that I will never get back. I lost a lot of things that I will never get back. But I got this, and I got my message, and I got my story that I get to share with the world. And that is worth so much to me.”