Christie’s Olympics jinx strikes again
After brave comeback in the 1,000m, speed skater is disqualified in yet another dose of bad luck at Games
FOR a blissful moment, it seemed as if British speed skater Elise Christie had finally left her catalogue of Olympic nightmares behind.
Nursing a damaged ankle, the 27-year-old Scot had pulled off a breathtaking surge from 30m behind the pace, snaking through her competitors at lightning speed to cross the line in second and, surely, seize a place in the 1,000m short track quarter finals.
Yet it was with sickening inevitability that just a few minutes later the dream was over. Yellow card: disqualified. She was going home.
For her legion of fans, it must have seemed ordained.
Misfortune had just tipped Christie out of her last remaining event at the Pyeongchang winter games; just as it had in all three competitions at Sochi four years ago.
Brilliantly talented, the skater from Nottingham has won three World Championships and is a 10-time European gold medallist. Yet her Olympic attempts have been dogged by shocking failure.
At the 2014 games she was disqualified from all her events, and last week she fell in the 500m, suffered the same fate in Saturday’s 1,500m semi-final, before her disqualification yesterday.
It has led some to question if the problem is more than bad luck, but psychological; whether Christie is destined to join the cadre of world-class sportsmen and women who for some reason never perform on the very biggest stage.
As the “shell-shocked” athlete said herself after being carried from the ice, her disappointment “wasn’t through lack of capability”.
Dr David Fletcher, a sports psychologist at the Centre for Olympic Studies and Research at Loughborough University, said: “Plenty have disappointments, but Elise is quite an extreme case.”
He explained that the brain has a finite processing capability and that, unless properly compartmentalised, the memory of recent failure can sap the faculties needed for top-level physical performance, a phenomenon that can snowball if it leads to more mistakes.
“The mantra of sports psychology is to control the controllable,” he said. “But if you’re stressed you can overload the brain processes and derail performance. It’s a complex cocktail but in the end it’s the athletes who can control their minds and bodies who are successful.” To further twist the knife, Christie appeared to be overcoming an ankle injury that she sustained in her 1,500m fall.
She had already fallen in the first seconds of yesterday’s heat, but officials had granted her a second chance by restarting the race. After yesterday’s event, she told the BBC she would have bowed out of any other competition, but the lure of Olympic success had prompted her to carry on. Her lack of fitness initially told, but as Wilf O’reilly, the former British short-track skater, said: “That was immense courage that Elise Christie showed to get on the ice and then to go back to the start and be 20 to 30m off the pace, and close the gap.”
Once back with the pack, it was in the weaving and rapid position changing in and around the corners that the Scot picked up her yellow card, a decision which left her baffled.
“The only thing I can think of is if the referee doesn’t think I was safe enough to race,” she said.
Thanking her fans, she promised to “fight back” from the disaster and do her best to represent Great Britain at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.
“It’s been tough. I’ve had to make some hard decisions. Part of me was saying: ‘It’s not meant to be, don’t bother going on.’ But another part was saying: ‘Just fight once more, one more try. I deserved that and it’s my best distance. It just wasn’t meant to be.”
Christie appeared in good spirits after passing a fitness test in the morning and looked confident in the pre-race practice. She said later that another skater had hit her ankle during the crash she suffered on her first start.
“I thought the adrenalin might take over, and it didn’t.”