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Sport Performance Weekly
February 5th , 2007 |
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The Globe and Mail
The World Cup speed-skating event might have been at the Turin Olympic site, but the outcome wasn’t same. Still, Canadian athletes won five medals, two of them yesterday, in the final World Cup event before the world all-round speed- skating championships in Heerenveen, the Netherlands, next week.
Cindy Klassen of Winnipeg, who won five medals at the Turin Games, won the bronze medal yesterday in the women’s 1,500 metres, an event she won a year ago at the Winter Olympics. She also finished third in the women’s 3,000 metres on Saturday, happy to get a distance race under her belt before the championships begin.
The stars of the show were the Canadian men’s team, which won the gold medal in the 3,200-metre pursuit, a race in which they won the silver medal at the Olympics last year.
All three members of the Olympic team were back: Denny Morrison of Calgary, Arne Dankers of Calgary and Steven Elm of Red Deer, Alta. They finished first in 3 minutes 48.08 seconds, ahead of Russia and Italy, the Olympic champions.
The Canadian women won the silver medal in the women’s 2,400-metre pursuit. The team—Kristina Groves of Ottawa, Christine Nesbitt of London, Ont., and Brittany Schussler of Winnipeg—finished second only .05 of a second behind Russia, who won the gold. A Dutch team was third.
Nesbitt and Groves had been part of the Olympic team a year ago.
Groves was fourth in the women’s 1,500 metres behind Klassen, while Nesbitt was fifth.
Morrison, of Fort St. John, B.C., finished third in the men’s 1,500 metres behind Enrico Fabius of Italy and Erben Wennemars of the Netherlands.
Morrison, who finished in 1:46.07, was a little more than a second behind Fabius and is currently third in the World Cup standings.
“That was a big improvement over my performance earlier in the season,” Morrison said. “The training I’ve done is really starting to pay off and it’s setting me up well for the world championships next weekend. I’m skating the way I want to right now.” |
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With two Olympic medals and 70 World Cup podium finishes in his 17-year career, there would appear to be little left for Edmonton native Pierre Lueders, Canada’s most decorated bobsleigh pilot, to get excited about.
However, Lueders said Sunday’s silver medal in four-man at the world championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland, was as satisfying a finish as he’s ever had. With a steering mechanism part borrowed from the Canada 2 sled after the first day of competition, Lueders and his crew leapfrogged two other sleds on the fourth and final run to finish second.
Lueders’ four-run time of four minutes, 21.09 seconds allowed him to inch past defending world champion Andre Lange of Germany by one one-hundredth of a second and also knock Steven Holcomb of the U.S. off the podium. “This could possibly be the most meaningful four-man result of my career,” Lueders, 36, said in Switzerland. “I have a great crew and they did everything they could to achieve this medal today.”
Lueders’ crew consisted of Ken Kotyk of Rama, Sask., David Bissett of Edmonton and Lascelles Brown of Calgary. Lueders, who was fourth in the four-man at the Turin Olympics, teamed with Brown there to win silver in the two-man.
Ivo Ruegg, who set start and track records in the final run Sunday, drove Switzerland to the upset gold medal in front of boisterous home-country fans lined up five and six deep along the 1.7-kilometre track. It was the first four-man gold medal for Switzerland since 1993. Lange’s third-place finished ended a run of five straight world and Olympic gold medals since 2002 for the German.
After Saturday’s first two runs, Lueders discovered that part of his sled’s steering mechanism was damaged. He accepted a part from the Canada 2 sled of Lyndon Rush of Humbolt, Sask., forcing Rush and his crew, who were in 21st place, to sit out the second day of competition.
“It was Lyndon’s first world championship and he gave up his chance to compete today to help us—to help Canada win a medal,” said Lueders.
“It was a real show of team spirit." |
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The Vancouver Sun
A rare genetic disease has left Brian McKeever with only eight-to-10 per cent vision. It hasn’t, however, stopped the accomplished cross-country skier from focusing intently on a pretty remarkable goal.
One of Canada’s most decorated Paralympic athletes, McKeever, 27, wants to race at both the Olympics and Paralympics in 2010.
Last weekend, he took a giant kick-and-glide forward by qualifying for the 13-member Canadian senior team bound for Sapporo, Japan, later this month and the FIS world cross-country ski championships.
“I think I surprised a lot of people,” McKeever said Wednesday from his home in Canmore, Alta. “Did I surprise myself? I don’t think so. I had my eyes set on this the whole year.”
McKeever qualified by posting the second-best points total in the distance races at Canmore, behind national team skier George Grey of Rossland.
McKeever won four medals, including two gold, at the 2006 Paralympics with his brother Robin, a former Olympian, acting as his guide. In 2002 in Salt Lake City, the McKeever duo won two gold and a silver.
Brian has to ski alone at able-bodied events, but with the much larger fields he will try to go with whoever’s leading, sit in behind somebody and use somebody else as a guide. “If I’m close enough to the guy in front me, parts of him disappear. A few metres back, entire bodies will disappear,” he said. “Climbing is easy enough because you’re going slower. Downhills and corners I have to be a little bit careful.”
McKeever competed in the 1998 world junior championships, but by 1999 he couldn’t read billboards from the car window. He suffers from Stargaard’s disease, which leads to macular degeneration or loss of central vision.
He describes his impairment as similar to what sighted people experience when they stare at the sun for a long time and then turn away. “You get these fuzzy spots. For me, the fuzzy spots don’t go away.”
McKeever says that even after moving to disabled skiing, it was always in the back of his mind to some day challenge himself against Canada’s best. Two years ago, he won the overall title at the nationals—he didn’t compete last year because it conflicted with the Paralympics—and that was the confirmation that, given the right circumstances, he could qualify for a world team.
“I didn’t set out necessarily to be a role model. If people want to take me that way, okay. But I did set out to push the envelope as far as disabled skiing goes.”
McKeever said national team officials have been incredibly supportive, particularly in having people call out times and speeds during the races last week and ensuring that he got the necessary liquids and sugars.
National team head coach Dave Wood, who coached McKeever at the ‘98 world juniors, says he always believed Brian was capable of competing with this country’s best male racers. And he thinks he can make the Olympic team in 2010. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s physically capable. Of course, I would hope his sight hangs in there.
“To me, that would be the only thing that could potentially stand in his way.”
It hasn’t been determined which races McKeever will contest in Sapporo, “but I would love to race the 50K, the longest one. It’s a classic [technique] race ... and I like the long ones.”
He says qualifying for the worlds is “right up there” with winning Paralympic medals. “It was the next challenge and it’s also the next step on the way to being the fastest racer I can be. And I have to start racing internationally, be competitive internationally, if I’m going to 2010. This is a big accomplishment, yet it’s only the first step.” |
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The Ottawa Citizen
If you place the athletic resumes of Kristina Groves and Osvaldo Jeanty side by side, you’ll notice significant differences.
Groves is a winter athlete, one of the top middle-distance long-track speed skaters in the world. Jeanty is a four-season athlete, one of the best amateur basketball guards in Canada.
Less is better for Groves as she aims to cut tenths or full seconds from her trips around international ovals. More is pleasing to Jeanty as he contributes points and assists to the Carleton University Ravens offence.
Groves, 30, who lives and trains in Calgary, is starting the final quadrennial of her meticulously built career, which has seen her race 11 years with the national team.
But there was one striking similarity last night at the sold-out 54th annual Ottawa Sports Awards dinner at Algonquin College where Groves and Jeanty were named the respective female and male athletes of the year.
Dinner organizers passed out 12 major awards and also honoured 65 athletes in 60 sports as well as numerous individual and team champions at the provincial and national levels. It was a record-tying third time Groves was selected an athlete of the year by the Ottawa sports media. Groves also was the top female for her achievements in 2003 and 2004.
“I was thrilled they (organizers) told me,” Groves said in a telephone interview earlier this week from Turin, Italy. “The first year my parents told me I won after they read it in the newspaper. I didn’t appreciate it as much or have a chance to give thanks. “I’m never able to be there (because of a conflict with the competitive season) and I wanted to say thank you.”
Groves, a silver medallist in the women’s 1,500 metres and team pursuit at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin and a four-time medallist at the world single-distance championships, corrected that this year in a four-minute thank-you video to the crowd numbering more than 600. |
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It’s been more than a quarter-century since a Canadian man stood on the podium at the world ski championships, but the long drought could end today as the 2007 championships open in windswept Are, Sweden, with one of Canada’s best events, the super giant slalom.
It would take some upstaging of favourites for John Kucera or Erik Guay to win the opening race of the two-week climax of the weather-plagued season.
American Bode Miller is the defending champion and he’s declared he’s out to win five medals in Are. Olympic downhill champ Antoine Deneriaz of France and Italian Peter Fill say they’re ready to take the super-G title. Then there are four Austrians in the field of 68, from the relatively young Mario Schreiber, 24, to wily 34-year-old codgers Hermann Maier and Fritz Strobel.
But Canadians have been the surprise of the World Cup tour this season, having taken six podium places and shown an overall revival of the program that looked dead five years ago at the Salt Lake Olympics. The target set by Alpine Canada for the world championships is two medals.
Kucera, of Calgary, made one Canadian breakthrough to start the season, winning the super G at Lake Louise, Alta. He followed up with a third-place finish at Val Gardena, Italy. “My results through the season have shown that if I can get my stuff together on race day, I can compete with the top guys,” Kucera told The Canadian Press.
Today, Kucera said, the focus will be on the technical side of his race as he faces a 2,127- metre course with a vertical drop of 637 metres. Skiers will hit speeds of 90 kilometres an hour and be airborne over a gradient as steep as 69 per cent.
Alpine Canada is sending a 19-member team to the world championships (11 men and eight women), which will wrap up with the team event on Feb. 18.
The six podium places so far put the Canadian team ahead of schedule for its 2010 Olympic mission. Things cooled off at the start of January, and that was fine with Ken Read, the chief executive officer of Alpine Canada.
He didn’t want anyone to panic or start scrapping the program just because there wasn’t a weekly podium parade. Success is something you manage, especially with the emotional roller coaster where an athlete goes from the high of a medal performance to idleness and uncertainty because of bad weather.
“They’ve done a great job,” Read said in an interview. “It was never expected to be a constant upward streak. When a young team starts fast, then hits a plateau, this is the patience period. You stick with them, give them some time when they need it.
“We actually sent some athletes home at Christmas for a break, walking away from potential team points at Bormio [Italy]. “The point was to position the athletes and the team for the world championships and the remainder of the year. It’s about patience and support.”
The Canadians have been consistent when not on the medal stand, usually posting three finishers in the top 20.“It’s exciting for me and the whole team to know we could not only have podiums here, there could be somebody that wins,” said Osborne-Paradis, of Vancouver.
The other Canadian men who have won World Cup medals this season are: Guay, of Mont-Tremblant, Que., second in the Val d’Isere downhill; Michael Janyk of Whistler, B.C., silver in a slalom at Beaver Creek, Colo.; and Francois Bourque of New Richmond, Que., second in a giant slalom at Hinterstoder, Austria.
Leading the Canadian women’s team will be Kelly VanderBeek of Kitchener, Ont., who was third in a super G at Lake Louise, and veteran Emily Brydon of Fernie, B.C.
Former World Cup medalists on the team are Brydon, Thomas Grandi of Canmore, Alta., and Genevieve Simard of Val-Morin, Que.
Canadian women have traditionally done well at the world championships, winning a total of 14 medals dating back to 1956. Melanie Turgeon won the downhill in 2003 in St. Moritz, Switzerland, while Allison Forsyth was third in the giant slalom. |
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The Whitehorse 2007 Canada Winter Games are a major undertaking. In fact, these games will be the biggest event ever staged in Canada north of the 60th parallel.
A total of 37 registered athletes and alumni from the National Sport School (NSS) in Calgary will be competing at the Games in Whitehorse.
The Games will run for two weeks from February 23rd to March 10th, 2007. Over 3,600 athletes, coaches and managers will gather in Whitehorse to compete for a total of 1,122 medals in 22 sports. Whitehorse will also host several non-sporting venues including the Athletes Village, Mission Centre, the Media Centre, the Volunteer Centre and venues for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. It is anticipated that Canada’s national broadcasters will provide over 100 hours of television coverage.
The Games are Canada’s premier multi-sport competition, and are held every second year, alternating between summer and winter. They showcase our nation’s top elite amateur athletes, many of whom will go on to represent Canada at the international level. The 2007 Games will be a major competition for many young athletes on their way to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
For a complete list of the NSS athletes competing at the Games, please click here. |
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The Alberta Sport Development Centre Northwest located in Grande Prairie is putting on a Sport Performance Conference, the first of its kind in Northern Alberta.
The Sport Performance Conference is March 2nd and 3rd, 2007 and the featured speakers include Olympic Gold Medalist Beckie Scott, internationally recognized Dr. Stephen Norris who is an expert on Long Term Athlete Development (works at the Candian Sports Centre in Calgary).
The Alberta Sport Development Centre Northwest supports Grande Prairie and the surrounding area. Its mission is to enhance sport in the region by providing programs and services to Athletes and Coaches who are striving to reach or are currently at a high performance level but need assistance to advance to the next level.
The Alberta Sport Development Centre Northwest has just recently partnered up with the Come Fly With Me Foundation started by Ryan Blais who is on the Canadian National Free Style Ski Team in offering scholarships for athletes.
Detailed information about the Centre, programs and services and about the Sport Performance Conference can be found on our webpage. To register for the Centre or the Conference please go to www.highperformancesports.ca
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