Canada’s Guay third at men’s super-G.
Associated Press

LENZERHEIDE, Switzerland – A fine season for Canadian skiers got a little better Thursday as Eric Guay finished third in the super-G at the World Cup finals.

With yesterday’s third-place finish in the final men’s super giant slalom of the World Cup season, the Canadian men’s ski team distinguished themselves as the most successful alpine bunch in Canadian history, better even than the Crazy Canucks of the 1970s and 1980s.

Erik Guay of Mont-Tremblant, Que., won the super-G bronze medal to give the Canadian men their 12th podium finish of the season and the team’s 14th over all, which includes the two medals won by Kelly VanderBeek and Emily Brydon.
Mr. Guay’s super showing marked the fifth time this season he has made it to the medal podium. In the same race, John Kucera of Calgary did well enough to finish third in the super-G overall rankings.

Canada’s previous best was 13 podium finishes in 1981-82.

“I think this should be the start of something big,” Mr. Kucera said from Lenzerheide, Switzerland. “There were the Crazy Canucks. Now, we’re the Canadian Cowboys, and, hopefully, we’re the next big step in Canadian skiing.”

The Cowboys are equally close-knit and have learned to enjoy each other’s sensibilities. “There’s good camaraderie,” Mr. Osborne-Paradis said in a recent interview. “I know in the past that hasn’t been so. The French have stuck with themselves a little. The English stuck with the English. But we’re united now.”
And they’ve all had their moments, which is surprising, considering their lack of high-level experience.

“If you look at the other teams on the World Cup, the veterans on the Austrian team are all 34, 35, 36 years old,” Mr. Guay said. “We’re such a young team and we’re learning together. We’re meshing. It’s a fun time right now.”

The Canadian men’s alpine team is making a name for itself, one the athletes can live with and, more important, live up to as they ski out of the shadows of their famous forerunners.

Despatie and Miranda earn Canada’s first medal at world aquatic championships.
Canadian Sport News

MELBOURNE, Australia – Alexandre Despatie of Laval, Que., and Arturo Miranda of Pointe-Claire, Que., won Canada’s first medal at the world aquatic championships on Monday with silver in the men’s three-metre synchro diving event.

Kai Qin and Feng Wang of China won the gold medal, the Canadians followed at and Tobias Schellenberg and Andreas Wels of Germany were third.  It is Canada’s first world championship medal in men’s synchronized diving and the result also secures a spot for Canada in the event at the Olympic Games next year.

The competition took an unusual twist in the middle of the fourth round when a power outage caused a 20-minute delay which seemed to affect the divers in different ways. 

‘’We didn’t let the delay affect us,’’ said Despatie, 21, who added he didn’t feel any pain from his neck injury which kept him off the boards most of last season.  ‘’We came back really strong after that and got back in the medal race.  But overall that second place is worth a lot for us.  We think the Chinese are beatable, it’s happened before.  We saw at the Athens Olympics they can make errors.’’

Miranda wasn’t surprised with the final result. ‘’When we got together (two years ago) we saw the potential that we could compete with the best in the world,’’ he said.  ‘’It was a question of how do we do today.  We had a slow prelims but we knew if we put in more effort and try harder we would be in the race.’’

Neilson’s best on a ‘board: Third place enough to give Canuck championship.
The Vancouver Sun

As the quintessential everyman of the World Cup snowboard circuit, Drew Neilson—father, construction worker, ex-partier-turned-all business ‘boarder—found the perfect way to celebrate his first overall discipline title Saturday in Stoneham, Que.

Neilson’s string of three straight wins in snowboard cross was snapped Saturday, but his third-place finish in the World Cup season-finale was still enough to give him the first points crown of his career. Neilson, 32, had been second twice and third on two other occasions.

 “I’ve been a fixture. People say world championship snowboarder Drew Neilson. Well, technically no. Now, it’s nice to have that. It’s redemption for me and one of those things I can knock off my to-do list.”

With heavy winds affecting the morning qualifying, Neilson was only the 22nd fastest of the 32 who advanced to the four-boarder elimination heats. His only competition for the trophy, American Nate Holland, tied for the 32nd fastest time and needed to win a run-off to advance.

But Holland was eliminated in the very first heat, when only the top two advance. “I pretty much knew before the day started that I had the [trophy], but I was there to win,” said Neilson. “It would have been nice to do four in a row, but I still got on the podium and a lot of my co-riders were telling me they were pretty impressed with my season. That was nice.”

Neilson, who raced without his upper body armour after forgetting it at the hotel in the morning, won his opening heat, finished second in the quarterfinals and won his semifinal. He got a poor start in the final and finished behind Pierre Vaultier of France and Nick Baumgartner of the U.S.

As one of the proven veterans on the team, Neilson had chafed earlier at some of the commitments the Canadian Snowboard Federation wanted for off-season and dryland training. But he found a way to balance family, work and gym time.
“There’ll be more demands as the Olympics get closer. I’ll just try to compromise or play their game.”

Kelly closes the skeleton season with silver.
Canadian Press

KOENIGSSEE, Germany — Michelle Kelly won World Cup silver in her last race of the skeleton season Monday.

The native of Fort St. John, B.C., was just under a second behind winner Anja Huber of Germany.

It was a great finish to the season for Kelly, who started with a disqualification at a World Cup meet in Calgary due to an overweight sled and who is due for shoulder surgery next month.

“It’s a great feeling to end the year this way,” she said. “Right before the race, I reminded myself that I really love what I do. It’s fun, and I wanted to go out with a good race, which I did.”

Kelly finished third in World Cup point standings with 389. American Katie Uhlaender was first with 715. Kelly’s showing was impressive given the disqualification and a missed event early in the season.

“Finishing third overall was really the icing on the cake,” Kelly said. “I couldn’t be happier.”

Sarah Reid of Calgary finished ninth Monday, and Carla Pavan of Lethbridge, Alta., was 13th. Amy Gough of Abbotsford, B.C., did not advance to the second heat but still managed to rank seventh in the overall standings.

Lindsay Alcock of Calgary, who did not compete at the last two World Cup races, finished 15th in the standings.

Great Scott Giant wins.
The Calgary Herald

Canada’s Kelly Scott is proving to be the class of the field early on at the 2007 world women’s curling championship in Aomori, the first adult world event ever hosted in Asia.

Scott bested her two main rivals, defending world and Olympic champion Anette Norberg of Sweden and 2006 finalist Debbie McCormick of the United States, on a critical day at the Aomori Prefecture Skating Rink venue.

Scott defeated Norberg 7-5 and McCormick 8-4 to move to 4-0 and hold on to first place. “That was a big game for us,” said Scott. “It was important for us to know that we can beat this team.”

Scott was 0-3 lifetime versus Norberg heading into the match, and had rarely competed abroad prior to last fall. Last year’s world bronze medallist had told the media prior to the worlds that she had a “bag of tricks” ready for the Swedish champions. But when asked about it, Scott admitted the difference—and Sunday’s victory—were due to old-fashioned hard work.

And Scott, a decorated high-performance competitor, seemed not to mind a basic training approach any amateur club curler would choose. “We went to Europe (in January) and international competition helped,” Scott explained. “But we’ve really worked on our mechanics, we’ve worked hard to improve.
“We’ve worked on our strategy, our technical approach, a whole bunch of things.”

For Norberg, it was simply a bad day at the office. “We deserved to lose,” said the tall skip, never one to mince words. “We had two or three bad rocks, and it took a while to figure out what was wrong. They fooled me a bit.”