Speed Demons

The chant was sandwiched between a rousing, singalong of O Canada with the house oom-pah-pah band, and an even lustier rendition of Queen’s We Are the Champions (extra emphasis on “No time for losers”). It lasted maybe 30 seconds, starting out in the grandstands by the backstretch, then spreading quickly around the smooth curves of the Richmond Oval. Christine Nesbitt had just delivered Canada’s third gold medal of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, topping the podium by 0.02 seconds in the women’s 1,000-m speed skating race, and the delirious home crowd was already looking ahead. “We want more! We want more!” they screamed.

Nesbitt didn’t need to be told. Fulfilling the prophecies and clinching the event she was touted to win—the 24-year-old from London, Ont., hadn’t lost a 1,000-m all season long—wasn’t much of a relief, or a release. There were some Kodak moments, as her mother Judith, an elementary school teacher, came to the trackside for a quick hug and to show off the “Go for gold Christine” banner her students at Lord Roberts French Immersion had drawn up on a white bedsheet. Nesbitt also entered into a lingering lip-lock with her boyfriend, Dutch long-tracker Simon Kuipers. But that was about it for passion.

At the flower ceremony—the medals would come later that night at BC Place—silver winner Annette Gerritsen of the Netherlands leapt onto the podium and thrust both arms in the air. The best Nesbitt could muster was a tight smile and a wave. If you had just arrived at the rink, you might have thought they were standing on the wrong spots.

Afterwards, as she faced a throng of reporters in the Oval’s basement, the new Olympic champion let it be known that she wasn’t exactly overjoyed with her performance. “I can’t believe it. I’m really lucky,” she said. “I don’t feel like I won Olympic gold.” The race, she explained, was probably her worst of the year, and the detailed breakdown of why took far longer than her 76.56-second skate to victory. There was a slip in her first steps off the starting line. Then her timing was off as she came out of the first corner. When her coach, Marcel Lacroix, held up a board with her split at the 200-m mark—18.36 seconds, 15th place—the doubts crept in. “I was panicking. I was definitely fighting demons,” she said. “I didn’t feel technically good. I was: ‘Oh, no! I’m not having a good race. I’m not even going to be on the podium.’ ” At the next split, the 600-m mark, she was in ninth place, and sweating it even more. “I knew I wasn’t skating very well. I almost felt like with a lap to go, the crowd fell silent when they saw how far behind I was.” (If that was indeed true, Nesbitt was the only one to notice. It was so loud inside the Richmond Oval that you could barely hear yourself think.)

What Nesbitt’s master class in self-criticism didn’t cover was one of the greatest finishes in Canadian Olympic history. Over the final 400 m, she turned on the jets, chasing down the skater she was paired with, Monique Angermuller of Germany, and blowing right past her. (“She had a piece of meat in front of her; something to chomp on,” Lacroix, her coach, explained later.) Legs churning, arms swinging, she battled down the final straightaway, crossing the line with an awkward toe kick. Good enough for first place, but not by the margin she has come to expect.

For once this season, Nesbitt was forced to watch and wonder, as the last pair, Canadian teammate Kristina Groves and Margot Boer of the Netherlands, flew around the track. The 33-year-old from Ottawa turned in the fastest final lap of the day, but in the end, her time of 1:16.78 was only good enough for fourth, 0.06 seconds behind the bronze.

Nesbitt’s muted reaction to victory speaks volumes about the headspace of many of Canada’s athletes at the 2010 Games. So too with the crowd’s—and the nation’s—hunger for more moments of triumph. The lofty ambition of owning the podium at these Olympics by capturing the most medals turned out to be unrealizable. But such goals are no longer dismissed as unattainable, or somehow un-Canadian. Success is no longer viewed as a bonus: it’s become a shared expectation.

It’s a burden that the long-track speed skaters—who were responsible for a third of the country’s 24 medals in Turin in 2006, and expected to deliver a similar performance in Vancouver—seem to have particularly taken to heart. At the tail end of Canada’s weekend horribilis—crashes that wiped out medal hopefuls, failures to launch, and an opening round loss to the Americans in men’s hockey—Groves and Nesbitt again stepped to the line for the 1,500-m, a distance where they ranked first and second in the world coming into the Games. And this time it was Groves’s turn to disown the podium, winning a conspicuously subdued silver.

To put it in perspective, the willowy blond had already captured an unexpected bronze in the 3,000-m on the opening weekend of the Olympics, followed by her near miss in the 1,000-m. She is also scheduled to race the 5,000-m, and will be part of the women’s pursuit team along with Nesbitt, heavy favourites for the gold. In a sport that has become increasingly specialized over the years, five-race athletes are an endangered species. With good reason. As Groves explained, all the distances hurt, but her misfortune is that God gave her a body that is particularly suited to meet the 1,500-m’s demands—speed and endurance. “It’s the worst,” she said. “Sometimes you can taste blood in your lungs.”