It was slower for him last year—he won just one medal, a World Cup gold in Whistler, permitting him to arrive at the Vancouver Olympics somewhat under the radar—a hopeful candidate on a men’s skeleton team with few serious prospects. But Montgomery had a different view. Last September, he and some friends on the Canadian team consulted a sports shaman in Revelstoke, B.C., who, among other things, identified each athlete’s animal spirit. Montgomery learned his ally in that other world is the turtle; he promptly enlisted Vancouver native artist Phil Gray to paint the animal on his helmet.
A turtle? It’s an image that did little to prepare us for what happened next. Montgomery captured his first-place finish seven hundredths of a second ahead of leader and gold-medal favourite Martins Dukurs of Latvia. For sheer breakneck drama, little could beat it. The man we’ll now forever know as Monty charged down the corridor of white at the top of the Whistler Sliding Centre and hopped on that speeding bullet with all the economy and aplomb of a gunslinger drawing his pistol. Trailing the 25-year-old Dukurs by 0.18 seconds following the third heat, Montgomery got off to a half-second lead over his nearest competitor in the final run, Russian racer Alexander Tretyakov, 24. Then, flying down the ice, Montgomery spun his magic, stretching that 0.5 lead into 0.6, then 0.8 until, slipping into home, he stood and waited for the final time. The crowd held its breath. When the 1.06 seconds he now held over Tretyakov popped up on the JumboTrons dotting Blackcomb Peak, the Canadians in the crowd went mad. Montgomery had secured the silver, that was for sure, but what would Dukurs, racing last in this final heat, do?
The Latvian, the skeleton man to beat, began strong, maintaining a lead of a quarter of a second or so over Montgomery’s start. Then Dukurs hit a wall—what he would later call his “black corner,” explaining that “all training I was fighting with this curve”—and oozed ever so sluggishly out of the seventh turn. The Latvian’s lead had bled away before the crowd’s eyes.
Standing by a huddle of reporters as Dukurs slipped through a massive band of white on the JumboTron above, Canadian Jeff Pain, the 39-year-old vet who, moments earlier, had finished his final Olympics in ninth place, gasped. “He’s got the gold!” he said. Pain was right. With Dukurs’s race over, the final pronouncement: on screens around Whistler, a +.07 slipped into view, signalling the victor. “I lost my mind when I saw the +.07,” Montgomery later said, “like I put my finger in the light socket.” For Pain, who in 2006 lost the top spot on the podium in Turin to fellow Canadian Duff Gibson, settling for silver, and who will now retire, it must have been bittersweet. Watching Montgomery, a Prairie kid from southwest Manitoba going against the grain of geography by throwing himself into the steep dives and wicked turns of skeleton, seize his golden moment and pump the air—Pain himself had come to the end of the line. What next for the tall, red-headed Calgarian? “I don’t know,” he said. “Curling? Ballroom dancing?”
Meanwhile, the crowds in the stands looking over the finish line had started chanting “Monty.” Right after taking the podium, Montgomery allowed that “a pint” was in his immediate future. How would his gold medal change his life? He rejected the question. “I’ve got doping, then I hope a beer, then tomorrow’s a blank slate,” he said. “It’s a good unknown. I’ll take it any day.” The turtle had made it across the finish line.
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