Photograph by Jeff McIntosh/ Canadian Press
On television, it was the medal race a lot of people missed: all across the nation, channels were tuned to Team Canada’s rout of the Russians. But up at the Whistler Sliding Centre, one of our women’s bobsled pilots was contending for gold, while another was about to prove that on this controversial sliding track, with its sharp twists and treacherous slopes, anything can happen.
The race’s outcome—Canada 1 pilot Kaillie Humphries, backed by brakeman Heather Moyse, broke the track record in three of four heats to win gold; Canada 2’s Helen Upperton, with Shelley-Ann Brown, secured silver—lent the Canadian podium spots the weight of parable, a story of the fragility of friendship and its occasionally remarkable strength. In the case of 24-year-old Humphries, the gold proved too that you can break just about every bone in your body, go on to have your heart broken by sport, and then come back to reverse it all.
That story starts with the difficult relationship Olympic bobsled pilots, in particular on the women’s side, frequently have with the athletes who back them. The women get just a single shot at the podium (men have both a two- and four-man option) and each pilot gets two brakemen: a main and an alternate. Only one is selected to compete (coaches choose in consultation with the driver)—a circumstance that leads to crushed hopes and frequently shattered friendships.
Thanks to that dynamic, the four women who stepped onto that Olympic podium were all linked; more, the bonds between them were in various states of health and disrepair. Canada 1 pilot Humphries had once been fellow driver Upperton’s brakeman, but had been dropped prior to the Turin Games in 2006 in favour of Moyse. “Yes, Helen and I have a history. And yes, we are competitors,” Humphries told a reporter in December. “But we’re on the same team and we do respect each other.”
But after helping Upperton to a close fourth-place finish in Turin, Moyse too was replaced, with Brown, as Upperton’s brakeman in the ramp-up to the Vancouver Games. “You will have to ask Helen why she didn’t want to push with me at the beginning of the season,” said Moyse, 31, also a member of the national women’s rugby team, before Olympic selections were announced: all this meant that when Humphries and Moyse began their bobsledding partnership a year or so ago, it was on uneasy ground—one castoff encountering another of newer vintage who’d once replaced her.
Humphries, a successful competitive skier as a teenager who moved to bobsledding—after breaking both her legs, at different times, on the slopes—had healed the wound of leaving Turin without competing by enrolling in a bobsled pilot school in Lake Placid, N.Y. Now she had to smooth things over with Moyse, her one-time rival.
The pair began to make amends on one of those endless road trips around Europe during the World Cup season. The athletes were passing the time reading out questions from a book of conversation-starting queries. One of those brainteasers hit uncomfortably close to home for the group: if you could somehow punish anyone who’d wronged you in your past, who’d it be? “I’m probably in your top-10, huh Kaillie?” asked Moyse. “Actually,” she recalled Humphries replying, “you’re not even close.”
Dragging the issue into the open started a dialogue. The pair went on to make a potent team, ranking second and breaking start records in six out of seven World Cup events this season, and capturing gold in Altenberg, Germany in December (in an eerie parallel, Upperton took silver that day). “Turin was hard. It was hard. Definitely,” Humphries said. “But I’ve grown and I’ve had to look past that and—yeah, it’s part of my story. It’s part of us together as a team and what’s built our relationship, kind of what started everything. And we’re here because of it.”
Here being top of the Olympic podium.
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