Canada's luge team is in Pyeongchang calling the battle for clean sport to be stepped up as the Russian doping scandal continues into the 2018 Olympic Games. Luger Sam Edney says a clean playing field is as important as winning a medal. (The Canadian Press)
Twice burned by Russia, underdog Canadian luge team keeps eyes forward at Pyeongchang Olympics
By Kerry GillespieSports Reporter
Sat., Feb. 10, 2018timer5 min. read
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA—At the start of the training season on ice, nine months before arriving here, Tristan Walker started to explain the curious spiked gloves he and his luge teammates wear to help propel themselves down the ice track. Then, abruptly, he stopped himself.
"(Coach Wolfgang Staudinger) might not like it. He's super secretive about equipment," said Walker, half of Canada's doubles team.
There are a lot of secrets in luge — track tampering and athlete doping being at the top of the list — but Canada's spiked gloves aren't one of them.
The little nails come from Switzerland, the only ones sharp and thin enough to work, and Staudinger and fellow coach Bernhard Glass painstakingly place them into moulds filled with plastic resin to make the spiked fingertips.
When these coaches worked in Germany — the powerhouse nation that won gold in all four luge events at the 2014 Sochi Games — they didn't have to make anything. Germany has a multimillion-dollar company to take care of all that.
But coaching the Canadian team for the last decade they've developed a dedicated little band of sliders with a can-do attitude who are here to compete with the best in the world.
They're also here to rise above what happened to them at the last Olympics and what they see as the biggest open secret of all: the Russians cheated Canada out of a medal.
In fact, now it seems the Russians did it two ways: first, by doping their athletes, and second, by tampering with the track in the new team relay event.
A luge track is like an ice rink, with pipes inside, and the temperature can be regulated. Turn it up and the track slows down — and that's what Staudinger is sure the Russians did during the team luge event, helping themselves to a silver medal and leaving Canada just off the podium in fourth place.
Prior to the event, several nations who feared the Russians intended to tamper with the track asked for track maintenance to clean off frost and check the temperature before the final top-five seeded group raced but they were refused.
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So on the final night of luge competition in Sochi, when Staudinger watched his team drop from a silver position at the top of the track down to fourth by time they reached the bottom, he knew what had happened. And there was nothing he could do.
The Star obtained the track data proving the track temperature rose by more than 1 C, even as the air temperature outside dropped, but that took time.
The rules required an appeal to be filed within 30 minutes of the race so, by the time Staudinger was talking to media about his team's disappointing fourth-place finish, it was already too late.
"I spoke with the (International Luge Federation) about it and they just shrugged. You stand alone because you can't prove it," Staudinger said during summer training. "They want to have the ceremonies with no scandals and happy smiling faces on schedule."
The Sochi Olympics, of course, have since become the centrepiece of the biggest scandal in Olympic history, with the Russians exposed for widespread cheating through a state-sanctioned doping system that included swapping dirty samples for clean ones through a hole in the wall at the anti-doping lab at the Games.
Exposing that scam is what led to the Canadians being told — two days after they were named to the 2018 Olympic team — they had a bronze medal from the 2014 Games coming to them because the Russian silver medallists had taken performance-enhancing drugs.
And then, days before these Games began, the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the International Olympic Committee's punishment of some athletes, including lugers Albert Demchenko and Tatiana Ivanova, putting that medal from Canada back in doubt.
Men's slider Sam Edney, a four-time Olympian, calls it "the medal that it is not."
For Edney and his teammates, Sochi proved particularly hard to get over.
No athlete ever wants to be in fourth place and that relay result was actually the third time in a week they'd found themselves just off the podium. Alex Gough was fourth in women's luge, as were the doubles team of Walker and Justin Snith.
"It's hard to come close and fall just short and all the circumstances around it," Gough said, during summer training.
She doesn't talk about the doping Russians or the track tampering. That's something she has no control over, and elite athletes tend not to waste energy focusing on those things.
"You just have to let it go, move on and move forward."
She has, and comes into these Games in South Korea ranked fourth in the world with a laser focus on reaching the podium in women's luge when she begins racing Monday. Gough will also have another shot at the team relay, where the Canadians are ranked third.
On the plus side, the International Luge Federation (FIL) changed the rules to make it less likely for a home country to give themselves an advantage by monkeying around with the track.
In Sochi, the order for the relay teams was based on the accumulation of points from the last World Cup event. The Russians made sure they were out of the top-five seeded group, which raced last, by withdrawing their top male slider Demchenko, a move that would drop their overall ranking. Now, the start order in the relay event is determined by the results of the other races this week.
But even in a fair game, Canada's path to the podium in luge will be much harder this time.
"Is it possible? Of course it is possible but it won't be as easy, well, it's never easy, but the field is more competitive and it becomes more difficult for everyone," Staudinger said.
But if his athletes wanted easy medals, they'd probably consider switching sports, and if he wanted only to coach winners he wouldn't have left Germany, where the pool of elite athletes for luge is akin to what Canada has for hockey.
"As a coach here (in Canada) you have to really work for it."
That was hard to do after Sochi.
"The three, four years before Sochi were all up, up, up and we were really at our best, all of them, and it was such a stupid thing to get basically cheated out of a medal," he said of the track tampering.
"It took me a while to get over it and get going again. This was not an easy one to swallow and the worst was simply that I knew that everybody knew."