Alpine Skiing

On the eve of the first training run of the World Cup ski season, members of the Canadian speed team (along with a couple of American ringers) gathered for that most pure of national rituals, a spirited game of shinny in the cold mountain air.

It is part of their routine no matter where the circuit takes them, a break from the cycle of training, competition and travel, a way to clear heads and have a little fun that's certainly not going to change in this tense pre-Olympic countdown.

Not that the events to come in February in Vancouver are front of mind. Nothing of the sort.

"I'm not even thinking about the Olympics," Manuel Osborne-Paradis said, fresh off the ice.

"I've got eight races to worry about before then," his roommate and running buddy Robbie Dixon said. "I've still got to survive Kitzbuhel."

Fine and dandy. But forgive the rest of the country, bombarded as never before with the names and faces and back-stories of potential Canadian Olympians, for fitting this whole winter season into that context.
And especially for looking at the races this weekend as a possible harbinger of what's to come.

The men's downhill - weather permitting - will be the first medal opportunity of the 2010 Vancouver/Whistler Games, not to mention one of the great glamour events in all of winter sport. Saturday morning, the opening downhill of the year will be run on the Lake Louise course.

Coming off a season of lows (Jan Hudec's injury) and tremendous highs (John Kucera's victory in the downhill at the world championships, Osborne-Paradis's career-first World Cup win) there is reason to believe someone in this group has a legitimate shot to be the first Canadian to capture an Olympic gold medal on home soil.

The getting there is going to be interesting in its own right, featuring a fierce internal team competition. Canada will have four spots in the big race, at this point none guaranteed - though since last season's results will be taken into account, it's hard to imagine either Kucera or Osborne-Paradis, if healthy, being left out.

Hudec is back on the mountain this week, fully recovered from tearing up what had previously been his "good" knee in Val d'Isere, France, last February, and has a reputation for rising to the occasion on race day. Dixon, who never takes a training run at anything less than full speed (he was fourth yesterday, behind leader Didier Cuche of Switzerland), is pushing hard to break into the elite group.

And then there's Erik Guay, a supremely gifted skier with a big sponsorship deal and a strong World Cup résumé, who in other circumstances would be a cinch to make the Olympic start list and an obvious threat to win a medal.

What may have altered his fortunes is the fact he aggravated a back problem during a summer training sessions in Chile, and lost a week on the snow. Now, he figures, he's two or three weeks behind his teammates, and almost certainly will be eating their dust, at least to start.

"It might be a little tough on my ego," Guay said. "It's not easy to watch the other guys whipping you."

Those other guys can talk about the rest of the season, about the European races coming up, about the Olympics being just a single stop along the way, about how the top skier is the guy who wins the overall World Cup title, and not necessarily the one who has his best day under the brightest spotlight.

Guay, though, doesn't have that luxury. He knows he's on the clock now. He can hear the drums beating. He understands that confidence, being able to take chances, to ski on the edge, is way more than half of this game.

"It's tough because I know what I should do on the course, I know what I want to do," he said, "but it's something you can't force and you can't fake."

And so he also realizes that what should be a peak moment in his career could just as easily slip away. "I'm going to try not to panic too early and just chip away at it and get ready for the Olympics."

Panic, though it is always there, isn't a word you hear too often in the world of sport.

No, this isn't just another season.