Short Track Speed Skating

MONTREAL - At first glance, she seems mostly indistinguishable from the others - same bouncy stride, same litheness. But there are hints she is no neophyte - deeper laugh lines and the steady gaze that's acquired only by having seen it all.

Short-track speed skater Tania Vicent is a comparative rarity on the 2010 Canadian Olympic team - a 34-year-old who has been on one version or another of her sport's national squad (junior, senior, Olympic) for more than half her life.

She's accustomed to the whispers that she's past her prime, the raised eyebrows and knowing glances that inevitably follow an injury or a bad run of results. Yet, Vicent endures.

As she finishes preparations for her fourth - and final - Winter Olympics, Vicent is in a good place.

"I don't have to worry about anything other than the Games. I don't have to qualify for next season on the World Cup, I don't have to worry about what anyone thinks. Not only am I going to enjoy every second, I'm going to savour every fraction of every second," she said after a recent training session at the team's base in the Maurice Richard Arena in east-end Montreal.

She's also mindful that a year ago, her Vancouver Games dream seemed as hazy as a mirage.

Hobbled by fatigue and bothered by a balky hip - she missed the entire 2006-07 season because of hip surgery - Vicent failed to qualify for the 2008-09 world championships, the first time in 15 years she missed the event. That prompted talk of retirement.

But when Olympic trials rolled around last August, Vicent was rejuvenated and skating fast, scoring surprise victories at both 500 metres and 1,000 metres - her specialty. Because of the format of the trials, which mirrored the Olympic race schedule, Vicent's cumulative results in the first few races made a fall that kept her from the 1,500-metre final irrelevant.

Against considerable odds, she was headed to the Olympics again. And after five months of often intense preparation - the national team coaches have been working their charges hard - the doyenne of the short track is champing at the bit.

"We've had a really tough six weeks of training," she said. "I'm kind of sick of being here, actually. It'll be nice to breathe some different air. I'm anxious to change my routine and to get into a new routine out there [in Vancouver]."

The short trackers will tune up for the Games at a short training camp in Calgary, though they are at the low ebb of their training cycle. The plan is to peak in two weeks.

"I think we all feel pretty good now, but when you get to the Games, there's an energy there that makes you feel even stronger, you train better, you eat better," Vicent said.

Vicent is buoyed by her experience from the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, where she suddenly began turning in personal-best times after a terrible year punctuated by her mother's illness (she died two years later).

After finishing fifth overall in the previous world championships, she barely qualified for the Olympics. Vicent nevertheless came home with a medal (bronze in the 3,000 relay).

She began training with the national squad when she was a highly touted 15-year-old, and skated in her first world championships in 1993 at 17.

In some ways, the blond, pony-tailed Vicent is a lucky charm. She has skated on medal-winning relay teams in each of her previous Games and, last fall, the Canadians set a national record at a World Cup race in Marquette, Mich.

She won her first Olympic medal - a bronze in the relay - at the 1998 Games in Nagano. Two others, the bronze in 2002 and a silver in relay at Turin in 2006, have followed.

On a team whose other members are two 19-year-olds, a 22-year-old and a 24-year-old, Vicent is the eminence, a calming presence who can speak knowledgeably about the demands of an Olympics. Not that she relishes the role.

"I know it would bug me if the old lady said, ‘Do this, don't do that.' I used to hate it when the experienced girls would start doing that, so I'm not about to start doing it to them," she said.

The Laval, Que., native likes to joke the others keep her young and vital, but she admits it gets harder to manage her energy and recover from the strenuous training regimen.

"The sport keeps me young, relative to people I know who have been working for 15 years," she said. "I've never had a real job, other than a few little things here and there along the way, but I'm looking forward to not being as selfish. Being an athlete is an egotistical life, you always have to think of yourself first. There's no choice. If you're not, you won't perform."

Once the 2010 Games are behind her, Vicent hopes to focus on raising a family with her boyfriend of eight years.

Then, perhaps she'll indulge her guilty pleasure for exotic perfumes ("I order them all the time, I love the hard-to-find ones") by opening a boutique parfumerie.

"Starting a business is intimidating, but I've loved perfumes since I was a little girl," she said. "But I guess it's like skating, you just have to jump in."