23 février 2006

Tony Atherton

The black and white image is, like its author: bold, playful ... and surprising.

From the top of a rock outcrop, a climber reaches down a helping hand, not to another climber, but to the elongated shadow of a mountain biker, neatly etched against the rock. The photograph is titled "Two Worlds."

In 1999, the striking photo was part of a solo exhibition by a 16-year-old photographer from the Rocky Mountain town of Canmore, Alta. She was a rock climber and mountain biker with an artist's eye, who, as she said at the time, also liked to go fast on skis.

The surprising part was not so much that a high-school student had once merited her own show at the town's museum. The big surprise was where the young artist was on this morning, tantalizingly near the pinnacle of an entirely different kind of art form.

That day, before the sun had climbed above Mount Albergian in Piedmont's Chisone Valley, Chandra Crawford may have stepped out on the balcony of the quaint 19th-century digs (a "giant tree-fort-style place," Chandra had written home), that she and her teammates on Canada's Olympic cross-country team had shared for the previous couple of weeks. The balcony over-looked the race course on the Pragelato Plan where, if all went as expected that day, Canada would win at least one medal, and maybe even two. Beckie Scott, who had already won a bronze and a silver on this course, and Sara Renner, who had shared Scott's silver in team pursuit, were Canada's big guns, veteran skiers with excellent prospects.

For Chandra, a 22-year-old rookie who had made the Olympic team only three months before, and had competed in only six World Cup events in her life, just being here was an accomplishment. Her personal goal, as she contemplated the race course that morning, was a top-30 finish.

However, despite such modest aspirations, Chandra knew she was not the same skier she had been even three weeks before. The change had come at a World Cup sprint in Davos, Switzerland, a week before the Games opened. Chandra's usual style in such races had been to tuck herself behind the leader, conserve strength and wait for a moment late in the race to make a break. The method had delivered results that were dependable, if not spectacular; she had regularly placed in the top 50 in World Cup races.

In Davos, though, after a fast start, she found herself in the lead, and decided to keep it. She was, she realized, adopting the aggressive style of teammates Scott and Renner, who had coined a colorful expression for their gung-ho anti-strategy: "Gun to Tape, Annihilate!" The approach got her, remarkably, to the final, and, though she would be passed by a couple of skiers in the dying seconds of that race, she would hold on for a bronze medal.

Chandra had come out of nowhere to place in a World Cup event days before the Olympics were to start. It might have made a bigger stir, if Sara Renner had not, the very next day, won a silver medal and eclipsed the accomplishment. "I have to keep up with the rookie," Sara had told reporters.

Chandra had not begrudged Sara the limelight. She would later say Sara and Beckie had been among her greatest inspirations. Like the rock climber in her photo, they had generously reached out to help her follow in their wake.

Support had come, too, from her hometown, which had embraced both its cross-country Olympians, Chandra and Sara. Somewhere inside Chandra's alpine "tree-fort" was a Canmore town flag, signed by the 610 students of her alma mater, Canmore Collegiate High School, which Chandra's parents had brought to Italy with them the previous week.

There was another, more personal, talisman on a chain around Chandra's neck: her grandmother's ring, inset with a stone for each of her children. The young skier had worn the family heirloom throughout the Games.

It was safely tucked beneath her ski suit a few hours later as she found herself in a miraculous position: in the lead with 100 metres to go in the final sprint of the day. Somewhere behind her -- behind her! -- was Beckie Scott, but right there in front was what had been unthinkable, a gold medal.

Ten metres from the finish line, Chandra broke into a grin that would not quit. On the medal podium that afternoon, she would have to work to get the words of Canada's anthem out from behind that gleeful smile.

She had set a tone. Success would have a particularly feminine disposition on this day. When it didn't arrive on skis, it skated in on long blades. At the Oval Lingotto that evening, the spotlight was on Cindy Klassen, the Winnipegger who had switched to speed skating after being cut from Canada's 1998 Olympic hockey team.

If Cindy won another medal in the 1,500 metres, she would have won more laurels at a single Olympics than any other Canadian woman.

Still, before she could step on the ice for the second last heat of the night, the attention of spectators had been distracted. Kristina Groves, the Ottawa skater better known for her performances at longer distances, had skated a scorching 1,500 and put herself in first place.

Kristina, who had shared in Canada's silver in team pursuit, and posted a satisfying fifth place finish after a last-minute entry in the 1000-metre event, was discovering power she didn't know she had, and it couldn't have come at a better time.

Kristina's skate challenged Cindy Klassen considerably more than the competition in her own heat. Anni Friesinger, Cindy's most dangerous rival at most times, was off her stride. Not so the Canadian skater; Cindy rocketed around the track and posted a time nearly two seconds faster than Kristina's. Cindy would not only make Olympic history, but Canada would also take both gold and silver.

And the day wasn't over yet. At the short-track rink in the Palavela, Canada's 3,000-metre women's relay team, which included Alanna Kraus, a bronze-medal winner in the same event four years earlier, and Anouk Leblanc-Boucher, who had just won a bronze in the 500 metres, skated to a silver medal, just one-third of second behind South Korea.

The day would end by delivering a devastating blow to the Canadian men's hockey team - and to the country's pride. A sudden-death, quarterfinal loss to Russia, the third time Canada had been shut out in the tournament, had put an abrupt end to what had been, in retrospect, a presumptuous expectation of a gold-medal repeat.

Canada had likely had the most talented -- and certainly the deepest -- team in the competition.

It hadn't been enough. Defenceman Chris Pronger would say, after the game, he hoped that before the next Olympics in Vancouver, Canadian players would learn from how those in other countries step up "when they throw on the jersey for their country."

But though the recriminations and post mortems would be noisy and numerous, seven women sharing four medals had made it impossible to call this day a disappointment.

During these two weeks, countless newspaper, TV, Internet and radio reports on the Turin Games will record facts and figures, highs and lows, heroes and villains and the colour of the country. This serial is something else. It is an attempt to tell, in daily doses, the overall story of the 2006 Olympic Games in a style that is as much narrative as journalism. It will cull details from conventional reports and fuse them with careful surmise to create, we hope, a kind of living history.

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