Lueders mellowing as 2010 Games approach

PAWEL DWULIT/TORONTO STAR

Pierre Lueders, right, looking accomodating, and Helen Upperton.

Canadian bobsled ace Pierre Lueders seemed a pretty relaxed and contented guy in Toronto on Monday at a season kick-off news conference for the team before they headed for Europe.

Lueders has always been a guy with a chip on his shoulder, never reluctant to let a reporter know if he thought a question betrayed a large ignorance of his sport.

But he couldn’t have been more accomodating at an event where he was subjected to a series of long interviews, happy to hang in there until the last question was asked.

That should bode well for his sport heading to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics as he certainly remains the team’s chief spokesperson, although Helen Upperton and Kaillie Humphries are doing their part to bring attention to women’s bobsleigh with their podium results.

It’s clear the other sledders look to Lueders to set the tone. Said Upperton:

“I think we’re really fortunate to have somebody like Pierre in our program. Since I first started on the team, he’s been a great source of guidance and advice and tips and driving instruction. Tips on lots of stuff, equipment and sleds. I think also he’s been so successful that everyone who’s come into the program since he’s been a part of it, they’re just trying to achieve a similar level of success. He just raised the calibre of the whole program.”

And while he seems to be mellowing, the good thing is it doesn’t look like he’s lost his competitive edge.

Tornado Hopes Sunk: Sailor Kevin Stittle of Orangeville got the bad news today that the Tornado class is officially out of the program for the 2012 London Olympics.

Stittle, who finished an excruciating fourth with helmsman Oskar Johansson of Oakville at the Beijing Games, was hoping to continue competing in the fast and popular Tornado division, while Johansson had got married and started a business.

“I haven’t spoken with a single person in the sailing community that agrees with the decision,” said Stittle. “It’s spread across the board with people wondering ‘Why the heck did they do that?’ I can only assume it was a political decision.”

Posh Job for Buttle? One of the scandal rags is reporting that Victoria Beckham wants her husband’s new football team, AC Milan, to provide an ice rink for the kids and has drawn up a list of prospective teachers at 1,000 Euros an hour. It includes retired world champion Jeffrey Buttle.

Bet he’s going to race to do that job.

Heymans commits through 2012 Olympics

AP FILE PHOTO

Taking it down a level for 2012.

Emilie Heymans announced today that she’s committing to compete through the 2012 London Olympics, but it won’t be in her speciality, the women’s 10-metre platform.

Heymans won silver in a brilliant duel on 10-metre with her China’s Chen Roulin at the Beijing Games, her third straight Olympics in which she’d won a medal on the tower, the first two coming in the synchro event with Anne Montminy (2000) and Blythe Hartley (2004).

But Heymans and her coach Yihua Li believe the 10-metre will exact too much of a pounding on the 26-year-old Montrealer’s body over the next four years and will have her instead concentrate on the 3-metre springboard, where she’s also enjoyed success, but not to the same degree.

“It’s an enormous challenge,” Heymans said in a statement. “But Yihua Li and I are confident I can be a medal contender in London.”

Heymans added she won’t put too much pressure on herself early in the Olympic cycle.

“I have no objectives with regards to results for the next two years,” she said. “My main focus is technical work and increasing the difficulty of my dives. I want to start with a solid technical base and build a competitive diving list that puts me on par with the best in the world.”

FairWother fans knock speed skating star

It didn’t take long for a moron to come crawling out of the woodwork when Canadian speed skater Jeremy Wotherspoon broke his arm in a 500-metre World Cup race on Saturday in Berlin.

The first comment posted on the CBC Sports website was a totally crass entry that harkened Wotherspoon’s past Olympic failures and suggested his career is done. A number of subsequent entries have taken this fool to task.

It would be nice to just pass it off as incoherent babble from a random idiot, but there’s a pattern here as you can see from this article before the 2006 Turin Olympics. Some Canadians seem to get a real joy out of rubbing Wotherspoon's face in his mistakes. It's a similar phenomenon with hurdler Perdita Felicien.

There’s no question Wotherspoon’s career is coloured by his failure to deliver on his potential at the last two Olympics, especially in Salt Lake in 2002 when he was the favourite and fell on his opening steps.

No one knows that more than Wotherspoon. It’s a big part of the reason he made the decision to keep going through the 2010 Vancouver Games. After taking a year off, he came back and dominated by winning nine of 10 World Cup 500-metre races and the world title last season. He won speed skating’s equivalent of the Oscar as a result.

That’s the thing, Wotherspoon has had the kind of international career few Canadian athletes have ever enjoyed in any sport. He is a huge star in the Netherlands, where they know speed skating like we know hockey.

Those who understand the sport have a tremendous appreciation for this guy. It’s clear that there’s a segment of the Canadian population that doesn’t have a clue. Hopefully, it shrinks a bit at the 2010 Games fast approach.

Burka Documentary: There’s a compelling documentary on legendary figure skating coach Ellen Burka, entitled Skate to Survive, on OMNI.1 this coming Sunday at 8:30 p.m.

Directed and produced by her daughter Astra, it details a colourful skating career that included coaching her other daughter Petra to a world title as well as guiding Toller Cranston, but also tells about her upbringing in pre-war Amsterdam and surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, during which her parents perished.

Wotherspoon out for the season?

Canadian speed skater Jeremy Wotherspoon might miss this last full season before the 2010 Vancouver Olympics after breaking his arm today in a crash in a World Cup 500-metre race in Berlin.

Wotherspoon was coming off one of his best seasons ever, winning nine of 10 World Cup 500-metre races in the 2007-08 campaign after returning from a year away from competition.

But in his his second race of this World Cup season, the 32-year-old native of Red Deer, Alta., lost his balance as he was pushing off with his left skate and went careening into the protective mats. He broke his upper left arm when he put it up to protect himself as he slid into the mats.

Wotherspoon, who’d never broken anything before in his career, was taken off the ice on a stretcher. His arm in a cast, he later returned to have supper with the team at their hotel.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Wotherspoon, understandably not in much of a mood to talk, in a phone interview. “I just went down and hit the mats pretty quickly. I didn’t have time to right myself because I was in the outer lane.”

Finn Halvorsen, director of the Canadian long track team, said that if there are no complications with Wotherspoon’s broken arm he could be back for the final World Cup event March 6-8 in Salt Lake City and then compete in the world single distance championships on the new Olympic Oval in Richmond, B.C. the next week.

But Halvorsen said there is a chance Wotherspoon might not be ready in time for the worlds.

It was the second serious crash for a veteran Canadian sprinter in as many days as Mike Ireland of Winnipeg separated his shoulder in a fall on Friday.

“I’ve been in speed skating some years and I’ve never seen something like this,” said Halvorsen, who has piloted to the Norwegian and American teams to great Olympic success in the past. “I would say it’s absolutely bad luck. Mike and Jeremy never fall.”

Olympic 'boarders get dose of reality on MTV

Kimiko Zakreski of Calgary struts her stuff.

It’s hardly a surprise that when MTV chose to do a reality show on a Canadian team preparing for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, they picked the snowboarders.

They must have figured there’d be plenty of personalities (read characters), not to mention drama. Judging from the premier episode of Summer Sessions featuring the Canadian snowboard team – premiering Thursday on MTV at 10 p.m. ET/PT – they appear to be on to something.

It was a smart move by Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium to commission something like to this to give the public more of a feel for some of the athletes they’ll be cheering for at the 2010 Games.

The athletes and coaches know the cameras are rolling, so you definitely gotta wonder how much is reality and how much is just plain staged – it certainly does seem forced at times. But it does give one a feel for what they’re going through as tensions mount as the Games get closer.

You get to see tearful veteran boarder Alexa Loo of Richmond, B.C., after she learns her Sport Canada funding has just been axed, as well as the shenanigans and attititude of bad boys Michael Lambert and Simon Bonefant (these dudes definitely love the camera).

Dominique Vallée extols the virtues of her new discovery, “woga,” where “you reach for your glass of wine and it’s always with your heart first.” (Something like that could catch on as an Olympic sport!)

Coach Mark Fawcett plays the heavy, taking on a Bull Meecham-type attitude, with his shaved pate, perpetual scowl and desire to run the training camp as a more of a boot camp. He continually criticizes the boarders for being too soft.

“You’re pussies,” Fawcett tells them.

Fawcett recalls how tough it was when he was a competitor and he had to sleep in the back of trucks. He doesn’t mention how he also used to sell cookies to fund himself (Might be bad for his hard-ass image if they know he can bake.)

This is the prequel to a half-hour series, Over The Bolts, which will air on MTV in 2009.

O is for Obama. O is for Olympics …

There’s a growing feeling in many quarters that President-elect Barack Obama could be the man to put Chicago over the top in their bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics against competitors Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid.

As longtime Olympic watcher Philip Hersh notes in his column, not only will Obama be a powerful ally for the bid, but McCain would have been a liability because he is not well-liked by IOC types because of his tough questioning of them during the Senate Commerce Committee hearings that followed the Salt Lake bribery scandal.

As one Chicago resident told a local CBS affiliate: "I think instead of having Michael Jordan and Oprah representing Chicago, we now have the president of the United States representing Chicago and I think we have a good shot now."

Patrick Ryan, the head of the Chicago 2016 bid, certainly thinks their chances have improved.

The spokespeople for the Tokyo bid are also quickly backtracking from comments that bid members have made that they’re worried about the Obama factor.

Chan's the Man ... and other stuff

Patrick Chan did something rarely done in the figure skating world or anywhere else in the sporting world for that matter – he apologized after a win he wasn’t sure he deserved.

Chan made a number of mistakes during his long program on Saturday at Skate Canada in Ottawa, but still managed to pull off the win in the men's event. He wasn’t sure it was merited and he even said so, another example of the young Torontonian’s class.

Sweetland Down Under: Triathlete Kirsten Sweetland of Victoria, considered the top prospect for Canada on the women’s side heading towards the 2012 London Olympics, is now training in Brisbane, Australia, with Olympic bronze medalist Emma Moffatt.

It’s a big move for the 20-year-old to leave Simon Whitfield’s training group under coach Joel Filliol, but obviously she believes it’s the right one to get her to the next level.

Charity Will Take Hit: Right to Play, the Toronto-based humanitarian organization, expects that its $35 million annual budget will take a 15 per cent hit next year as corporate funding is affected by the credit crisis, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

“At the moment, some of the companies are hard to even get to talk to,” Koss told Bloomberg at the FT Sport Industry Summit in London. “This is not the priority at the top of their minds.”

Still no word yet from the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) on whether they might relent on their decision to bar Right To Play from the Olympic village at the 2010 Winter Games because they have competing sponsors.

Touching Tributes: The passing of Canadian shot putter Bishop Dolegiewicz has been greatly mourned in the track and field community and there are a lot of touching tributes to him on MastersTrack.com. Former discus thrower Rob Gray and some other of Dolegiewicz’s teammates are planning to raise a few in his honour this week in Toronto.

New Minister, Same Old Baloney?

It’ll be interesting to see if Gary Lunn is any different than any of his recent predecessors when it comes to lack of vision and passion in his new role as sports minister. The feeling from this corner is it’s unlikely, even if he does have a background as a junior skier on the B.C. team.

It’s a junior portfolio still, a demotion from his previous post in charge of Natural Resources. The Victoria Times Colonist reported that he declined to be interviewed on his new position and instead offered a statement declaring: “I am looking forward to the challenge of being Minister of State for Sport as Canada prepares to welcome the world at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010."

Hardly sounds like a man of vision. Sport in this country needs a strong advocate, not a Wal-Mart greeter.

Tracking a Good Cause: Canadian track and field coaches Derek Evely and Kevin Tyler are travelling to Ethiopia to take part in the Great Ethiopian Run on Nov. 23 and are trying to raise $5,000 in advance of the trip so they can bring over baby formula, food and medical supplies to help out three orphanages and a foster home.

Evely and Tyler, who run the Canadian Athletics Coaching Centre at the University of Alberta, have developed a strong relationship with the Ethiopian running community and were invited to the event – which is Africa’s largest road race -- by legendary runner Haile Gebrselassie.

The four charities the money is going towards are: The Kebetsehay Children’s Orphanage; CAFAC Foster Home; The Holy Savior Children’s Orphanage and Association; and the Kechene Children’s Home Government Orphanage.

Cheques should be made out to the University of Alberta – tax receipts will be issued if you include your information – and sent to Derek Evely at: 11643 – 76th Ave.; Edmonton, Alberta; Canada; T6G 0K9

Evely can also be contacted at derek.evely@ualberta.ca

Coaches Corner -- Olympic Style

It was Coaches Corner, Olympic style.

The Coaches Association of Ontario held a workshop on the weekend entitled “Coach Reflections on Beijing: Conquering the Wall” featuring some of the top coaches in the country.

It featured (L to R) women’s softball coach Wendy Dobbin, whose team finished fourth; rowing coach Mike Spracklen, who coached the men's eight to gold in Beijing; Swimming Canada CEO Pierre Lafontaine, whose squad got a bronze from Ryan Cochrane; and triathlon head coach Joel Filliol, who guided Simon Whitfield to a silver medal.

The Star had an opportunity afterwards to stage a round-table discussion with these top coaches to bat around some of the main issues facing Canadian sport.

While to his credit Spracklen doesn’t sport a Don Cherry-like wardrobe, he is not shy about expressing his opinion and definitely had the strongest statements of the group.

Here are Spracklen and Filliol on the topic of Canadians not being comfortable with athletes who want to win:

Spracklen: "I was in South Africa (to give a coaching clinic recently) and we were out to dinner and a lady said, ‘What’s wrong with Canada? My niece went to a Canadian school, she was a fast runner, won all the races, and she was told not to win. What’s going on in your country?’ I sai, ‘That’s Canadian, I’m afraid.’ The gold medal that we won, I think our association would rather have 24 bronze medals to give to everybody than the one gold medal. I think they would change it if they could. They’d prefer to see everybody happy and everybody equal and they hate the word ‘performance.’ The guy that really wants to get to the top, they hate him. And it’s changing but it will be a long time. I find it very frustrating.”

Filliol: “Similar to what Mike just said, I found it interesting when triathlon declared what we wanted to do to get a medal (choose an athlete to specifically support Simon Whitfield to win a medal, not decide the team strictly on performances leading to Beijing). The response was interesting, even within the triathlon community. People didn’t like it. It upset a lot of people, that we weren’t about the individual anymore, we were trying to earn a medal for Canada, trying to win. I thought that kind of reflected where Canada’s at with success and support. It was interesting that it reflected a lot, not only the media criticism, creating a controversy out of it, but also even internally within our sport. Are we all trying to win or not? It felt like they weren’t trying to win. … Simon took quite a lot of flak from that. He had never felt that before from the community. He had to shut off comments from his blog because people were criticizing him so much for this, trying to win. It was interesting, reflecting a bit where we’re at.”

For the transcript of the roundtable, click here.

Stevie Y wants players to be village people …

Based on his own Olympic experiences, Steve Yzerman is convinced he wants his players to stay in the athletes village during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Some high-profile teams have chosen to stay outside the village during the Olympics – most notably the U.S. men’s basketball team, which prefers a five-star hotel.

But the Canadian hockey pros have opted for the village since they joined the Olympic arena at the 1998 Nagano Olympics.

Yzerman, recently appointed executive director of the team, wants the tradition to continue.

“I was there in ’98 and ’02 and we were in the Olympic village and all the players really enjoyed it,” said Yzerman, adding that the issue will be discussed today in a conference call with Hockey Canada executives.

“The reality is it’s more convenievent to be in the village, you get all your meals there whenever you want them, it’s a lot quieter. I just thought it was great. The players really enjoyed and appreciated being around not just the Canadian athletes, but all the other athletes and really enjoyed getting to know, particularly the Canadian athletes, and spending some time with them. They really appreciated that. It’s part of the experience. I plan to have the team definitely stay in the village.”

Yzerman said he enjoyed the opportunity to compare notes with athletes in other sports.

“I was always a fan of speed skating, long track speed skating, so I enjoyed meeting some of the speed skaters and getting to know them, talking to them about skating and training and whatnot. And obviously the alpine skiing is a sport I’ve always been interested in. The players are sports fans and enjoy meeting the other athletes.”

Biathletes hope nude calendar a bestseller ...

After having trouble getting the bare necessities to train and compete, the Canadian women’s biathlon team decided to take their clothes off.

Five athletes from the team – including Zina Kocher, a World Cup medalist – posed for the calendar, entitled Bold Beautiful Biathlon, which is being sold online for $25 Canadian including shipping.

The athletes say they’re proud of the calendar, which shows them in strong athletic poses, including some with their rifles.

“We’re not just sitting around looking pretty,” said Megan Imrie, one of the biathletes. “We’re showing we have muscles and we worked hard for them.”

The biathletes were inspired by the Nordic Nudes calendar done by members of the Canadian cross country ski team in 1999. It turned out to be a successful financial venture for that squad which included Sara Renner and Beckie Scott and brought attention to the team. Renner encouraged the biathletes to go ahead with the project.

Kocher said they’re hoping to sell all 5,000 copies and raise $80,000. She said they appreciate the funding they get from Sport Canada and Own the Podium, but it’s not near enough to properly fund their team and produce medal winners.

“To put it in perspective, when I’m standing on the start line with a German athlete, she’s receiving in support what our national team budget is,” said Kocher. “It’s like I’m a two-cylinder engine and I’m racing beside a V-6. A lot more can be done.”

You have to give these athletes credit for taking the initiative, as tired as the idea of these calendars may be to some. It was something that worked as a great team builder for the cross country ski team. The biathletes also believe doing the project has brought them together as a team.

“The photo shoot was so much fun,” said Sandra Keith. “It was a great team building activity. We’ve really grown together as a team because of this project.”