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.