From a converted hurdler to a ‘fricking epic’ comeback, meet Canada’s most intriguing Olympic team: Women’s bobsleigh
The lack of NHL players in the coming Olympics means Canadians will be denied the winter tradition of arguing about rosters and line combinations, unless you feel quite strongly about whether Ben Scrivens or Justin Peters should get the Team Canada net.
But to fill that void of intrigue and speculation, in a sport in which Canada is a two-time defending Olympic champion, I give you: women’s bobsleigh?
It would normally be a little more straightforward. Kallie Humphries, pilot of the gold-medal sled in Vancouver and again in Sochi, has been expecting for some time to have a new Olympic brakeman behind her, as her former teammate Heather Moyse retired from the sport after the second medal in 2014. Humphries has won World Cup races with Cynthia Appiah and Melissa Lotholz in her sled, and both are hopeful of pushing someone in Pyeongchang.
But there’s also Phylicia George, a two-time Olympian in the hurdles, including last year in Rio, who has made the jump (sorry) to bobsled and was last week named to Canada’s World Cup team. That alone adds a new level of intrigue: summer-winter Olympians are great fun, especially if George were to end up in the sled of Humphries, a clear podium contender.
And then there is Moyse. At 39 years old, she decided a little over two months ago to try what would be a wild comeback: from not training since Sochi to getting up to Olympic-level fitness in a matter of weeks. Pyeongchang 2018 is barely three months away.
Canadian bobsledder Heather Moyse poses for a portrait in Toronto on Oct. 27.
There is a lot to sort out. And with the World Cup season starting in Lake Placid, N.Y., this week, the sorting process looms.
“The idea, obviously, is to put the best team on the ice, number one, and number two is to get as many opportunities as possible to win a medal,” says Todd Hayes, one of the Bobsleigh Canada coaches, who was in Toronto last week for the official naming of the World Cup team. They hope to qualify three two-woman sleds for South Korea, which means a lot of possible combinations between the Olympic veterans and the rookies.
For Moyse, who was in Toronto recently to give a speech to a corporate audience — she started a full-time speaking business after Sochi — the challenge is not to try to three-peat with Humphries, but to be a veteran pushing the sled of someone who hasn’t been to the Olympics before.
Alysia Rissling, 28, who moved from brakeman to pilot last season and won a bronze medal on the Pyeongchang track, reached out to Moyse over the summer, wondering if rumours of a possible comeback were true.
“I actually sent her an Instagram message because I didn’t even have her email (address),” she says. “I was hoping she’d know who I was, and she did, so it worked out pretty well.”
Moyse says that she had declined overtures to return to the team as recently as last spring, but when the message from Rissling arrived, she realized it was the kind of thing she talks about in her speaking career.
“It does align with my message, empowering other people and passing knowledge along to the next generation,” Moyse says. “That made me consider it.”
Her first call was to her therapist, to see if was even possible to get herself in Olympic shape in such a short time. (Moyse says that she was just getting used to be able to wear jeans again; bobsledders have very large thighs.)
In this Feb. 23, 2014 file photo, Canadian flag bearers Kaillie Humphries (right) and Heather Moyse march in the closing ceremonies of the Sochi Olympics.
She says she doesn’t know if she can pull this off. “But I’m sure as hell excited to see how close I can get to hitting my target,” Moyse says. “It’s pretty fricking epic what I am trying to do. To see what my 39-year-old self can manage to do when I really put everything I can into it.”
Humphries knows that the question of who will be pushing in her sled is an interesting one. There’s the three-peat angle, plus the crossover of George and the return of her former partner. Four athletes with whom she has all now shared a sled.
But she says none of that is worth worrying about now. “We are still a hundred days out. We are not going to pick an Olympic team now,” she says. “I’m working my butt off, and I know all of my teammates are doing the same.
“Heather and I make a great team,” Humphries said. “What we have accomplished as a team is undeniable.” But the program is deeper now, she adds. The coaches will ultimately make those calls, likely not until January.
And so, if Moyse gets herself back up to team standards, is it a given that Canada will split its Olympic experience into multiple sleds?
“It’s kind of a liquid situation,” says Hayes, the coach. “That would be very nice if she could help one of our (Olympic) rookies. So that’s certainly a place where it would have a lot of value. But we haven’t really mapped it out just yet.”
The mapping begins on an ice track in New York, in just a few days.
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