Calgary's Chris and Mike Moffat posted an exuberant and excellent finish in their third Olympics, speeding through their last run in the two-run doubles luge race on Wednesday night (Feb. 17) to hit the finish line with pumping fists and joyful smiles at the Whistler Sliding Centre.
Cheered along by more than 6,400 fans and their men's singles luge teammates Jeff Christie, Ian Cockerline and Sam Edney, the Moffat brothers finished seventh with two strong runs in an event complicated by an unfamiliar and difficult lower start position, and by the shocking death that preceded the Olympic luge races.
"It's been a really crazy week," Mike Moffat said. "But to finish that second start, as well as we did, I'm pretty happy leaving the season on that note."
Like the women's singles racers, the doubles teams started from the lower juniors' start on the Whistler Sliding Centre track, so they had to navigate a challenging plunge right into a curve instead of their usual.
The International Luge Federation decided to lower the start heights for the Olympic luge races on the Whistler track following the shocking crash that killed Georgia's Nodar Kumaritashvili on Day 1 of the Games, saying they wanted to help alleviate the emotional and psychological impact of the tragedy. But many of the athletes said they would have been prepared to start from their usual heights and expressed the difficulty of using the juniors' start for their races.
Austrian brothers Andreas and Wolfgang Linger defended their Olympic doubles gold by posting the fastest time in both runs for a total time of one minute, 22.705 seconds, while the Latvian brothers Andris and Juris Sics sped into second place.
"It's a dream come true again, four years later. We had a new start this week and had to deal with it. We tried and it worked. To make the second run better than the first run is good for us," Andreas Linger said.
Germany's Patric Leitner and Alexander Resch, the 2002 Olympic champions who finished second in the World Cup season overall and second at the World Cup race in Whistler last year, kept their country on the podium with their bronze-medal finish. Germany, the powerhouse luge nation, grabbed two medals in each of the other two 2010 Olympic luge events.
Leitner and Resch leapt onto the podium after sitting fifth following their first run.
"It's our last race, our last run. It's over now for us," Leitner said. "We said we want to win a medal. Bronze is like gold for us."
Germany's Andre Florschuetz and Torsten Wustlich, three-time world champions and winner of the Whistler World Cup, had to settle for fifth after the Italian pair of Christian Oberstolz and Patrick Gruber snuck into fourth.
For the Canadians, the changed start wiped out the familiarity they had developed with the track in nearly 300 runs over the last two years. The doubles teams, like their teammates in the four days of racing before them, dug deep to rise to the challenge.
After what Chris Moffat called a "brilliant" first run, the brothers looked even better in their second run to achieve one of their best results in recent years.
"What a time to have it at home, in front of these crowds, all the support, it's amazing," Chris Moffat said.
Mike Moffat said he felt little surprise in looking at the event medallists, and he was happy for the victorious Lingers, but added that "the only surprise is we wanted to be up top there. But you know what I'll take seventh place, I'm pretty happy with it."
Canadian coach Wolfgang Staudinger said he was "very happy and pleased" with the Moffats' result, especially after everything that happened in the last week.
"They put down two solid runs (and) I'm quite happy with the seventh place, it is a good result," he said, adding that they handled the start curve OK, though not perfectly. Staudinger likened the shift to the lowered starts, after the Canadians' two years of training on the expected start heights, to training for an alpine skiing downhill race and then having to race a slalom instead.
The rising rookie tandem of Tristan Walker of Cochrane, Alta., and Calgary's Justin Snith attracted the most enthusiastic contingent of fans to the finish line for their Olympic debut. Supporters chanted "Wal-ker-Snith" sporadically throughout runs before the young Canadians hit the track, and screamed heartily as the duo finished 15th.
A few of Walker's best friends even went shirtless on the chilly night to paint "Walker Snith" and maple leaves on their chests.
"It's the first time I've ever been able to hear people cheering the entire way down the track. Normally you just hear the wind rushing past your head, and everything else gets blocked out," Walker said.
As the youngest and least experienced pair on the World Cup circuit as Walker put it after training on Monday (Feb. 15) Snith and Walker have been a pleasant surprise with their solid performances throughout their rookie season on the senior World Cup circuit.
Walker said the 2010 Games was mainly about gaining experience, for this pair of 18-year-olds, but "four years from now, we're going to be looking for medals."
Staudinger, whom the Canadian team recruited from Germany in 2007, said the Canadian athletes came "pretty much out of nowhere into medal contention" between the 2006 and 2010 Games, and he hopes the progress can continue.
