Things are far from settled in the Olympic skeleton races at the Whistler Sliding Centre, but Canadians are in striking position after the first two runs on Thursday night (Feb. 18).
Jon Montgomery of Russell, Man., sits in second place in the men's event, while World Cup overall champion and Olympic bronze medallist Mellisa Hollingsworth is third in the women's race heading into the final two heats on Friday (Feb. 19).
Montgomery's total time is currently just 26 hundredths of a second slower than that of leader Martins Dukurs of Latvia, this season's overall World Cup champion, who could be poised to win his nation's first-ever gold medal at a Winter Olympics.
Montgomery and Dukurs duelled for the lead on the chilly Thursday night, as Montgomery, who has been posting top times and speeds in the training runs leading up to the opening night of the four-run competition, slipped behind Dukurs by 26 hundredths of a second in the first run but managed to beat the Latvian by just two hundredths of a second in the next heat.
"So far, so good. I'm pleased with the way I slid this evening, and if I could do that again tomorrow night, I'll be a happy boy," Montgomery said. "Martins is sliding like the champ that he is, the overall World Cup title holder, and he's that for a reason, because he's consistent, solid and has phenomenal pushes at the start."
Dukurs, who won four World Cup races this year en route to capturing the overall title, smashed the track record for the Whistler track with his first-run time of 52.32 seconds. But he said he certainly doesn't think he's unbeatable, with his lead of three tenths of a second heading into the final two heats.
"Both runs (Thursday) were great, not perfect. There are still things to fix," he said.
In the women's races that opened the evening, Hollingsworth powered up in her second run to jump into third place after finishing fifth in the first heat. Her total time of 1:48.35 is 39 hundredths of a second behind leader Amy Williams of Great Britain, who won a silver medal in the World Cup race held in Whistler last year.
Hollingsworth managed to post the third-fastest time in the second heat despite coming out of the start grooves as she launched her run, as the ice forced the 2006 Olympic medallist to smash the wall and skid into the first corner.
After Thursday's runs, she said, "I'm disappointed, for sure. I'm frustrated a little bit. But the positive thing that I'm drawing out of it is I could have very easily given up when I smashed the wall coming out of the grooves but I didn't, I kept pushing forward, and it's still a close race.
"A couple tenths on this track is really nothing, especially with two runs to come."
Germany's Kerstin Szymkowiak, who finished third overall on the World Cup circuit this season after a strong string of podium placings, improved in her second run to sit in the silver-medal position heading into Friday's final heats.
Williams also set a track record with her first-run time of 53.83 seconds, but said she wasn't paying too much attention to the numbers on the board. She said there's room to improve every run, and she'll seek to control the nerves that naturally accompany competitions in order to perform well again on Friday.
Abbotsford's Amy Gough screamed into second place in the first heat, but posting the 11th-fastest time in her second run, she dropped into a tie for seventh overall with 2006 Olympic silver medallist and World Cup overall runner-up Shelley Rudman of Great Britain. Gough said she thought she steered her second run "a little too aggressively," and she's looking forward to shaking off the nerves more for Friday's runs.
"For me personally, I just really want to be consistent. So I'm really looking forward to put down some runs that I know I have had here in the past," Gough said.
Michelle Kelly of Fort St. John, B.C., sits 13th, while Toronto's Michael Douglas is seventh on the men's side, followed by 2006 Olympic silver medallist Jeff Pain in 10th. Kelly and Pain expressed some frustration with their performances, but Pain is hampered a torn oblique muscle that is "more and more painful every minute," and Kelly is looking to figure out what went wrong tonight and fix it for tomorrow.
Montgomery, who won the World Cup race in Whistler last February and finished fifth overall on the World Cup circuit this season, isn't getting ahead of himself going into the last runs. Many of the racers Thursday night described the fast and technical Whistler track, whose challenges have been all over the news in the last week, as a course where anything could happen.
"This track is amazing fast and difficult," said Dukurs, who reached speeds of 144.9 kilometres per hour on Thursday.
It could all come down to the final run on Friday night, said Kristan Bromley of Great Britain, the past World Cup overall winner and world champion who currently sits fifth, 89 hundredths of a second behind Dukurs.
"You've just got to be dialed in every second of every corner, and not get two corners in front of you, or one run in front of you, or thinking about standing on the podium you've got to concentrate on what's right before your nose, and that's the next corner," Montgomery said.
Russia's Alexander Tretyakov sits third in the men's race, followed by Austria's Matthias Guggenberger in fourth, at 84 and 86 hundredths of a second behind Dukurs.
