Guay gets his second wind on the slopes
Erik Guay is the most successful alpine skier in Canadian history. And, having grown up on stories of the successful Crazy Canucks of the late 1970s and early 1980s and watching Kerrin Lee-Gartner and Kate Pace race in 1990s, that’s a title that means a lot to him.
“Part of the reason I became a ski racer was because I watched them growing up so that inspiration is what fuelled me to try to be better,” Guay said.
For all the Canadian records and world podiums and titles he’s accumulated in his 16 years on the World Cup circuit, there are a couple things missing from his trophy case and Guay, finally, feels healthy enough to have a shot at winning them.
Top of his list are the classic downhill races, the Wegen World Cup on the slopes of the Lauberhorn in Switzerland and Austria’s Kitzbuhel on the Hahnenkamm mountain in Austria. In 2018, he’d really like to turn around his Olympic luck. His timing at the last three Olympics has been terrible, with his skiing generally peaking right afterwards.
“I’m obviously very proud of what I’ve accomplished throughout my career and I could retire tomorrow and be very satisfied and happy with it but, at the same time, I’ve battled with a lot of injuries and I think if I hadn’t had those injuries I could have done a lot more,” Guay said, just before starting this race season.
In total, he’s had six knee surgeries, his last one a rare and complicated procedure in 2015 that he now feels fully recovered from.
“My knees are doing great, my back is doing well,” he said. “There’s a second chance here that presents itself and why not see what I can make of it?” So far, quite a lot. He finished sixth in his first downhill in Val d’Isère, France and earned bronze in the super-G season opener, which turned out to be in Val Gardena, Italy Dec. 16.
“I feel like I can be competitive. I don’t have any excuses right now … I get to attack the season like I would have five years ago before my in- juries,” he said. “I haven’t been really healthy since 2011.”
Guay first made Canada’s World Cup team when he was 19 years old and he never expected to ski so long — he’s married with three children — or through so many surgeries.
“This is my limit. If I hurt my knee tomorrow that will be it, I won’t be coming back from that,” he said.
“The last surgery I had I was motivated, I knew I was going to come back but, at some point, enough is enough. At 35 years old, I just don’t see the necessity to come back from another injury, there’s nothing left to prove . . . and being away from home for so long, being away from my family and struggling to come back, it’s just not going to happen again.”
He already has his pilot’s licence with float plane certification — achieved when he was off skis recovering from injury — and he’s well aware just how many great fishing lakes there are around his Mont-Tremblant, Que., home.
“Athletes are stubborn and they’re very goal orientated, they have fixed objectives and they know what they want and they’ll do anything to get there,” Guay said, noting that teammates John Kucera and Robbie Dixon, now retired, each came back from multiple broken legs.
“We see it a lot, people have tremendous injuries and they come back, but right now I’m healthy so I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, smiling.
Guay knows his retirement from skiing will come before too long but he’s hoping for one last Olympic shot.
“Skiing is kind of cyclical, you have these ups and down throughout the year and it seems like I haven’t quite timed it,” he said.
For instance, at the 2014 Sochi Games he was 10th in the downhill and a week later won the Kvitfjell World Cup race in Norway.
“The Olympics is one race you get to go to once every four years, you don’t get to practise on it, you don’t know what the conditions are like, don’t know what the start numbers are going to be,” Guay said. “There’s so many factors that can come into play that are either for you or against you.”