BEIJING, China – One was a figure skater. Another was a hockey player. A third was, shh! don’t tell anyone!, “never a hockey guy” and always preferred skiing and mountain biking to the national sport.

One thing the new generation of Canadian downhillers have in common, however, is that they all grew up competing at the Whistler Ski Club.

They don’t have a nickname yet. But like the “Crazy Canucks” and “Canadian Cowboys” of yesteryear, they are fast and they want to show it at the Beijing Olympics.

Brodie Seger, James Crawford and Broderick Thompson are all in their mid-twenties, still young for downhillers, and they’ve flown under the radar as they rack up the good results.

At the world championships last season in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Seger and Crawford finished fourth in super-G and combined, respectively.

As in Cortina, the speed course in China is new.

“It’s a bit like in Cortina last year; it was a new site and it was interesting to see the veterans scrambling there without a point of reference, Seger said. They were no more prepared than us young people. And I think it will be about the same in Beijing. »

Crawford surprises

If Thursday’s first downhill practice session were any indication, the Canadians could do well there. The top four in the standings all missed gates, making Crawford, fifth, the best skier to finish the course correctly and Thompson, fourth in the revised standings.

“Everyone is hungry and the team is in a good position to push hard,” said Thompson, who earned his first World Cup podium with a third-place finish in the super-G in Beaver Creek, Colo., there. two months old.

Last month, Crawford clinched fifth and sixth places in Wengen, Switzerland, and Kitzbühel, Austria on back-to-back weekends. Then he won a second-tier European Cup downhill in Austria just before flying to China.

According to family tradition, Thompson did figure skating until the age of 16.

“I was doing triple loops and double axels,” he said.

Thompson has a younger sister who performed in the Disney on Ice troupe, and her older sister, Marielle, was an Olympic ski cross champion in 2014. Her skating background helps Thompson in skiing.

“We were all figure skaters growing up and skiing has always been a big part of our family,” noted Thompson.

Crawford played competitive hockey until he was about 17 before switching to skiing full time.

“I’ve never been a big fan of team sports. It’s always fun to have a team around you, but in hockey my team was a little toxic,” Crawford said. I just liked skiing more. »

Like Thompson, however, Crawford still benefits from his former sport. He learned to train hard in the gym for hockey.

“In skiing, we had to train really hard in the gym and at that age neither guy had done that yet,” Crawford said. So that was an advantage for me. »

As for Seger, his main sports have always been skiing and mountain biking.

“I was never a hockey guy,” Seger said. In the winter my family went from Vancouver to Whistler and skied on the weekends and in the summers we all mountain biked. »

Finding a nickname

Downhill coach John Kucera is one of the only guys on the team who stays up late to watch hockey games at home while in Europe.

“It might sound terrible as Canadians, but we don’t have a ton of die-hard hockey fans on this team,” Seger said.

Kucera, who won the world downhill title in 2009, is the link between the “Canadian Cowboys”, a group completed by two-time world champion Erik Guay, Olympic bronze medalist Jan Hudec and world championship bronze medalist Manuel Osborne-Paradis, and this generation.

“I started with those guys with the junior team six or seven years ago,” Kucera said. We won several NorAm titles a few years ago. And now I just passed with this group at the World Cup. […] So there is a lot of continuity, a lot of trust. And I think that contributes to our successes. »

Phil McNichol, former head coach of the US ski team during the Bode Miller years, is the Canadian team’s alpine director.

Another Cowboys connection was made in Whistler, where Thompson is a neighbor of Robbie Dixon, another former skier.

Now all this group needs, other than a few medals, is a nickname. It’s been a Canadian tradition since the “Crazy Canucks” emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with Ken Read, Steve Podborski and Dave Murray.

“I think it’s (the media) to come up with the name,” Seger said. We asked ourselves this question a lot. It will take more time to say what is needed. »