Calgary’s Pathway to the Podium Series highlights 10 local Canadian athletes on their backstories and hopes in Pyeongchang. Justin Snith and Tristan Walker are two of them.
Four years ago, Canadian luge doubles teammates Justin Snith and Tristan Walker missed out on an Olympic medal in Sochi by just 0.05 of a second and for the twosome, that blink of an eye has been a constant motivator.
“That memory and that feeling of being so close is still quite fresh and definitely still a little raw,” 26-year-old Snith admitted of their finish, which was the best-ever Games result by a Canadian sled in the doubles event.
“But this year, we’re feeling really good going into it, we’re pulling the fastest starts that we ever have, we’re feeling as good as ever, we both had solid summers of training, and we know we just need to perform to the best of our ability.”
And it’s been a strong season for the Calgary-based sliders leading up to Pyeongchang.
As part of the relay team, which is also made up of men’s and women’s singles, they finished third overall in the World Cup standings. In doubles, they earned bronze at December’s World Cup in Lake Placid, N.Y., for their first medal in three years.
According to Snith and Walker, those ups and downs form a partnership that’s lasted over a decade.
They joined the Canadian Olympic team as fresh-faced 18-year-olds and made their Games debut at Vancouver 2010, the youngest in the field. The duo says they frequently get asked how they’ve been able to sustain such a strong working relationship.
“We know each other’s boundaries, we know we live or die by the sled,” Cochrane-born Walker said. “Our moods and relationship can kind of fluctuate with how well we’re sliding. But even with that, we know, like there’s been a couple of years where we get frustrated with each other, but it’s not really frustrating with each other, it’s frustrating with sliding.”
His partner echoes those thoughts.
“There’s some other teams on the World Cup stage that don’t get along together, and you can see it in your sliding,” Snith said.
“Guys will be together four years, they’ll go to an Olympics together, they’ll be together for a quad, and then they’ll go their two separate ways and then find new teammates and then have to pretty much start from scratch all over again. Whereas Tristan and I have been lucky enough to have been sliding for 10 years now and have really gotten to know what the other’s going to do on the sled before it even happens.”
Their first day at the Olympic Sliding Centre in South Korea is Feb. 11 for training runs, followed by three days of practice. They compete on Feb. 14 in the first of two runs.
Track walkin’ with @justinsnith pic.twitter.com/AJJz9wwuRm
— Tristan Walker (@TristanLuge) February 5, 2018
“At the end of the day, the result is the result, but we’re there to perform to a level that we can, and I think if we do that, we’ll be happy where we end up,” Snith explained.
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