Simon Whitfield doesn’t want to tell us what he was thinking when he authored one of the gutsiest moments in Canadian sporting history, when he grit his teeth, threw his hat down and sprinted to an Olympic silver medal in Beijing.
But, after a bit of convincing, he did.
“Ah, f— that.”
It’s pretty perfect, isn’t it? You know the story: Whitfield had talked himself into the fact he’d be OK with fourth. The lead pack was a solid 40 metres ahead, he had less than a kilometre to run in the 2008 Olympic triathlon, already with a gold medal in his collection, and he thought: “I’m done, these guys have got me.”
Then, that expletive thought, the hat-whip, and the no holds barred sprint when you thought he had nothing left.
When Whitfield announced his retirement Wednesday, at age 38, you had to think about the hat-whip. That epic hat-whip.
Whitfield, of course, famously passed the leaders sans hat. “You gotta play all your cards at that point,” he says. He doesn’t know if he ever thought he had that race locked up. He was in a world of agony, could barely see, let alone think, when Jan Frodeno passed him. The German beat him by five seconds. Silver for Canada. And perhaps the sweetest silver medal in Canadian Olympic history.
It’s sad to know the man who put triathlon on the map in this country is done racing professionally, that we’ll never again get to watch him compete. Whitfield won Olympic gold the first time triathlon was ever contested at the Games, gave us the opportunity to splash headlines like SIMON SAYS GOLD on the front page of newspapers across this country. He was 25 then, looked 14, with that red hair and the boyish smile.
Now here’s a Simon Whitfield story you probably haven’t heard: His third-favourite race, 2009, in Idaho. It was then the biggest purse in triathlon history, $200,000, a one-year-later rematch between Whitfield and Frodeno, the German who’d edged him in Beijing.
“I sprinted to a win,” he says. “A little bit of payback. That was sweet.”