A little travel-weary but none the worse for wear, Cochrane luger Tristan Walker arrived home Monday night following long flights from Sochi, Russia.
He, doubles luge teammate Justin Snith of Calgary, and the rest of the Canadian Olympic luge team hit the YYC arrivals concourse to a raucous greeting from family, friends, fans and news-media outlets.
The Feb. 24 Calgary touchdown ended an Olympic journey that began with final Canadian training runs on the Sanki Sliding Centre track in mid-November, followed by a World Cup season that saw Walker and Snith claim the first World Cup doubles luge medal (bronze) ever for Canada at Koenigssee, Germany, a month before the Sochi Olympics.
At the Games, the Canadian luge duo threw down three near-flawless, consistent runs on the Sanki, including a track-record run, but came up agonizingly short – placing fourth in both the doubles and team relay.
Their season now over, the Cochrane slider and his Calgary teammate are taking a break before ramping up training in late April for another World Cup season next winter.
“I’m happy with the way we slid,” Walker proclaimed to a crowd of media members scrumming him on the airport arrivals-hall floor. “Being part of Team Canada is mostly why I do this. I’m really proud to be part of the team.”
Said teammate Snith: “It was a little bittersweet at the end there. We wanted to contribute to the medal total but we came up a little short. But I think we can be proud of what we accomplished.”
They accomplished Canada’s best-ever doubles luge result in an Olympiad, finishing less than an inch out of the medals, under what some suggest were suspect conditions.
When asked about alleged track tampering between Olympic team-relay runs, in which ice conditions slowed sleds when it was Canada’s turn to slide, Walker took the high road: “Tracks deteriorate. There was over an hour between the start of the relay race to us. The track did slow down, obviously, from the beginning to us. Whether or not it was done on purpose, it’s hard to tell and even harder to prove.”
His second Olympiad over, the 22-year-old Cochranite is back home.
“We’re going to take a break. Last year we only took two weeks off from the last World Cup to the beginning of our offseason training. So we’ve been going non-stop for pretty much two years now.
“We’ve got a good break before we start our dryland training and getting ready for the next competitive season.”
Their best luge season now behind them, Walker and Snith have another four-year cycle ahead to make the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
“We have the biggest drive ever we could possibly have now – 500ths of a second off the podium at the Olympics. So we were 15th in Vancouver and fourth in Sochi, so if my math skills serve me right, hopefully 2018 will be pretty special.”
