Not everyone with an Olympic dream is punching their ticket for Sochi.
For the 221 athletes representing Canada at the 2014 Winter Olympics, there are many more being left behind.
Springbank snowboarder Michelle Brodeur is one of those athletes who, beset with unfortunate timing and bad breaks, didn’t make Canada’s 2014 Olympic snowboard team.
Competing in the snowboard cross (SBX) event, the 2007 Calgary Academy grad’s Olympic train began derailing in autumn 2012 when she suffered a concussion at the World Cup season opener in Austria. After getting back on her feet in 2013, she finished with a silver medal at a Nor-Am SBX event in Canyons, Utah, in March.
She blew her right knee out, for a second time, in the process.
Such is the reality of elite athletes pursuing Olympic dreams in high-risk events like SBX, where six competitors at a time board down steep, twisting courses dotted with large jumps in a sprint to the bottom.
Following her second knee surgery, Brodeur rehabbed through the summer in time for the start World Cup season this fall.
“It feels OK,” she says in a telephone interview with The Eagle from her current home in Whistler, B.C. “It’s still in recovery stage a little bit. It doesn’t feel like 100 per cent. But the strength is all back. I’d say most of the stability is back.
“I still have to wear a brace and it hurts when I snowboard. But it’s nothing you can’t put in the back of your mind and not think about.”
In pain, and on a not-fully-recovered right knee, the 24-year-old Hay River, NWT, native who moved to Springbank at age 10 was unable to score the World Cup finishes she needed to qualify for Canada’s Olympic SBX team.
“Nothing to brag about,” she says of her early World Cup results this season. “It’s actually not been that great.
“It’s funny because I had about maybe a week of being back on snow hitting jumps and being on the course before my first World Cup after my knee surgery,” she recalls. “And I don’t know if it just wasn’t enough, or what. But my first World Cup (back from surgery) was my worst result I’ve ever gotten. It was disappointing.
“This has been a really frustrating year. Especially with the Olympics. I was trying to make the team last year and I really didn’t have a result with my injuries. It was kind of all up to four events.”
Undeterred, the 5-foot-2 SBX dynamo intends to soldier on and rejoin the World Cup tour following the month-long Olympic break. She’s not going anywhere but back to the top of the mountain in an effort to beat everybody else down.
“You really do grow to love all of it. The training’s amazing, the travelling’s amazing. Everybody you get to go to these places with tends to become more or less like a family to you.
“And the actual sport itself is such a huge adrenalin rush. When you do well in it, it’s such a good feeling. It’s hard to get that feeling anywhere else.”
While she isn’t saying as much, you can’t help but think the Springbank snowboarder has thoughts of the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea tucked away in the back of her mind.
