GUAY GIVES CANADA GLORY AFTER DROUGHT
Erik Guay was at first rather pleased with himself for his third-place performance on Friday on a Kandahar piste made extra challenging for late starters by warm weather.
Then the Canadian downhill racer got the opinion of his former coach.
"He said it was a good run but that I could have won it," Guay said on Saturday after winning his first World Cup race in the second Garmisch downhill.
"That got me thinking. So I went back and studied the tapes over and over again last night. And I saw some things."
Guay had managed to overcome an unfavourably high starting number -- 21 -- on Friday to get third, 0.44 seconds behind the victor Andrej Jerman of Slovenia. On Saturday, he was even lower at 25 but was half a second ahead of Jerman after a stellar run.
"It's incredible, it hasn't really sunk in yet," Guay told a news conference with a wide smile after the win that put him fifth in the downhill standings, ahead of champion Michael Walchhofer of Austria.
"I have come close a couple of times," Guay said. "It's just an incredible feeling to get my first victory."
He said he had felt challenged by Jerman, who took the lead again on Saturday with another strong run wearing bib 21.
"I figured if he could do it with such a high number, so could I," said Guay. "I took as many chances as possible. I knew I made some little mistakes at the top of the course. Maybe I was a little lucky. But that's how it is sometimes."
It was the first downhill victory for a Canadian since Cary Mullen won in Aspen on March 5, 1994.
"I didn't know it was 13 years since the last one," said Guay. "That's a long time. The team we have is getting better and better. I hope we can get a few more in the next few years. We all get along. We work hard together and have a good ambience.
"We feed off each other. If someone gets a good result, someone else wants to do even better. It's a healthy competition. We're all still friends."
Guay has emerged as one of the hottest downhill skiers on the circuit since the start of 2007. He was second at Val d'Isere in January and in February he got fourth at the world championships before Friday's third and Saturday's win.
"Nothing's really changed this year," he said. "I had a little bit of a rough start this winter but it got better and better all season. I came so close in Are. I was on the wrong side of two-hundredths of a second."
Guay said the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 were helping to motivate the Canadian ski team.
"Having the Olympics at home adds pressure and it brings more of a budget to Canada," he said. "It provides us with better training facilities and better training on snow in the summer."