Lugers Walker, Snith have shown going downhill fast has its upside
Canadian doubles pair hope to put a bow on accomplished careers in Beijing
Often an inside joke, the Canadian bronze — aka fourth place — had become all too familiar a finish for luge doubles pair Tristan Walker and Justin Snith.
They had finished fourth four consecutive times leading into the 2014 World Cup event in Königssee, Germany, including at the 2013 world championships in Whistler, B.C., and World Cups in Lake Placid and Sochi. On the cusp of the Olympics in Sochi, this wasn't the momentum they were hoping for.
It itched at both of them, two highly competitive souls who take no half-measures when it comes to being the best they can be. Snith can be so intense he even left his childhood soccer team because he felt the other kids weren't trying hard enough. He went into luge to compete individually, and only committed to the doubles because he knew childhood friend Walker was just as passionate about winning as he was.
That's why their result at Königssee means so much to the pair. After all those close but not quite close enough moments, the number of times they've set up base camp there and essentially made it a home away from home, it was fitting that Germany was where they broke through, winning bronze for the first-ever podium finish for a Canadian pair.
"It was a little bit of relief," Snith said about winning in their second home that has provided plenty of highs and lows. "To finally do it there in Königssee of all places was really something special. I'd like to have the first one at home in front of friends and family but if it wasn't going to be home, I would draw it up to be [in Königssee] 10 times out of 10."
That was five years into their senior doubles career together. There have been both Canadian bronze finishes as well as more podium finishes since, on even bigger stages. Just teenagers at their first Olympic Games in Vancouver, Snith and Walker, both now 30, are veterans who have set a new standard for those looking to follow suit.
Marking new heights for Canadians has been nice, but in what could possibly be their final chapter on the biggest stage, Walker and Snith are hoping to add to their tally of globally recognized accomplishments in Beijing.
Piloting luge
It's something about having just the right level of extreme with these two.
Inspired by his grandfather who was an air force pilot, Walker wants to try his hand at calling the shots at the front of a helicopter when he's ready to say goodbye to luge. As a child, Walker's parents would take him to every air show in Calgary since his father worked for Kodak, the event's longtime sponsor.
"He was always about flying and things that went fast and looked exciting," Bruce Walker said of his son.
Walker loved looking up into the stars and looking out for planes and space stations, thinking about the ones in control of making a gravitational miracle look so serene and routine.
Snith's father, Steve, was in aviation as well, working as an aircraft mechanic. Out with his dad one day, Snith saw some sleds drying in the paint shop of the hangar housing aircrafts. With his curiosity piqued, he asked what he was looking at. Someone at the shop explained that they were luge sleds and that if he wanted to ride them, it would be as simple as having his parents sign him up. Snith was fascinated. A big old aircraft might be too large and complicated to handle, but a small sled like that? Maybe he had a chance. Oh, and to try to make it work all by himself? What a treat.
Natural advantages
Kyle Connelly, an Olympian who went on to coach Walker and Snith at various levels for the better part of a decade, first met the pair when they were 10-year-olds just looking to have fun on a sled. In Walker, Connelly saw a kid with almost a concave chest who would have plenty of room to grow physically. He also identified that both looked athletically inclined, and that while Walker was the more extroverted of the two, the wheels always seemed to be turning with Snith.
They both had their own natural advantages and disadvantages operating the sled as they grew up, Walker turning his concave chest into a convex one and growing physically stronger each and every year, while Snith's slighter frame had him developing a quick feel for how to use his shoulders to direct the sled. They developed into good individual sliders as they got into their teens, but Mike Lane, another member of the coaching staff, felt both could accentuate each other's strengths while negating the weaknesses enough to possibly be great together.
Despite Snith's initial passion to compete solo, the opportunity to maximize his chances of winning by entering an additional event appealed to him. That, and the fact that he and Walker had already developed a close knit friendship.
"We really think that it was inevitable to be honest," Walker said. "At the time, we were the only ones who were the right fit. We needed a doubles team, I definitely took it as a challenge at the beginning. I never really knew how serious it was going to be. At the beginning I think both of us felt it was filling a gap on the junior team."
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Two become one
Working together in harmony on a sled while moving at speeds illegal for cars on a highway through a track filled with twists and turns takes a level of chemistry and synchronization that only comes with years of knowing someone better than the back of your hand.
There's no bunk bed-style negotiations on who goes top or bottom in a luge sled. It's all about size, and with Walker being bigger, he goes on top and steers with Snith under him managing turns. The balance point of the sled is critical and so Snith at the bottom means the weight is pushed further up the sled. There's an aerodynamic element as well, as Walker on top allows for more interior space to be consumed and make the sled as airtight as possible.
Walker and Snith have been in so many races now the tracks are embedded in their brains and muscle memory takes over and that's the point; the finer details can't be mastered without time. Snith, being the lower body, can't really see much of the track, but he's learned the visual cues to look out for. Identifying which wall is closer to him sends his shoulders one way, the slightest head tilt from Walker sends them the other. All that gets witnessed from afar is the electrifying speed with which the sled zips across the track, but inside each millisecond is a decision that oscillates somewhere between a crash and the podium.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, I treat Justin as almost part of the sled.- Tristan Walker
"You really have to know what the other person's going to do before they do it," Walker said. "I mean this in the nicest possible way, I treat Justin as almost part of the sled. He's so consistent with the way that he uses his shoulders on the sled that I can almost drive it like a single sled."
They talk before the race, too. Snith and Walker break down where they expect to hit challenges, who takes charge when, and the butterfly effect of dozens of scenarios that might play out. They have to operate under the assumption that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and they've got to be prepared to pull things back on track (no pun intended) when they do. That's what assessing and reacting within a five- or 10-metre span while racing with your bodies moving at 130 km/h requires.
"There's really nowhere to hide on the doubles sled," Snith said. "You can feel what the other person is doing the whole way down the track so if you have a mistake coming out of one corner we both know what's going on on the sled."
One big happy family
The bond this luge duo has created extends to their families, too, partly because of the challenges that come with watching the sport live. Supporting one's child in luge isn't quite like watching them in other sports. It's not a sunny day at the baseball diamond or a soccer match or in the comforts of an arena for basketball or hockey. Out there where it's minus-20 in Calgary, they'd be standing on the straightaway hearing them much longer than they'd actually see them go by. Practices their first few years meant five or six runs of the track, or the equivalent of about a minute's worth of seeing them over the course of the day.
What that also meant was that all four of Bruce, his wife Karen Bolger, Steve and Andrea Snith had plenty of time to interact.
"We probably knew Justin's parents way better than Justin at first because you're just hanging around," Bruce said.
Over the years spent together, the watching habits during races have been established. Bruce is a keen observer who's watched every race that's been broadcast, Steve loves to wear a loud, red and white Canada suit with maple leafs all over. Andrea and Karen can hardly bear to watch.
At the Olympic games in 2014, Bruce suddenly lost track of his wife.
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"When we were in Sochi, my wife, I looked around and she wasn't there," Bruce said. "We were 100 per cent planning on going to Beijing before the restrictions. A few months back we were joking, 'So, would you like to spend another twenty grand to not watch your son?'"
Andrea has been slightly better with watching over the years. She watched the Vancouver Olympic race from the bottom of the track where there was a big screen, witnessed Sochi in 2014 on a projector at Calgary Olympic Park and her son's events in Pyeongchang were keenly followed at her sister's house. Just to be on the safe side, her daughter makes a barf bag every Olympic cycle just for mom, but Andrea is proud she hasn't had to use one yet.
Canada has always been an underdog in luge and it's pretty awesome when you can buck the trend a little bit and see a maple leaf on the podium when you put it there.- Tristan Walker
By the time Walker and Snith headed for Pyeongchang, fourth place had become a running joke, a position that they had come to own. So much so that the family had T-shirts made that had a Canadian motif on the front as well as a symbol of all the Olympics on the back and a hashtag that read: Four no more. It was prescient.
After the heartbreak of missing out on the podium at Sochi in their doubles event by five-hundredths of a second, the pair combined with Sam Edney and Alex Gough to win a silver medal. They had combined to win silver at the world championships in 2013 and here they were, five years later, mirroring the success together.
"He's competitive, I'm competitive, we're both super stubborn," Walker said of how the fourth-place finishes made them stronger. "A lot of pushing through the hard times was from that. That definitely made us stronger together and wanting to prove people wrong.
"Canada has always been an underdog in luge and it's pretty awesome when you can buck the trend a little bit and see a maple leaf on the podium when you put it there."
Leading from the front
There has been plenty of uncertainty for Walker and Snith the past couple years. They lost their main sponsor ahead of this season and, until recently, had sled issues that had them falling well short of their expectations. They've since found a new sponsor and have been on the upswing in terms of results after getting their sled issues sorted, but despite the stumbles, have embraced the role of being an example to their program.
Without the sponsorship, Walker and Snith instead took the opportunity to showcase some charitable organizations on their sled. The logos of STARS Air Ambulance, Downie Wejack Foundation, Kvisle Fund for GBM and Cochrane Humane Society were proudly pasted on and they made the most of what was an unfortunate situation.
"There are things that rightfully deserve more charitable contributions than two privileged kids who get to toboggan for a living," Walker said. "Being able to go to charity events, volunteer, use our little bit of fame we've got doing this kind of goofy thing that we do to be able to support in the ways that we can is pretty cool."
Since Pyeongchang, Walker and Snith have been firmly in place as the grizzled veterans of the team. From 18-year-olds enjoying the ride in Vancouver they're now 30-year-olds in charge of the steering wheel. They've felt themselves almost assuming a pseudo-coach role and guiding the younger lugers as they come along, taking them on track walks and explaining lines.
Walker has found himself viewing things from the younger athletes' perspective and thinking about how he would then want the guidance to be. He's adopted the Albert Einstein quote that if you can't explain something to a six-year-old then you don't understand it well enough yourself. Snith is relishing the opportunity to come full circle and work another doubles team after being influenced by the Moffat brothers – Chris and Mike – when they first made the team.
"It's definitely put the shoe on the other foot," Snith said. "Now moving into that mentorship role for those young guys, I think it's great for us. It makes us focus a little bit more on our sliding and nitpick a little bit more, it definitely makes me more accountable."
Going into their fourth Olympics, Walker and Snith face an uphill task going up against the heavyweight programs of Germany, Italy, and Austria, but they'll rely on their competitive spirit and experience to come through when it matters most. That, and the unshakeable trust they have in each other as Snith so eloquently put it.
"I might not have full confidence in what's underneath me, but I have full confidence in the guy riding it with me."
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