At this point in his storied career, ninth is not enough for Jan Hudec.
Representing Canada’s best chance to continue the nation’s string of top finishes at alpine world championships, Hudec finished ninth in the downhill at Schladming, Austria, Saturday (Feb. 9).
He had previously won a silver medal at world championships in Are, Sweden in 2007 and felt he was poised for a return to the podium, but came up short.
“I’m really disappointed,” Hudec said in a press release. “I knew I had a chance to be on the podium today and that’s how I skied. I just had some bad luck today and that’s ski racing.”
By bad luck, Hudec means he couldn’t see – not the best situation when speeding downhill at 110 kilometres an hour.
“About 25 seconds into the race I thought it was snowing a lot. I think I was just sweating under my helmut from the warmup. I couldn’t see. It was already bad visibility, but I couldn’t see anything,” Hudec said.
Hudec is still hunting for his first podium of the season and wanted to find his form in Austria.
“Top Canadian doesn’t mean much today. At the end of the day, I wanted to win,” Hudec said, who was nearly two seconds back of eventual winner Aksel Lund Svindel of Norway. Italy’s Dominick Paris was second and David Poisson of France was third.
Hudec wasn’t the only Canadian to have bad luck in the downhill. Erik Guay, the defending world champion, was leading at the third timing split, but made a mistake, went off-course and was disqualified.
“I knew at the start that I didn’t want to come down here and finish fourth or fifth, so I took some chances. Unfortunately, I just hooked an edge and as quickly as that it was over,” Guay said. “It’s a little bit disheartening for sure. I had a good race out of the start. I was in the right place – I was skiing well. My head wasn’t really into it through the bottom section and I ended up going out. It was just a little bit of bad luck.”
“It was heartbreaking to see Erik struggling in the middle section, to have that mistake. He was in the lead and I really thought he could defend his championship,” Hudec said.
Other Canadians also made mistakes. Ben Thomsen of Invermere, B.C. was 17th, followed by Manuel Osborne-Paradis, who was 18th.
“I thought my run was pretty good. I thought I was really good up top, but down below I struggled a bit,” said Thomsen. “I just gave up way too much time down there. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. I’ve just got to accept the challenge.”
“Right from the start I was taking risks and I just didn’t get away with it,” said Osborne-Paradis, who clocked a time of 2:03.58. “I knew halfway down it was not going well. That’s racing. You go for it and some days are good and some days are bad.”
“We clearly didn’t come here to have ninth as our best result,” said Pete Bosinger, Canada’s men’s team head coach.
“We know we were doing some good things. Erik was well on track to ski into the top five or even onto the podium. That was a positive, but unfortunately in this game mistakes do happen and we’re not the only team that was the victim of a mistake.
“As a team we know where we stand and we know we can still finish the season strong. That has to be the focus now. We came here to defend the world championship gold medal and that didn’t happen. Now it’s time to regroup. We’ve got to go out there and continue to compete for podiums.”
