Christine Nesbitt keeps blazing new speed skating trails.

By Chris Welner

Even getting rammed by two tonnes of steel couldn’t keep Olympic champion speed skater Christine Nesbitt from dominating the top step of the podium for the third consecutive season in 2010-2011.
Coming off two years filled with World Cup championships at 1,000 and 1,500 metres, and an Olympic gold medal, Nesbitt was not exactly primed for a third consecutive championship campaign after being T-boned by an SUV on her commute from the Olympic Oval in Calgary. The collision in June 2010 left Nesbitt with a broken arm, a banged-up knee and buckets of woe about what was to come for a speed skater in her prime. Add in the fact her dog died and her coach retired, and Nesbitt’s post-Olympics summer was filled with angst.

“I wondered if I’d ever compete again,” she remembers saying to herself lying on the side of Shaganappi Trail in northwest Calgary. The crash hit her physically and drained her emotionally, wiping out her desire to train even after her bones mended. “I trained sporadically. I had no motivation to do much more. I came through such a low, I didn’t want to train. I was just going through the motions,” she says.

With Xiuli Wang, her new coach and the woman she calls her “Zen master,” Nesbitt seemed to get in just enough training to battle her demons and rattle off a string of victories that carried through from Day 1 until the final weekend of World Cup competition where she lost her first 1,000 metre race of the season. Not bad after all the turmoil.

“It will be hard to do better this year, but that’s when it becomes more about doing it for yourself and you get really personal about more than just results,” says Nesbitt, breezing through 90 minutes on a spin bike as we chat, a new relaxed attitude that sees her coming into this skating season with a decidedly sunny disposition. Free of Olympic stress, and a veteran at handling the pressure that comes with unbeaten streaks, Nesbitt is matter-of-fact about skating with a bull’s eye on her back.

“That’s part of maturing and growing past just wanting to win,” she says. “That’s what’s going to give me the ability to want to win on days when I get complacent or arrogant.  There are always things to improve upon.”  That doesn’t bode well for the competition — again. 

Nesbitt is feeling more at ease, more fit than ever as she rolls into the midsection of her four-year Olympic cycle in advance of the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia. So her track record of winning virtually every race, and her desire to keep on doing so for another three years can be daunting unless one considers the mental fortitude and physical gifts she carries in her toolkit.
“You can lose that spark and that fire. You always have to be working on things and pushing yourself to improve to stay on top,” says Nesbitt. “If you get comfortable, you’re not going to be there for long.

“I know I have a giant target on my back. Those girls don’t want to see me up there every weekend.”  Nesbitt says her challenge is to maintain her race readiness late in the season. After the Olympics, she didn’t win another race that year. And last season she faltered only slightly at the end.

“You totally need an ebb and flow to the season and that’s something I’m learning to do. I get so excited to race at the start of the season that I have a reputation for racing really well in the fall and not as well in the winter, and that’s something I’m working at turning around,” she says. “I think that’s what my last couple of years had been like. It’s my goal to win every race and this year I’m trying to expand and do more 3,000 and 5,000-metre races, which is a lot to handle.”

Nesbitt, 26, was born in Melbourne, Australia, and moved to Canada as an infant. Her father is a geology professor in London at the University of Western Ontario and her mother teaches at a French-immersion elementary school. Nesbitt herself is a three-time Canadian female athlete of the year winner and is a member of the London Sports Hall of Fame. She studies urban geography at the University of Calgary.

A short-track skater, Nesbitt moved west to Calgary when she was 18 to put in her miles on the big oval under coach Marcel Lacroix. She raced with him for seven years before he left coaching after Nesbitt’s Olympic victory by just 2 hundredths of a second. “I remember telling Marcel, ‘Don’t write me off,’” Nesbitt says. “I really felt like Marcel was the first person to see potential in me and believe in me. It was so cool to be able to develop from not even knowing how to skate long track to winning an Olympic gold medal. It was special to win in Vancouver and have Marcel be my coach.
 “It was a perfect way to end our athlete-coach relationship.” But changing coaches isn’t something that happens often immediately following a big victory. And Nesbitt was apprehensive about her new coach Xiuli Wang — a Chinese world champion who had been coaching in Canada since 2002.

“I thought I didn’t have a lot of options. Xiuli invited me to go for coffee at Second Cup and I remember sitting down and grilling her for an hour and a half,” says Nesbitt. “I asked her, ‘How do you know you can provide me with what I need?’ Now, she knows me better than I do. I really trust her.” Nesbitt marvels at the Chinese expressions Wang offers that “just sound ridiculous,” but are filled with wisdom. “A cow never eats the grass that’s behind her,” is one such expression. “Don’t go back. Once it’s done you move forward,” explains Nesbitt. “It’s always profound and simple when she says something. I like to have those simple truths.”

Wang has coached Clara Hughes, Kristina Groves and Arne Dankers, and admits her new star pupil laid out a big challenge. “I said give me one year to earn your trust and you need my trust too,” says Wang. “Christine always puts lots of questions in her head. I never really count how many races she wins. She’s capable of winning and she performs. It was for me to prepare her mentally for each race.”

Nesbitt talks about maturing as an athlete and as a person, and she feels she is still growing into her potential.
“Even if someone is a better skater than me, I believe that I have a spark in me that maybe that other person doesn’t have.”

What does skating 1,000 metres really feel like?

“1,000 metres is 2½ laps around the track. About a minute, 17 seconds. It’s a sprint but you need endurance to be able to finish. The last lap really kills pure sprinters. The last lap is where middle distance and all-round skaters gain ground. We get splits after 200, 600 and the finish at 1,000 metres.

At 200 metres, I look for a time around 18.3, then I know I can’t be freaked out by how far ahead of me a sprinter is. I chase people down for 1,000 metres. I like the chase, but it’s stressful always having to make up time. If my opponent is three, four, five metres ahead of me at 600 metres, it’s really time to fly. At the Olympics, I was with German Monique Angermuller in the second-last pair and I was ahead of her the whole race. If I were racing Annette Gerritsen, I would have been trailing until the last couple of metres.

At end of a race you are no longer building speed, so you need a real good entry into the final corner. You have to set up the last turn perfectly, go in deep and carry speed. We’ll hit speeds upwards of 53-54 km/h. The Olympics, technically, was not a very good race, but I remember a point thinking I’m not going to win a medal. I could just finish, or I could give everything I have. With about 400 metres to go, I put my head down. I chose the harder route and it paid off.”
— Christine Nesbitt