Ed Drake

Olympic Season Report 2009/10

I’d qualified for the Games a few times during this season and last, but once I received the letter to say that I had been selected to represent my country, the fact that I had achieved a dream that I had harboured since I first started racing didn’t really dawn on me until I went to Heathrow to collect the Team GB gear, and I read the embroidery ‘Vancouver 2010’ set below the iconic image of those five rings!

Just as I was leaving the kitting-out session, bags in tow, a man with a clip board approached me. I thought he had come to ask me a few questions about how I was feeling about the Games or what my expectations were, but unfortunately he was not: he was a drugs tester and I had just been to the toilet before driving home… so the next couple of hours were spent drinking bottle after bottle of water!

Chemmy and I plus coaches and a physiotherapist flew out of Heathrow T5 to Calgary in our team travelling clothes with enough bags for the whole of Team GB! We would go on from Calgary to Nakiska for our pre-Olympic training camp.  

We were met by Team GB holding camp staff making sure we had everything we needed, then it was off to Nakiska which was about 2 hours drive away - it would have been shorter had we been in Europe as the speed limits back home aren’t quite so conservative!.  

After a day to get over jetlag it was off to training, which went really well up until the second last day. We were training Super G, it was a really fast course and I was skiing really well but lost my outside ski just before a roll in the piste which popped me up when I should have been absorbing the roll. Consequently, I missed the steep landing, slapping down onto the flats and I ended up on lying on my back, skis still upright, knees flicked underneath me, then lying on my side heading to the safety nets but stopping just short of them. Once I got up and checked myself out that there was nothing majorly wrong, I started to feel pain in the back of the knees.

I ended up having the next few days off to give my knee a chance to recover. It turns out I was very lucky. The coaches feared the worst, that my Olympic dream was over. Crashes are a strange part of a ski racer’s life, something that we try not to think about too often as the moment you let the thought and consequences into your mind is when you become more likely to crash or ski within yourself.

In my case, the instant I realise that I am about to crash, everything goes into slow motion until the first impact, but from then on it flies by. This time, during that first slow motion part when I realised I was crashing, before the first impact, the Olympics flashed into my mind: the possibility that I had come so close and might not actually get there. By the time I had picked myself up and got to the bottom, been checked out by the physio and it turned out that I would still be able to race, I was finally able to breathe!

(Actually, it was worse than I thought. It turns out that I had torn a ligament but as I could ski, the physios etc  didn’t want to investigate too much further. However, once it was all over, I had to face the fact that I had damaged the knee and would have to take most of the rest of the season off to recover. But for now, the dream continued to become reality…)

It really hit home that I was at the Olympics when I got off the plane in Vancouver after a short flight from our pre-Olympic base in Calgary. This was finally the result of the years and years of dreaming, training and sacrifices (mine, my family’s and my friends’) . Picking up the accreditation that practically became another limb (as it was needed to get everywhere: ski room, training/racing piste, food hall, Olympic Village, shuttle buses, everywhere) was another seminal moment.

Once I had arrived at the Olympic Village and been shown to the cabin that would become home for the next two and a bit weeks, it was time for our welcome talk from the Whistler Chef de Mission, Sir Clive Woodward and the rest of the BOA team, telling us how everything worked at the Games but mostly about the facilities available to help us achieve our best performance possible. I quickly formed a close hatred of the ice baths which would help with the swelling of my knee and my recovery from skiing as biking proved painful.

The slopes of Whistler Creekside were more like my normal environment, a bit more what I was used to, but with racing fast approaching, I was finding it hard to treat this just like any other event. But the weather (which obviously hadn’t got the memo about this being the Olympic Games) started to mess with the racing schedule. Only the top 38 managed to get through the first planned training run before the fog came in and the training run was cancelled. The following day we managed to get the whole field down the course including the 38 who had already got a run, but the finish had to be moved up to accommodate the weather again!

Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to attend the opening ceremony as the first downhill was scheduled for the following morning but just to rub salt in the wound, upon waking up I was told that there would be no race, that it had been postponed for a few days’ time  when there was a better chance of getting the races completed on a fairer playing field.

Race day eventually got underway. With inspection completed, I was in the athletes’ lounge visualising the course, thinking back to the video analysis from the night before, combining that with my plans for the race. The course had a bit of everything: steeps, flats, technical sections, jumps, fast sweeping turns and unfortunately some slushy snow where the sun had heated it up.

As my start number approached, I was getting more and more nervous - a bit more than usual. I kept trying to convince myself that it was just another race! This began to work but by the time I got to the start and pulled on my bib, it hit me: I was at the Olympics, about to race at the pinnacle of my sport, any sport. I was trying to put on my best performance on the big occasion, in front of millions watching on TV, the thousands lining the course, my family at the finish.

I continued my warm-up as normal, taking off my outer clothes, clicking into my skis, my technician checking over the bindings, giving me some final words of encouragement, doing up my boots, waiting for the guy in front of me to push out of the gate.

This is when I got passed on to the legend that is the US start coach: ‘Baby Huey’, the notorious voice that any ski enthusiast who watches skiing on a regular basis will recognise.  “C’mon Eddie, you gat this. C’mon Fast Eddie let’s do this thang” (I have been newly christened Fast Eddie by the US Ski Team!) “Show’em, it’s your time now, give’er some, it’s just another day, get after it dowg!” (I am sitting here writing this with shaky hands re-living this amazing experience that only a handful of people will ever get to know.)

I place my poles over the wand at the 10 second beep, Baby Huey still roaring encouragement at me. I gaze out across the mountains as I do every time I race, find the highest mountain I can and take a few deep breaths for a couple of seconds to clear my head. Beep (five), beep (four) - I can’t wait any longer. I summon everything I have and explode down the biggest thing I have achieved in my life so far.

The first couple of turns are clean and precise, trying to absorb the ruts that have been formed by the 48 people before me. I make a good move coming up to the first jump and get minimal air. The second jump is immediately after the first landing, leading straight into the take off. I fly off the second, getting much more air than expected as the speeds are higher from the only training run. I try to stay compact in the air as I soar high and long (about 50m). It feels like slow motion; but then I land and it’s back to normal pace.

The following section seems faster than it actually is as the gates are set quite close together and there isn’t much of an offset, before a tight cranking right foot turn leading to a jump where you switch straight to the left foot in mid-air so that you start turning instantly. Tight bumpy turns swing down this steeper section before a couple more big turns as you drop to the flat section.

A giant ‘banana’ gate saps the majority of your speed before the ground literally falls from underneath your feet. You get light on the right foot before a compression leading to a jump on the left, back to a compression before two gates on the flat, followed by a right foot ‘banana’, another jump, switch landing on the left, giving it everything to get back across before a tough right foot on the crest of yet another drop, leading into probably the most severe compression, my whole body getting dragged down to the snow as I resist with anything I have left!

There’s one short straight on a flatter section before it rolls over and back into some swinging turns, rattling through the ruts. Trying to keep my hip tall and my chest down, I set the left ski up on the edge about a metre from the nets, trying to take enough direction and pressing with all the power I have left, just sneaking inside the next right foot turn before a quick switch back to the left and across for a long traversing section. The sun has been on this bit, I feel my skis slowing as they dig into the softer snow.

The piste rolls, absorb mid-turn, next the piste falls away to the right hand side, yet more pressure on the left foot, then it flattens off again as I tuck into the second to last jump. I take a few deep breaths as I realise I’m near the finish. “Leave it all on the hill” I think to myself, squeezing everything I have left to make the moves necessary to squash this jump. I fly about 30m, land, absorb yet another compression, and then fly off the final jump, travelling about 60m before dropping back into my tuck and crossing the line.

The ‘leaving it all on the hill’ attitude is great but it makes stopping a damn site harder! Struggling to get out my tuck and stand was tough enough but then putting the long skis sideways to bleed off speed… that was something else! Finally I come to a stop inches from the safety air fence. I feel like collapsing! Looking back at the timing board I see I have come in 38th. A little disappointment floods over me, but then hearing the cheering of the thousands in the finish the feeling passes just as quickly as it arrived and I remember I started 43rd and have missed the majority of the season. So all in all it’s not bad.

The Olympics was everything I thought it would be, something I have dreamed about my whole life. I have achieved part of what I set out to do; next is to be standing on that podium. It’s not going to be easy, there is a lot of work to do - on and off the slopes -  but I see this as an achievable target.

This season has been by far the hardest in my career but also the most enjoyable. The tribulations of SSGB forced me to seek out my own funding which took up a lot of time and effort, but that’s part and parcel of the job. I am extremely grateful to everyone who helped me over this and previous seasons: my sponsors  Scott Dunn, Atomic, Ski Club of Great Britain, Wallis Shipping and Kandahar Ski Club. Also my thanks to my godparents Beena and Sam who made it possible to have my whole family at the Games - sharing my dream.  

Previous season reports can be found on Ed's website www.edwarddrake.co.uk