Erik: then and now

Mont Tremblant ski school students, instructors, Mont Tremblant Ski Club racers and other admirers crowded around a table outside the Atomic ski shop near the cable car lift. Their hero, World Cup alpine ski champion Erik Guay, was signing autographs on Atomic pamphlets, helmets, jacket sleeves and wherever else the star-struck kids wanted him to sign. Erik was in town during a holiday break in the World Cup campaign. “What does Erik mean to you?,” I asked a nine-year-old youngster from the local club. “Everything,” he answered in awe!

“It’s great,” said Erik after the autograph session. “If I can be an inspiration for these kids, who knows, maybe one might become a great champion someday. In any case, it’s satisfying to motivate kids to participate in a healthy, active lifestyle.”

Undoubtedly, that inspiration will be one of Erik’s meaningful legacies. He is a model of a champion as much for his attitude as for his talent. So far, Erik has won a World Cup Crystal Globe in Super G, a World Downhill championship, 16 World Cup medals and has 37 top ten finishes including four fourth- and six fifth-place finishes as well as a razor-close fourth place at the 2006 Olympics and two very close fifth-place finishes at the 2010 Olympics. He’s had his frustrations with close finishes but he has taken them in stride. After another fourth recently in Italy, Erik said stoically, “There are worse places to be than fourth.” (He was in a better place in late January, racing to his 16th career medal, a silver, in the downhill on the famed Kandahar course in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. It was a spectacular run as he somehow managed to recover from a near fall when the top of his boot scraped the snow in a sharp fall-away turn and threw him off-balance at breakneck speed! Erik won the World Downhill Championship on that course last year.)
“It has all gone by so fast,” Erik says. Named to the national development team in 1998 as a promising teenage rookie talent, it wasn’t long before he began challenging the best. Erik earned his first World Cup medal in 2003, at the age of 22, one of the national team’s youngest members. Now the team’s senior statesman at 30, his major objective is an Olympic medal in Sochi. He’ll be 32. He hopes to still be around for the 2018 Olympics when he’ll be 36. Much depends on staying healthy…and his family. With his wife Karen expecting a second child, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be away from home for so long during the World Cup season.

André Courey, journalist