Canada's Jon Montgomery celebrates winning a gold medal in the men's skeleton competition at the Whistler Sliding Centre at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games in Whistler, B.C., Friday, Feb. 19, 2010. It always comes back to the beer when you remember Jon Montgomery's gold medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Relax, Canada. Do not be concerned that J. MONTGOMERY CAN has not flashed across scoreboards at any skeleton tracks this season.
He was conspicuously absent from the men's World Cup skeleton event at the Whistler Sliding Centre on Friday, but we have not seen the last of Jon Montgomery. There are plenty of runs in his future, and possibly another gold medal, in Sochi. Why not? He will return to the sport on his own terms and with better equipment. True, he will by his estimate be, maybe, six figures lighter in the chequebook, but Montgomery believes it will be worth it.
Beats getting your butt handed to you every race.
Montgomery followed up his gold-medal win at the Vancouver Olympics with a ninth-place finish in the 2010-11 season, his only podium position a first-place finish in the first race of the season, in Whistler. On the day of the final selection race for the Canadian team this season, Montgomery started wondering about possibly eschewing the European portion of the schedule, or maybe sliding instead on some different tracks in the Intercontinental Cup. At that point, he says, another thought "started to form in my head."
Why not take the entire season off?
Knowing his equipment was no match for the stuff being churned out by the multimillion-dollar German FES program, Montgomery remembered a discussion with folks from Calgary-based manufacturing firm Standen's, which develops and manufactures steel suspension components, trailer axles and agricultural tillage tools, during a breakfast at an auto auction (Montgomery, remember, is an auctioneer). Standen's helped Montgomery with the sled that won the gold medal. Were their engineers up for a bigger challenge, he wondered? Such as helping him develop and design a sled from the ground up? Turns out the answer was yes.
"I think the writing on the wall was actually last year, the second day of training in Calgary, when I just thought: 'You have zero chance,'" Montgomery said in a telephone interview from his Calgary home on Thursday as he settled down in front of a computer to watch Mellisa Hollingsworth win the women's World Cup skeleton race.
Montgomery, who is married to skeleton pilot and would-be Olympian Darla Deschamps, has taken a hands-on role in terms of ideas and concepts and saddle fitting. The idea is to come up with a sled that can be tuned up for different tracks.
"It's a bit like NASCAR, where you need different setups for different tracks," Montgomery explained. "I'm trying to create a sled that is at least somewhat tuneable for each track."
Montgomery's zeal for racing remains. His workout regimen consists on some days of "racing the dog in a race down the street," but he isn't, in his words, "about to let myself go." He has purchased a Bromley sled in addition to Version 1 of his work-in-progress sled, and says the run volume he's getting in Calgary in one day is equal to what he'd get on tour in a week.
Montgomery and Hollingsworth were in Toronto in November doing a round of media appearances after Bobsleigh Skeleton Canada's 20-year sponsorship arrangement with Visa Canada was not renewed. "I'd made my decision before that trip to Toronto," Montgomery said. "But I didn't think it would be right to say anything about it. I didn't want it to be about me or my decision.
"I believe we're a saleable group of athletes," he added. "I think somebody will step up. I don't think it will go down to the final hour."
For Montgomery, right now it's that final hundredth of a second that is the greater concern, as opposed to the final hour. "This is my new competitive outlet, building something better than what I had before," he said. Considering the odds of a flat-lander from Russell, Man., conquering an Olympic mountain, it might not be wise to bet against him.