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Go figure; Kurt Browning says a win is a win on Battle of the Blades

Source: canoe.ca
Date: November 13, 2013
Author: Bill Harris
Kurt Browning seems a little sheepish as he says it. But there's no need for him to be. We would expect this sort of attitude from a world-class athlete.

"You like winning," Browning says. "I'm sorry, but you like winning."

Browning was attempting to explain what happens to the participants on Battle of the Blades. The fourth season of CBC's reality-competition series, which pairs figure skaters with ex-hockey players in a figure-skating competition, wraps up with its big finale on Sunday, Nov. 17.

The three remaining pairs with title hopes are Violetta Afanasieva and Jason Strudwick; Marie-France Dubreuil and Mathieu Dandenault; and Amanda Evora and Scott Thornton.

Browning, of course, is a four-time world figure skating champion. But he says it doesn't matter if we're talking about hockey players trying their hand at figure skating, or vice versa. If you're the kind of person who has the drive to compete at the top level of any sport, you just don't like losing, no matter what you're doing.

"If you go to one of our live shows and you see the participants skating around beforehand, from the looks on their faces, it might as well be Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final," says Browning, who serves as a judge on Battle of the Blades.

"Most of the hockey players who have competed on Battle of the Blades wouldn't have wanted to be figure skaters, because there are musical and artistic things that come along with trying to entertain people without a hockey stick. But they swallow that pill, because they're doing it for charity, or their wife wants them to, or their kids say they can't do it, things like that."

That last one is a major one for athletes. Don't think they can do something? Then they instantly want to prove to you that they can. It's in their DNA.

"And it's very honest when they're willing to stand up and possibly humiliate themselves, for those reasons," Browning adds. "These hockey players aren't doing it because they need to.

"Some of the B-list celebrities on some of the other (reality-competition) shows, they need to. They're doing it to get their names back out there. But none of the hockey players are really doing that. They're doing it because they want to."