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Pressure increases if Chan wins worlds
| Source: |
Canada.com |
| Date: |
March 25, 2009 |
| Author: |
Cam Cole |
LOS ANGELES In his athletic adolescence, Kurt Browning had a
front-row seat for the Brian Orser experience at the 1988 Calgary
Olympics.
It was an eye-opener of the kind he wouldn't wish on 18-year-old
Patrick Chan, should the precocious Canadian happen to win the world
figure skating title this week, and be the reigning champ heading into
a home-country Olympics.
"Statistically, absolutely it's better if he's not," said Browning,
the four-time world champion from Caroline, Alta., who twice carried
the title into an Olympics and didn't get a medal. "It's spooky what's
happened twice to me and once to Brian and once to Elvis (Stojko). If
you want to go by the numbers, he'd better not win.
"But there's no logic in that. If you have a chance to win a world
title, you should win it. There's people who say, but he's too young,
and it's all happening so fast. But if you get a chance to be world
champion, what do you do, go: oh, there'll be another chance? You
don't know that. Injury, someone else comes up, rules change and it
doesn't favour you any more . . . you don't know."
Orser, the only Canadian skater ever to face that Olympic heat on home
ice he won silver (or lost gold, as history would have it) in a
memorable battle with American Brian Boitano still thinks Chan
should go for it, and worry about the consequences later.
"You take it any time you can get it," said Orser. "You don't play
strategy like that, you don't hold back."
Browning, though, remembers how the pressure wore on Orser.
"Now that I'm older, I think it was like some actors who do movies for
six or eight months, and the character consumes them. I think that's
maybe what happened to Brian," he said.
"I remember walking past Brian's room after the Olympics and saw it
was empty, so I went in and sat down and I saw something under the
bed. It was a tape recorder. And I rewound it and turned it on, and
listened to about 20 seconds and just dropped it like a hot rock. It
was Brian's thoughts, something he was doing, like a diary. And the
last words I heard on the tape were: ‘Well, I guess the next time we
talk, I'll be Olympic champion.'
"And the chill I got from listening to that . . . it summed up the
power of the whole thing for me, as a kid, going: 'God, I'm
next.'"
"I just started to sweat, actually," Orser joked Wednesday, hearing
the story again.
"It's true. I was trying to record moments and thoughts through the
Olympics for a book I was writing with Steve Milton. I do remember
just before I left the room saying that. But I felt good about
it. What should I have said? 'You know, we'll see what happens? Keep
your fingers crossed, if you have any in there . . .?'"
"The magnitude of it, I think, affected everyone, not just Brian,"
said Browning. "And I don't know, a year out from Vancouver, with more
Canadian medal hopes in other disciplines, if it's going to be the
same for Patrick. Brian was older, he was already world champion,
already an Olympic silver medallist, he was a grown man. This is still
a kid, and somehow in my gut of guts, I don't think the pressure's
going to be the same as it was for Brian.
"I also think I'm factoring in that Patrick's a different breed of
kid. He wants to be a star. He wants to take this as far as he
can."
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