Winter Olympics 2014: Team GB men's curling captain plots medal redemption in Sochi

David Murdoch, one of Britain’s biggest podium hopes when the Sochi Games open in seven days’ time, says it would be the fulfilment of a dream to parade through his home town with an Olympic medal around his neck.

That town is Lockerbie and last month’s 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack perpetrated on British soil brought home memories of how, as a young boy, he witnessed the downing of Pan Am 103 with his own eyes.

“I was about 300 yards away and I saw it come down,” he said. “I was in the car driving back home and we were on an adjacent street.”

Murdoch, who was 10 at the time, had only recently taken up curling but, in the days after the disaster, his local ice rink served a different, grisly purpose as a temporary morgue. A total of 243 passengers and 16 crew died in the atrocity, with a further 11 people killed on the ground by falling wreckage.

“Yes they used the rink as a morgue and a lot of troops were using our farm to land on,” he said. “There were lots of bodies scattered all over Lockerbie so they were using the farm to put the Chinooks down.”

A quarter of a century later, Lockerbie remains synonymous with the death and destruction that rained down on Dec 21, 1988, but Murdoch is hoping to bring the town some positive headlines in the way that Andy Murray’s tennis achievements have brought pride to Dunblane.

“Obviously, there was the anniversary with Lockerbie recently and there were tough times there,” said Murdoch. “But it’s a real nice town with a lot of good people in it and I’d love to walk through there with an Olympic medal.”

Although Murdoch now lives in Stirling to be close to his training base at the Scottish Institute of Sport, his parents still live in Lockerbie and remain leading lights of the curling club. His father has had several stints as club chairman while his mother is a long-serving coach.

“The rink was almost like the family home when I was growing up,” he said. “I was learning to curl a lot earlier than I should. Most people don’t learn until they’re 12 but because my parents were heavily involved in the rink and my brother and sister were older than me, I was in there running up and down the rink at seven or eight, just desperate to go curling.”

By the age of 16 he was a junior world champion, earning a gold medal as an alternate in 1995, and he won a second junior world gold a year later, this time playing as a lead.

In the senior ranks, he has won two world titles as a skip – in 2006 and 2009 – but he is the first to admit that his Olympics ambitions are unfulfilled after “heart-breaking” losses at the 2006 Games in Turin and in Vancouver four years later.

In Turin, he finished fourth after missing out on the final by a couple of centimetres, while in Vancouver he lost in a semi-final play-off to Sweden, having arrived at the Olympics as the reigning world champion.

“It’s unfinished business for me in relation to the Olympics with the couple of close ones we’ve had,” he said. “Obviously, the last time in Vancouver we were world champions and we just didn’t have a good week.

“I don’t think we suffered from the pressure. We never really had good form and if you don’t have that it’s a tough thing to get going. This year we actually have good form and we’re playing well.

“I’ve trained harder on ice for this than I did for the previous two Games and I think it’s paying off. I’ve got a higher percentage of consistency on ice now and also a bit more experience from another four years in the game. In curling, the older you get, the better you get, or at least I hope that’s the case for me.”

In Sochi, Murdoch will be joined by the same team-mates – Tom Brewster, Greg Drummond, Scott Andrews and Michael Goodfellow – who won bronze at last year’s World Championships.

If they can reach the podium, they will be the first male curlers from Britain to do so at a Winter Olympics since 1924 – an achievement for the whole of Lockerbie to celebrate.

“It’s something you dream about, especially after the heartbreaks of not winning and training all those years,” he said. “You put in a lot of work and sacrifice and you sometimes you feel that you want to get something out of it. That’s what’s been pushing me on.”

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Winter Olympics 2014: Britain's Nick Buckland and Penny Coomes lift off with miracle worker

Thirty years after Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean captivated the world with their gold medal-winning Boléro routine at the Sarajevo Olympics, ice dancers Nick Buckland and Penny Coomes are going to unusual lengths to bring back the glory days to British figure skating.

One of their training tools is watching reruns of the Disney film Miracle, which chronicles the so-called ‘Miracle on Ice’ at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid when an American ice hockey team made up of amateurs and college kids defeated the mighty Soviet Union. The message is that a ruthless work ethic can overcome the odds.

Watching repeats of the film is the idea of Buckland and Coomes’s Russian-born coach, Evgeni Platov, who has been working with them at his base in New Jersey since they made their Olympic debut in Vancouver four years ago and who describes himself as a “beast” in the way he pushes them so hard in practice – just like in the movie.

Platov remembers the real American ice hockey victory from when he was a boy growing up in the Soviet Union and, though it was painful to watch at the time, he believes it can inspire his young British charges.

“I was 13 when it happened,” Platov said. “I was crying. How they beat us? We were the best team in the world. Now we watch this movie. It is Penny’s movie. Before competition she watches that. I told her watch this movie.”

Buckland and Coomes, who make their first appearance of the Sochi Games on Saturday when they perform their short programme in the team competition, agree the film is inspiring.

“I love hard work,” Coomes said. “They do that in the film and they defy the rules and win the Olympic gold medal. That really resonates with me. I am not naturally the best skater in the world, not naturally talented. I have to get there through very hard work and because Evgeni has pushed me, I have improved so much in the last few years.”

Since moving to the United States in December 2010, Buckland and Coomes have been training six days a week, eight hours a day under Platov, with the majority of that time spent on the ice. It was a shock to the system compared with their previous regime in Britain.

“I love your country but it’s too nice,” Platov said. “You have to push harder. After 2010 I said to Nick and Penny: ‘Make a decision. Drop everything and come and train with me.’ That’s what they did. We have a connection, a bond, but I can be very strict. I told them: ‘You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to love me on the ice. On the ice I will be the beast. Off the ice I can be your buddy, brother, mother, father, whatever you want me to be.’?”

But Platov is more than just a hard task-master with a gift for tough talking. In his own skating days, he was one of the few who could claim to have toppled Torvill and Dean after he and his partner, Oksana Grishuk, won gold at the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994 when the British pair made their Olympic comeback and finished with the bronze. Platov and Grishuk also retained their Olympic title in Nagano in 1998.

Under his guidance, Buckland and Coomes are showing signs that the long wait for another world-class British ice dance couple may be coming to an end, despite a recent health scare for Buckland when he was diagnosed with tachycardia – or a racing heart that reached alarming levels of 270 beats a minute.

The condition was treated with keyhole surgery and he now has an electronic device implanted in his heart to measure its rate.

The problem was not as dramatic as it sounds, insists Buckland, and he showed no ill-effects at the European Championships last month in Budapest where, dressed in a one-gloved ‘Michael Jackson’ costume for the free programme, he and Coomes produced a lifetime-best score to win the bronze.

After Saturday’s team competition, where a miracle on ice even more improbable than the 1980 Olympic ice hockey final is needed if Britain are to make the five-nation final, Buckland and Coomes will turn their attention to the main ice dance competition on Feb 16-17.

Realistically, a top-10 finish would be a decent achievement at these Games, though they are being groomed – and Lottery-funded – to win a medal at the next Olympics in Pyeongchang in 2018, when they will both be at their peak at the age of 28.

The hope is that one day Britain will have an ice dance couple to rival Torvill and Dean, though Platov injects a note of caution. “Nobody can touch Torvill and Dean,” he said. “They are untouchable.

Even with my two Olympic medals, even though I beat them. They did a revolution in ice dancing. To reach that level, that’s our absolute goal. Nick and Penny have so much potential but to reach an Olympic medal is going to be hard.”

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Winter Olympics 2014: Jamaican bobsleigh team delayed after losing luggage

Jamaica's bobsleigh team have suffered a serious Olympics setback after their luggage and equipment went missing but insist they will still compete even if they have to beg gear from rival nations.

"We had bad weather going into New York JFK and had to go to Philadelphia first and we missed the flight to Moscow," Jamaican team pilot Winston Watts said.

Team Jamaica at Sochi (AFP/GETTY)

"We flew Tuesday almost all day long but after we came here we found out that our luggage got left back there. We've got nothing right now with us. Helmets, spikes, lycra suits, everything is somewhere between JFK and Sochi."

Despite the setback, Watts, who inspected the daunting course at the Sanki sliding centre on Wednesday, insisted his team will still make it to the first training session on Thursday -- even if they have to borrow equipment.

"I'm looking around and trying to get some helmets and stuff like that. Thursday is an official training session for people who've never been down this ice," he said.

"We'll make it tomorrow, I guarantee that. It's still a learning process and we have a lot more to learn. I've walked around the course today learning the curves. But when you're inside the bob there's a completely different feeling."

Jamaica's two-man team, who have qualified for the Winter Games after a 12-year absence, are hoping to represent their country with the same vigour and enthusiasm shown by their 1988 Calgary counterparts, who inspired the Hollywood movie "Cool Runnings".

"We're definitely not the Games favourites but we came here to represent our country with pride," said Watts, who also competed in the 1994, 1998 and 2002 Games.

"With the help of our friends, sponsors and Jamaica's Olympic Association we've raised around $148,000 for travel expenses and preparations for the Games and are set to spend it wisely."

He later added: "It is a tough way to start. We have a back-up plan. A lot of guys wanted to help us and we may race on borrowed blades."

Despite arriving in Sochi with only the clothes on their backs, Watts said he was still enthusiastic for the challenge ahead.

"There are no words to explain how it is being here. The atmosphere, the fans, the friends, the media; it's really exciting," he said.

Watts added that their qualification for the Olympics even received the full support of world sprint superstar Usain Bolt.

"We've got all possible support from our colleagues at home," Watts said.

"Everybody loves and supports us there. We've talked once to Usain (Bolt) and he also congratulated us on the Olympic qualification and wished us good luck at the Games."

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Winter Olympics 2014: Amy Williams ready for emotional Games in Sochi

She looks at her life now, with the anticipation of all the adventures that lie ahead, weighed down by just a couple of sadnesses. One, she says, that there is no man in her life; and, two, that there is no bobsled in her life.

Arthur, the trusty sled she piloted to that extraordinary runaway Olympic triumph in Vancouver at 80mph-plus, is no more. “He’s languishing in pieces today. Now I don’t have a sled at all. They [the governing body, British Skeleton] asked for it back. Some bits of Arthur are my own, like the runners and the specially fitted saddle. I’ve got my Olympic belly pan, the bit which is closest to the ice, up on my wall. But the actual sled, the workings of it, the Skeleton federation wanted.

“But nobody’s been using him. To be honest, he’s old now, a prototype sled that wouldn’t win many races now.” So why can’t you get him back in one piece? “Tell me about it! I’d even pay for it. It’s just sad not to have my own sled so that when someone says ‘hey we want to do a feature or a show, like the new Channel 4 series The Jump’, I’d have been able to do it on a sled that I know.”

It feels weird to her. A retired swimming or athletics champion can still pop to her local pool or track but what do you do if you are an ex-slider who just covets the pleasure of reliving the experience that once daily dominated your life?

“I just feel sad when I don’t have the opportunity to slide. I suppose that’s the unique thing in our sport; when you retire, you have to accept ‘that’s it, I may not be able to slide again’. I’ve never been back down in the 20 months since I retired and that is very hard when you’ve spent most of your adult life doing it.

“Of course, it’s an expensive world now, maybe £5,000 to £10,000 to make a sled now. I don’t know what the answer would be if I said now ‘hey, can I get one built up and made for me again and I’ll pay for it?’ Such is the hi-tech and secrecy around developments now, with even McLaren involved, it seems pretty unlikely.”

She misses it because, despite plunging into all sorts of post-career action woman antics, like appearing in adventure and survival TV programmes, nothing, she reckons, has ever quite rekindled the thrill of Olympic sledding.

The nearest experience, she says, was her recent foray into rallying when she was Tony Jardine’s co-driver in the Wales Rally GB, tasting victory in their class. Next time, she reckoned, she would love to be given enough tutoring to be in the driver’s seat itself because she remains hooked by a challenge.

“It’s an amazing feeling knowing my name is in the history books. That’s ‘wow’ but the Olympic victory is only something that will define one chapter of my life, not the whole story. I guess when you talk to champion athletes who went on to become a mother, then their Olympics disappeared into insignificance.”

In Williams’s perfect world, she would now have been married to Slovakian sledder Petr Narovec, the long-standing boyfriend with whom she shared her triumph in Vancouver.

“I would have walked down the aisle with him; he was the love of my life but, ultimately, there’s no hard feelings between us,” she says, sounding genuinely sad. “We split up on Valentine’s Day a year after the Games. It was ’hug, kiss, love you’ but we needed to split up. It was complicated; he has a son and knew I wouldn’t have gone to Prague so he had to choose between his life being a dad to his boy there or moving to the UK to have a life here.”

Subsequently, Williams went out with England rugby World Cup winner Josh Lewsey but that did not work out either. “There’s no man now. I wish I could tell you there was. Where are they?” she laughs, and you can swear you can foresee a queue forming at her doorstep in Bath.

“Obviously, I’d love to find someone to go through the next chapter of my life with but, hey what will be will be. You never know what’s round the corner.”

Williams’s immediate next turn will see her in Sochi this week, trying to do her inspirational bit as a sounding board for Team GB athletes.

“I know a lot of them now and feel like a kind of big sister,” she says. “On Twitter, some end up direct messaging me and pouring their hearts out. I think they see me as one of them, someone who’s been there, who’s known the joy of winning a medal in my first Games but also who understands an athlete’s pain, having not been selected for Turin in 2006.”

She is also confidant – and landlady in Bath – to Lizzy Yarnold, the World Cup skeleton champion she desperately wants to see emulate her in Sochi and, hopefully, enjoy the experience of being a golden Olympian as much as she has.

“It has been a wonderful experience. It opens doors, doesn’t it,” smiles Williams. What, to a new sled? Or a new romance? Or the chance to be “the first female Bear Grylls”? She laughs that anything is possible but admits that, just for an instant up at Sochi’s Sanki Sliding Centre, there will be one last pang of regret.

“Just wanting to be on that sled and competing myself,” she sighs. “There’ll be part of my heart dying.”

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Sochi 2014: Why the Winter Olympics are better than the Summer games

The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics start in Russia on Thursday with events such as snowboarding and ice skating kicking off the snowy spectacular, where 98 gold medals will be handed out over 16 days of competion.

However, once the action gets underway the Winter Games promise thrills, spills and enough curling yo outdo anything in the warm weather version, at least that is according to Amy Williams, Britain's gold medal hero in the skeleton bob at the Vancouver Olympics four years ago.

View the original article here

Winter Olympics 2014: Britain's Nick Buckland and Penny Coomes lift off with miracle worker

Thirty years after Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean captivated the world with their gold medal-winning Boléro routine at the Sarajevo Olympics, ice dancers Nick Buckland and Penny Coomes are going to unusual lengths to bring back the glory days to British figure skating.

One of their training tools is watching reruns of the Disney film Miracle, which chronicles the so-called ‘Miracle on Ice’ at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid when an American ice hockey team made up of amateurs and college kids defeated the mighty Soviet Union. The message is that a ruthless work ethic can overcome the odds.

Watching repeats of the film is the idea of Buckland and Coomes’s Russian-born coach, Evgeni Platov, who has been working with them at his base in New Jersey since they made their Olympic debut in Vancouver four years ago and who describes himself as a “beast” in the way he pushes them so hard in practice – just like in the movie.

Platov remembers the real American ice hockey victory from when he was a boy growing up in the Soviet Union and, though it was painful to watch at the time, he believes it can inspire his young British charges.

“I was 13 when it happened,” Platov said. “I was crying. How they beat us? We were the best team in the world. Now we watch this movie. It is Penny’s movie. Before competition she watches that. I told her watch this movie.”

Buckland and Coomes, who make their first appearance of the Sochi Games on Saturday when they perform their short programme in the team competition, agree the film is inspiring.

“I love hard work,” Coomes said. “They do that in the film and they defy the rules and win the Olympic gold medal. That really resonates with me. I am not naturally the best skater in the world, not naturally talented. I have to get there through very hard work and because Evgeni has pushed me, I have improved so much in the last few years.”

Since moving to the United States in December 2010, Buckland and Coomes have been training six days a week, eight hours a day under Platov, with the majority of that time spent on the ice. It was a shock to the system compared with their previous regime in Britain.

“I love your country but it’s too nice,” Platov said. “You have to push harder. After 2010 I said to Nick and Penny: ‘Make a decision. Drop everything and come and train with me.’ That’s what they did. We have a connection, a bond, but I can be very strict. I told them: ‘You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to love me on the ice. On the ice I will be the beast. Off the ice I can be your buddy, brother, mother, father, whatever you want me to be.’?”

But Platov is more than just a hard task-master with a gift for tough talking. In his own skating days, he was one of the few who could claim to have toppled Torvill and Dean after he and his partner, Oksana Grishuk, won gold at the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994 when the British pair made their Olympic comeback and finished with the bronze. Platov and Grishuk also retained their Olympic title in Nagano in 1998.

Under his guidance, Buckland and Coomes are showing signs that the long wait for another world-class British ice dance couple may be coming to an end, despite a recent health scare for Buckland when he was diagnosed with tachycardia – or a racing heart that reached alarming levels of 270 beats a minute.

The condition was treated with keyhole surgery and he now has an electronic device implanted in his heart to measure its rate.

The problem was not as dramatic as it sounds, insists Buckland, and he showed no ill-effects at the European Championships last month in Budapest where, dressed in a one-gloved ‘Michael Jackson’ costume for the free programme, he and Coomes produced a lifetime-best score to win the bronze.

After Saturday’s team competition, where a miracle on ice even more improbable than the 1980 Olympic ice hockey final is needed if Britain are to make the five-nation final, Buckland and Coomes will turn their attention to the main ice dance competition on Feb 16-17.

Realistically, a top-10 finish would be a decent achievement at these Games, though they are being groomed – and Lottery-funded – to win a medal at the next Olympics in Pyeongchang in 2018, when they will both be at their peak at the age of 28.

The hope is that one day Britain will have an ice dance couple to rival Torvill and Dean, though Platov injects a note of caution. “Nobody can touch Torvill and Dean,” he said. “They are untouchable.

Even with my two Olympic medals, even though I beat them. They did a revolution in ice dancing. To reach that level, that’s our absolute goal. Nick and Penny have so much potential but to reach an Olympic medal is going to be hard.”

View the original article here

Sochi 2014: Why the Winter Olympics are better than the Summer games

The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics start in Russia on Thursday with events such as snowboarding and ice skating kicking off the snowy spectacular, where 98 gold medals will be handed out over 16 days of competion.

However, once the action gets underway the Winter Games promise thrills, spills and enough curling yo outdo anything in the warm weather version, at least that is according to Amy Williams, Britain's gold medal hero in the skeleton bob at the Vancouver Olympics four years ago.

View the original article here

Winter Olympics 2014: Jamaican bobsleigh team delayed after losing luggage

Jamaica's bobsleigh team have suffered a serious Olympics setback after their luggage and equipment went missing but insist they will still compete even if they have to beg gear from rival nations.

"We had bad weather going into New York JFK and had to go to Philadelphia first and we missed the flight to Moscow," Jamaican team pilot Winston Watts said.

Team Jamaica at Sochi (AFP/GETTY)

"We flew Tuesday almost all day long but after we came here we found out that our luggage got left back there. We've got nothing right now with us. Helmets, spikes, lycra suits, everything is somewhere between JFK and Sochi."

Despite the setback, Watts, who inspected the daunting course at the Sanki sliding centre on Wednesday, insisted his team will still make it to the first training session on Thursday -- even if they have to borrow equipment.

"I'm looking around and trying to get some helmets and stuff like that. Thursday is an official training session for people who've never been down this ice," he said.

"We'll make it tomorrow, I guarantee that. It's still a learning process and we have a lot more to learn. I've walked around the course today learning the curves. But when you're inside the bob there's a completely different feeling."

Jamaica's two-man team, who have qualified for the Winter Games after a 12-year absence, are hoping to represent their country with the same vigour and enthusiasm shown by their 1988 Calgary counterparts, who inspired the Hollywood movie "Cool Runnings".

"We're definitely not the Games favourites but we came here to represent our country with pride," said Watts, who also competed in the 1994, 1998 and 2002 Games.

"With the help of our friends, sponsors and Jamaica's Olympic Association we've raised around $148,000 for travel expenses and preparations for the Games and are set to spend it wisely."

He later added: "It is a tough way to start. We have a back-up plan. A lot of guys wanted to help us and we may race on borrowed blades."

Despite arriving in Sochi with only the clothes on their backs, Watts said he was still enthusiastic for the challenge ahead.

"There are no words to explain how it is being here. The atmosphere, the fans, the friends, the media; it's really exciting," he said.

Watts added that their qualification for the Olympics even received the full support of world sprint superstar Usain Bolt.

"We've got all possible support from our colleagues at home," Watts said.

"Everybody loves and supports us there. We've talked once to Usain (Bolt) and he also congratulated us on the Olympic qualification and wished us good luck at the Games."

View the original article here

Winter Olympics 2014: Team GB men's curling captain plots medal redemption in Sochi

David Murdoch, one of Britain’s biggest podium hopes when the Sochi Games open in seven days’ time, says it would be the fulfilment of a dream to parade through his home town with an Olympic medal around his neck.
That town is Lockerbie and last month’s 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack perpetrated on British soil brought home memories of how, as a young boy, he witnessed the downing of Pan Am 103 with his own eyes.
“I was about 300 yards away and I saw it come down,” he said. “I was in the car driving back home and we were on an adjacent street.”
Murdoch, who was 10 at the time, had only recently taken up curling but, in the days after the disaster, his local ice rink served a different, grisly purpose as a temporary morgue. A total of 243 passengers and 16 crew died in the atrocity, with a further 11 people killed on the ground by falling wreckage.
“Yes they used the rink as a morgue and a lot of troops were using our farm to land on,” he said. “There were lots of bodies scattered all over Lockerbie so they were using the farm to put the Chinooks down.”
A quarter of a century later, Lockerbie remains synonymous with the death and destruction that rained down on Dec 21, 1988, but Murdoch is hoping to bring the town some positive headlines in the way that Andy Murray’s tennis achievements have brought pride to Dunblane.
“Obviously, there was the anniversary with Lockerbie recently and there were tough times there,” said Murdoch. “But it’s a real nice town with a lot of good people in it and I’d love to walk through there with an Olympic medal.”
Although Murdoch now lives in Stirling to be close to his training base at the Scottish Institute of Sport, his parents still live in Lockerbie and remain leading lights of the curling club. His father has had several stints as club chairman while his mother is a long-serving coach.
“The rink was almost like the family home when I was growing up,” he said. “I was learning to curl a lot earlier than I should. Most people don’t learn until they’re 12 but because my parents were heavily involved in the rink and my brother and sister were older than me, I was in there running up and down the rink at seven or eight, just desperate to go curling.”
By the age of 16 he was a junior world champion, earning a gold medal as an alternate in 1995, and he won a second junior world gold a year later, this time playing as a lead.
In the senior ranks, he has won two world titles as a skip – in 2006 and 2009 – but he is the first to admit that his Olympics ambitions are unfulfilled after “heart-breaking” losses at the 2006 Games in Turin and in Vancouver four years later.
In Turin, he finished fourth after missing out on the final by a couple of centimetres, while in Vancouver he lost in a semi-final play-off to Sweden, having arrived at the Olympics as the reigning world champion.
“It’s unfinished business for me in relation to the Olympics with the couple of close ones we’ve had,” he said. “Obviously, the last time in Vancouver we were world champions and we just didn’t have a good week.
“I don’t think we suffered from the pressure. We never really had good form and if you don’t have that it’s a tough thing to get going. This year we actually have good form and we’re playing well.
“I’ve trained harder on ice for this than I did for the previous two Games and I think it’s paying off. I’ve got a higher percentage of consistency on ice now and also a bit more experience from another four years in the game. In curling, the older you get, the better you get, or at least I hope that’s the case for me.”
In Sochi, Murdoch will be joined by the same team-mates – Tom Brewster, Greg Drummond, Scott Andrews and Michael Goodfellow – who won bronze at last year’s World Championships.
If they can reach the podium, they will be the first male curlers from Britain to do so at a Winter Olympics since 1924 – an achievement for the whole of Lockerbie to celebrate.
“It’s something you dream about, especially after the heartbreaks of not winning and training all those years,” he said. “You put in a lot of work and sacrifice and you sometimes you feel that you want to get something out of it. That’s what’s been pushing me on.”

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