Baggy_Brad
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Reply 12 of 40 (Originally posted on: 02-27-08 05:42:00 PM)
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Quality Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Bradbury
Quote:
In the quarter-finals, Bradbury thought himself eliminated. He finished third (only the top two advance), but Marc Gagnon was disqualified, thus allowing Bradbury to advance to the semi-finals.
In his semi-final, Bradbury was in last place, well off the pace of the medal favourites. However, three of the other competitors in the semi-final crashed into each other, paving the way for him to take second place and thus allowing him through to the final.
Again well off the pace in the final, once more all four of Bradbury's competitors (Apolo Ohno, Ahn Hyun-Soo, Li Jiajun and Mathieu Turcotte) crashed out at the final corner, leaving a shocked Bradbury to take the gold medal, the first for Australia or any southern hemisphere country in an Olympic Winter Games event.
Quote:
In an interview after winning his gold, he said:
Obviously I wasn't the fastest skater. I don't think I'll take the medal as the minute-and-a-half of the race I actually won. I'll take it as the last decade of the hard slog I put in.
The "hard slog" included surviving two life-threatening accidents. During a 1994 race in Montreal, he had another skater's blade slice through his leg after a collision; ... In 2000, he broke his neck in a training accident, and spent the next six weeks in a halo brace.
Quote:
Bradbury was acutely aware of the possibility of collisions after his semi-final race. In an interview after the race he said:
I was the oldest bloke in the field and I knew that, skating four races back to back, I wasn't going to have any petrol left in the tank. So there was no point in getting there and mixing it up because I was going to be in last place anyway. So (I figured) I might as well stay out of the way and be in last place and hope that some people get tangled up.[1]
In the same interview, he acknowledged that he never imagined a scenario in which all four of his competitors would actually fall.
Bradbury had been the favourite going into the 1000m short track speed skating event at the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, Norway but fell after colliding with a competitor.
Quote:
Bradbury's triumph was celebrated by Australia post issuing a 45-cent stamp of him
bradism.
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