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Canada’s Larisa Yurkiw finishes 20th in downhill, but overcame massive funding and injury hurdles

Andrew Bucholtz

When is a 20th-place finish at the Olympics remarkable? When it comes from Larisa Yurkiw, a skier Alpine Canada dropped from the team before this World Cup season, one who sought out her own sponsors and paid her own way on the World Cup circuit to qualify for the Sochi Games, and one who's bounced back from a horrific 2009 crash that tore multiple ligaments in her left knee and kept her out of competition for two years. Yurkiw also suffered a sprained ankle in training Friday, but still elected to compete in Wednesday's downhill anyway. After what she went through just to get to Sochi, nothing was going to keep her from this race (or Saturday's super-G, which she's also scheduled to compete in).

The challenges the 25-year-old Yurkiw, from Owen Sound, Ontario, overcame in her effort to get to these Games are remarkable. She displayed promise on the World Cup circuit early on, recording seven top 30s from 2008 to 2009, and looked set to maybe compete for Canada in Vancouver, but crashed during a training run in December 2009 and tore her ACL, her MCL and her lateral and medial meniscus, a combined bunch of knee injuries so bad they're known as the "unhappy triad". That injury alone would have stopped many, but not Yurkiw. Here's what Dave Feschuk of The Toronto Star wrote about her recovery:

Her epic knee surgery, more than a quadrennial ago, was a massive undertaking that required the repair of nearly every piece of connective tissue. Dennis Yurkiw, Larisa’s chiropractor father, recalls speaking on the phone with the surgeon, London, Ont.’s Dr. Bob Litchfield.

“(Litchfield said to me), ‘You know, Dennis, this is a big one. This knee might never be the same,’ ” Dennis said last year.

“Larisa was looking at me while I was on the phone, and I had to do a little performance and smile through the whole thing.
But I was devastated.”
The recovery was gruelling, a trip to Sochi the furthest thing from an athlete’s thoughts.

“At the beginning, all I wanted was to bend my knee five more degrees,” Larisa said. “And then, for a while, all I wanted was to be able to walk and not have people ask me what was wrong with me. And then you get to the point where you say, ‘Well, I’m getting better — at least now maybe I could ski with my family one day.’ And then you actualy go skiing and you think, ‘Maybe I could go a little faster.’ And then when it became realistic that I could go super-fast again, I did.”

Yurkiw certainly did that. She bounced back after losing two years of competition, missing the World Cup circuit in both 2011 and 2012 and recorded some decent results in 2012. However, Alpine Canada then dropped her, opting to use funding on those seen as more likely medal contenders. That didn't stop Yurkiw either, though; she went out and raised $150,000 for summer camps in Europe, training and coaching expenses and World Cup travel costs, including chipping in $25,000 out of her own savings. As she told CBC's Scott Russell when she learned of Alpine Canada's decision, she didn't feel it was time to give up:

"The highs are so high and the lows are heartbreaking," she told me after finding out she would have to go it alone this season. "But I've never quit anything before I felt I was truly finished. It's in me to see this thing through and to stay true to skiing in the same way it's been true to me."

More challenges arose for Yurkiw thanks to Canada starting with just one berth on the World Cup downhill circuit in Europe, which Alpine Canada wanted to use to give Marie-Michele Gagnon downhill experience to help her in the combined. That meant Yurkiw needed to pick up at least a top-30 finish in the second World Cup event of the season, at Lake Louise, Alberta, as that would give Canada a second berth, and she needed a top-20 to really boost the case for her to get that berth. No problem: she came out flying and recorded a then-career-best seventh-place finish. That let her keep competing on the World Cup circuit, and she picked up an even-better sixth place in Austria in January, giving her the two World Cup top-12 finishes needed for qualification and a place on the Canadian team for Sochi.

Given how much of the Canadian Olympic talk revolves around owning the podium and being amongst the medal leaders, Yurkiw's 20th-place finish might be easily forgotten about. In some ways, though, her accomplishment is as inspiring as that of any medallist. The underdog label's often thrown around too much in sports, but it certainly applies to Yurkiw; even her own federation didn't believe in her. She proved them all wrong, though, and managed to turn in a tremendous showing; she finished in the top half of the 41-woman field, remarkable for an injured skier and exceptional for someone few figured would ever get to these Olympics. Yurkiw was the only woman to compete for Canada in the downhill in Sochi, and while she didn't medal, it's hard to think of a better representative.