Kelsey Serwa wants another shot at Olympic gold.
She just needs time to heal her battered knee, and if all goes according to plan we'll see her in February 2018 lining up at the ski cross start gate in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
The fact she's taken a full season off gave Serwa a chance to pack her most precious possession into her backpack and bring it to Prince George. As honourary captain of Team B.C. at the Canada Winter Games, the silver medal she won last year at the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, was the ultimate conversation piece at the team rally just before the start of the Games and she plans to bring that medal back for the next round of athletes arriving in Prince George on Saturday.
"I knew it was going to be such a cool opportunity to get to give back to these kids and motivate them," she said. "I don't think they need much motivation, they're pretty fired up, but just to be part of the Games and share that experience with them is really special to me."
Serwa was 17 when she competed in the 2007 Canada Winter Games in Whitehorse in alpine skiing. She remembers the Games in Yukon for the extreme cold. It was -40 C when she arrived for the second week of the Games but it gradually warmed up enough in time for her races and she went on to win gold in the giant slalom.
Winning at the Canada Games set Serwa up for making the Olympic team in Vancouver-Whistler, two years after she'd made the switch to ski cross. She advanced to the semifinals in 2010 and finished fifth overall, just missing the medal round, and went on the following season to win the Winter X Games and world championship titles. As she would learn later on, she suffered a compression fracture in her spine in a spectacular crash on her last run at X Games that year but still managed to win the world title a week later.
Serwa was leading the World Cup standings in 2012 when she crashed and tore her ACL and suffered the same injury landing a jump at the 2013 world championships. After two knee surgeries in successive seasons she was healthy enough in 2014 to win silver in Sochi, sharing the podium with her Canadian teammate Marielle Thompson of North Vancouver, who won gold.
"There's a lot of similarities between the Canada Winter Games and the Olympics - there are a lot of things you don't experience when you just go to an event for your own discipline," she said.
"There's concerts going on, there's pavilions, there's opening and closing ceremonies, meals are in a ginormous hall with tons of people and you're sleeping in bunk beds with four people to a room. I still have my sleeping bag from 2007. It almost feels like you're at camp and you get that sense of connectedness with your other team members, because you're in it together.
"I remember at the '07 Canada Winter Games after I won I was walking down the hall and other athletes I didn't know would give me a high-five and say, 'Thanks for winning a medal for B.C.' and it was the exact same thing at Canada House in the (Sochi) Olympics. We'd watch the athletes win medals and see them in the hall and we'd be giving them high-fives and thanking them for doing it for Canada."
Ski cross, by its nature, is always unpredictable and Serwa says that makes it an exciting sport to watch.
"It draws a lot of parallels to life because you don't know what's going to happen and as much as you plan for the perfect run, the chances of it happening are slim to none," she said.
"For the athletes it's all about being reactive and quick on your feet and taking into account what's going on around you. As a spectator, you don't know what's going to happen, people can go from first to fourth or fourth to first. On TV, the courses look cool, but in real life you see how big these jumps really are and how fast they're going as the athletes go by."
Serwa, 25, decided she needed a full year off to recover from her injuries to give her the best opportunity to excel in 2018. She's now a full-time human kinetics student at UBC Okanagan in Kelowna, where she's studying to become a physiotherapist.
She grew up in Kelowna and learned to ski at Big White, a resort co-founded by her grandfather Cliff Serwa and developed by her parents. Serwa volunteers as a KidSport ambassador to help raise money to allow underprivileged kids to play sports and started the Kaser scholarship fund for high-level Okanagan-based athletes who have graduated high school.
This marks the first time ski cross has been included as part of the Canada Games. Competition starts Thursday with men's and women's qualifying runs at 10 a.m. at Tabor Mountain Ski Resort. Finals are set for Friday starting at 10 a.m.
B.C. has 14 ski crossers entered, including: Katie Fleckenstein (West Vancouver); Sierra King (West Vancouver); Brooke Lukinuc (Kelowna); Frances MacDonald (North Vancouver); Nicole Mah (Vancouver); Kristina Natalenko (New Westminster); Ella Renzoni (West Vancouver); Kyle Alexander (North Vancouver); Gavin Donald (Vernon); Ryan Finley (Calgary); Asher Jordan (North Vancouver); Devin Mittertreiner (Calgary); Alexander Valentin ((Whistler); and Kasper Woolley (Squamish).
