The Gold & the Glory

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This article was published 06/11/2010 (5780 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gold Medal Diary

Inside the World’s Greatest Sports Event

By Hayley Wickenheiser

Greystone Books, 256 pages, $30

The journey to a goal is often more memorable than achieving the goal, and that’s the case with Hayley Wickenheiser’s odyssey to the top of the Olympic podium in 2010.

Gold Medal Diary is just that, journal entries from the captain of Canada’s women’s hockey team. It all starts from a galling 4-1 loss to the United States in the 2009 world championships, describes a year of sweat-soaked training and finishes with Wickenheiser & Co. succeeding at the Vancouver Games when the stakes — and the pressure — are that much higher.

The forward’s memories are more than just an array of hockey games, shifts good and bad and practices filled with the drudgery of constant drills. Wickenheiser is more than just a hockey player, and that’s a good thing, because her complicated life outside the rink is more fascinating.

Her life is a bit of a hurricane. Hockey during an Olympic year is a full-time job, with constant trips to Europe and all over North America for tournaments, long bus trips to play top 15-16-year-old boys’ teams and countless personal appearances.

Between all that she cares for her 10-year-old son, Noah, who constantly puts her life into perspective and provides the pangs of guilt that links Wickenheiser closer to the common parent than to being hockey hero.

She recognizes pulling this all off is a difficult feat, and like any top hockey player, is always looking for an edge. She’s a voracious reader of self-help motivational books and presents the theories that work well for her.

In that way Gold Medal Diary is a great get-off-the-couch-and-kick-butt manual for those who need that sort of inspiration.

Wickenheiser also demystifies sports psychology in ways the ordinary person can relate to. Detailing Team Canada’s exhausting 36-point list of scenarios that could distract the team and prevent them from playing their best at the Olympics shows how single-minded athletes must be to perform at their best in such a heated atmosphere.

Eventually, life away from the rink must end and the hockey takes over.

Sure, Wickenheiser is one of the most famous faces of women’s hockey around the world, but after a while, many of her hockey recollections aren’t any different than the recollections of any top NHLer: how does she play better, how does her team win more games and how does she overcome the injuries that make their inevitable appearance.

Like any game of hockey, it all becomes a blur.

The book reveals her injury-filled season that Team Canada held under wraps for the entire winter leading up to the Olympics for fear their rivals, the Americans, would gain some sort of advantage.

It’s one plus her team has over her male counterparts. It’s hard to imagine a Sidney Crosby injury going unnoticed by anyone in North America.

She does offer some interesting observations of her teammates, but Wickenheiser rarely digs in the corners when discussing her opponents.

That’s natural; she’s planning on playing in the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and wouldn’t want to provide too much bulletin-board material for her American rivals.

While Gold Medal Diary may not make the top of the sports-memoir podium, it does provide a neat look back at a memorable year in Canadian history and shows the human side behind one of Canada’s most famous athletes.

Alan Small is an assistant night news editor for the Winnipeg Free Press.