HIGH ACHIEVERS: Jack Crawford snaps 50-year-old family alpine ski jinx

By Martin Cleary

A sleepy Judy Crawford Rawley of Ottawa released a huge sigh of relief before being overwhelmed with joy in the early morning hours of Thursday.

The 50-year-old jinx revolving around the Crawford family’s obsession with fourth-place finishes at major international alpine ski championships has ended. It’s over. It’s finished.

When Rawley tuned into the CBC Sports app late night Wednesday and again early morning Thursday with a nap in between, she watched her nephew Jack Crawford of Toronto secure a podium placement by winning the bronze medal in the two-race men’s alpine combined event at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.

During the opening downhill and the closing one-run slalom, her adrenalin was pumping just like it was during her World Cup racing days with the Canadian national women’s ski team from 1968-74.

“It’s fantastic,” Rawley said in a phone interview. “I’m so pleased for Jack. He has worked hard and consistent all the way through.

“It’s nice to get out of No. 4 and have a No. 3. It was so great to watch him. My heart was pounding.”

Judy Crawford was the first Ontario-based skier to be named to the Canadian national women’s alpine ski team and she stayed with the team until her retirement in 1974. After leaving competitive skiing, she married former national ski coach Kim Rawley and they made Ottawa their home.

As a high-level, all-around alpine skier, Judy Crawford placed fourth in women’s downhill at the 1970 world championships in Val Gardena, Italy; fourth in slalom at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan; and fourth in the alpine combined at the 1974 world championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

But wait, there’s more forthcoming about the fourths. When it came to the World Cup circuit, where she had a career 23 top-10 results and one bronze medal, her best showing in both the downhill and giant slalom was a fourth.

Jack Crawford, 24, made his World Cup circuit racing debut at age 18 for Canada and a year later fell into the family fourth-place rut at the 2017 world junior alpine ski championships, missing the podium by one place in the men’s giant slalom and downhill races.

He revisited that unfortunate results placement again at the 2021 world men’s alpine ski championships in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy, when he was fourth in the men’s alpine combined.

At the Beijing Winter Olympics, Jack Crawford again found his way to another fourth-place showing in the men’s downhill, finishing a blink-of-an-eye 0.07 seconds out of the bronze medal.

But all his luck changed Thursday during the Beijing Olympics at the Yanqing National Alpine Centre, when his combined times for the downhill and one-run slalom earned him the men’s alpine combined bronze medal.

“I’ve been searching for a podium for so long on the World Cup,” Crawford said, after his sixth career Olympic race. “I kept feeling like it was right around the corner and, if I just continued what I was doing, it would finally happen, and today it did.”

He placed second in the downhill in one minute, 43.14 seconds, which was 0.02 seconds behind winner Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway. Three hours later, the speed skier, who rarely does any technical racing, put on his slalom skis and carved out a seventh-place result in 48.97 seconds.

Crawford’s combined time left him 0.68 seconds behind gold-medallist Johannes Strolz of Austria and 0.09 seconds back of silver-medal winner Kilde. Strolz was fourth in the downhill (1:43.87) and won the slalom (47.56) for a total time of 2:31.43, while Kilde was first in the downhill (1:43.12) and sixth in the slalom (48.90) for a combined clocking of 2:32.02.

Despite Crawford’s bronze-medal showing, there was another fourth to deal with, but it was a good fourth. He became the fourth Canadian men’s alpine skier to win an Olympic medal, a fourth-straight bronze, after Steve Podborski, 1980 Lake Placid, downhill; Edi Podivinsky, 1994 Lillehammer, downhill; and Jan Hudec, 2014 Sochi, super-G.

“He did really well in the (alpine combined) downhill,” Rawley said. “He was very solid. He knew what he had to do and he tried to execute that. He made a mistake in the super-G (placing sixth) and a little mistake in the downhill (fourth). But he knew the course well and that was to his advantage.”

Crawford appeared relaxed in his clean slalom run, despite having a buckle come undone on the lower part of his right leg shin guard.

“It’s difficult,” Rawley added, when asked about having a technical race so soon after a speed race. “You go back to the memory bank. He did some (technical) training in early December, where he did some giant slalom and slalom skiing.

“He just went out to do his best (in slalom). He looked at the course, memorized the course and tried to visualize the course for every gate. It wasn’t too technical and it was a bit shorter (than a regular world championship) slalom.”