In a teeming airport lobby, Jeffrey Buttle rummaged through his backpack and extracted the gold medal he had won as the world champion men's singles skater. He held it up and grinned for the cameras, showed it to wide-eyed youngsters and fed their dreams.
"It's definitely not as heavy as an Olympic medal," he said.
The 25-year-old skater from Barrie, Ont., knows that in a literal way — he was the bronze medalist at the Turin Olympics in 2006 — and in the figurative sense. Canadian men have been world champions 10 times, but never converted that to gold, even when going into the Olympics as world champs.
Brian Orser and Kurt Browning got to carry the Maple Leaf flag as athletes marched into the Olympics. But Orser carried out a silver medal from Calgary's 1988 Battle of the Brians when he lost out to American Brian Boitano. Browning carried away disappointment, missing the podium at both Albertville in 1992 and Lillehammer in 1994.
Related Articles
"I've talked to both of them about what it means, skating in the Olympics, especially before Torino," Buttle said. "They told me an Olympics is entirely different from the worlds. There's more pressure to deal with, expectations, media, attention, demands."
Buttle will take one day off, then get back to training. He won the world championship without using one of the much-touted quadruple jumps, but skating well-planned, more conservative routines almost flawlessly to win both the short and long programs.
"But I think in 2010, I'll need a quad," he said. "What I take away from this is that if I've accomplished this much without the quad, think what I could do with it.
"This was a case of it being more than the 10 seconds it takes to set up a quad. It's everything outside that, and I think that's what the judges were saying."
It's been 20 years since Browning landed the first quad at the worlds, and until the weekend, it came to be regarded as the hallmark of a male skater's championship performance. Certainly, 2007 world champ Brian Joubert of France, beaten into second place by almost 14 points by Buttle, made it known that he felt the quad is a brave and undervalued element "and Jeffrey didn't attempt it."
But after suffering a spinal stress fracture in his lower back — "a year ago, it was painful just to walk," said the champion's mother, Lesley Buttle — he took time to rest, come back healthy and show that winning skating involved more than just pushing the athletic limits. Skating without a quad in the routine was a smart technical decision.
Orser, who was in Sweden, said Buttle has the tools to master the quad, but advised against Buttle overdoing it as he adds it to his arsenal.
"He tends to overtrain when he has something to pursue and master," Orser said. "He's definitely capable. He's the most in-shape skating athlete I've ever seen."
One thing Buttle has in his favour is that he's world champion two years out from the Vancouver Olympics, when Canadian athletes will be in a cauldron as home-country favourites.
"I won the worlds the year before Calgary and you're dealing with trying to defend your position in front of a home crowd, having never defended it before," Orser said. "Jeff has a year to digest it. There's a world championship again at Los Angeles in 2009, and if he defends his championship there, he can say, 'This is what I did, this is what I felt, this is what works.' If not, he knows what to change for Vancouver. But he has a luxury of a year, and so it's a no-lose situation, as long as he takes this year and learns from it."
Orser is part of the Canadian Olympic Committee's roster of former Olympians brought on board to help athletes deal with 2010.
"It will be such a strong team with world champions in several sports, the COC wants the athletes to know what to expect," he said. "At home, it's so much tougher. It's a privilege to be in the Olympics at home. If you could write a script, you'd love to do it [win] at home. It doesn't get any better than that. It's your opportunity to shine."
For now, Buttle's world crown is another milestone on the journey that started when he was two years old, on a rink in Kapuskasing, when he mother says she put him on the ice for the first time and a love affair with the sport was kindled. It was nurtured on long, dark drives, when Lesley bundled her sleepy son into the car and drove from the family's former home in Timmins to Barrie, for early-morning practices.
"I didn't expect Jeff would be skating this long," said Lesley, who also designs Jeffrey's skating costumes. "We'll share him with Canada — I suppose that's already happened since he won an Olympic medal. Of course, it would have been nice to share him when it was time to drive all those miles at 5 a.m. But no one's around to share in that, only parents.
"I know Jeffery and he'll be hard at work tomorrow. He was the best skater in the world on Saturday night. Ultimately, most of the skaters who competed there are capable of all the elements. It comes down to who can do it on the day, and he did it, skating last. I couldn't do that. I'd be back in a corner curled up in a fetal position."
