West Vancouver’s Georgia Simmerling can add one more achievement to her already mind-boggling biography: Olympic medallist.
On Saturday Simmerling joined with Allison Beveridge, Jasmin Glaesser and Kirsti Lay to blast past New Zealand in the bronze medal race in women’s track cycling team pursuit at the Rio Olympic Velodrome. Simmerling had already made history just by showing up for the event, becoming the first Canadian ever to compete in three different sports in three different Olympic Games.
The 27-year-old previously competed in alpine skiing in 2010 and ski cross in 2014.
Her wild athletic ride also included quick recoveries from several scary injuries, including a ski cross crash in 2012 that left her with three broken vertebrae. She spent seven weeks in a body brace recovering, but just one year later earned the first of five career ski cross World Cup medals. Two years after breaking her back, she tried cycling on a velodrome track for the first time in her life. And two years after that she became an Olympic medallist.
“Did that just happen?” Simmerling posted on her Twitter account moments after the race. The big chunk of bronze hanging around her neck Saturday night confirmed that yes, that did just happen. Canada’s time of 4:14.627 in the bronze race topped New Zealand by nearly four seconds and set a new Canadian record.
“We had to come together really quickly, and we did that,” Simmerling stated in a Cycling Canada release. “We rode faster every single ride, and put it all on the line. I’m so, so, so proud to be a part of this team and to finish that ride with the girls that I rode with. I never thought it was possible.”
Simmerling’s story is creating quite a stir in the Canadian cycling world. North Vancouver cycling guru Richard Wooles has been there all along, helping Simmerling first try out a fixed-gear track bike less than two years ago. Wooles, a highly regarded coach who has worked with the Canadian national team, has had a front row for the Rio Games while doing television commentary for CBC.
“For somebody to go from nowhere in 18 months to winning an Olympic medal is pretty unheard of,” Wooles told the North Shore News from Rio. “I wouldn’t have banked on her being on the team a year ago because there were so many obstacles for her to overcome. It’s a phenomenal story.”
Simmerling has made the transition from skiing to cycling look easy, but Wooles knows that becoming a world-class track cyclist is anything but easy.
“It’s not easy at all,” he said. “You have to be able to pedal the bike fast but you also have to have the flexibility and strength to be able to get down in that tuck position. It’s not a comfortable position. And you can have the brute force and the power, but then you need the technique and the skill to be able to ride first solo, and then to be able to do it with other people on the team.”
Wooles was there as Simmerling took her first tentative turns around the Burnaby Velodrome.
“She’d never ridden on a fixed-gear bike going around a velodrome before,” he said. “It was just really basic stuff, like can you ride around the track and hold the bike down at the bottom of the track. There’s so many G forces that pull you up the track.”
He was impressed, however, by how quickly Simmerling picked it up, as well as by her very impressive power scores that she put up in testing. She was still miles away from making the national team, however, and Cycling Canada made it very clear to her that she wasn’t going to push her way onto the team unless she showed extraordinary progress.
“She got told ‘no, no, no,’ multiple times, to go away or whatever else, and she wouldn’t listen to it,” said Wooles. “She said ‘No, I think I can do this.’ … The team already had six solid riders, there’s a lot of depth to this team, they’ve been going for six years. For an outsider from a different discipline – and not even a summer sport, she was a winter sport athlete – it’s a little crazy.”
Simmerling’s first World Cup race came in January of 2016, and Canada won gold. The world championships were in March, and Canada won silver. And now they’ve claimed bronze on the sport’s biggest stage.
In Rio, Canada finished behind Great Britain, who claimed gold with a world record time of 4:10.236, and the United States, who clocked a time of 4:12.454 in the 4,000-metre race. The bronze was the first cycling medal of the 2016 Games for Canada. The Canadian women’s pursuit team also won bronze in this event in London in 2012, although Glaesser was the only member to return to the starting line in Rio. This time around Simmerling wasn’t just a team member, she was one of the leaders as the team raced faster than any Canadian team has ever gone.
“She really did solid performances,” said Wooles. “She’s definitely one of the stronger riders in the team. Technically I think she’s going to still keep learning. It’s going to be interesting to see whether she carries on with cycling or switches back to the winter sports now.”
And that’s the next chapter in Simmerling’s wild story. Throughout her cycling excursion Simmerling has maintained that she has not given up on skiing – the former member of the North Shore’s Grouse Tyee Ski Club could very well be in the starting gates for ski cross in Pyeongchang, South Korea in 2018. Whatever happens next, Simmerling provides inspiration for anyone who has dreamed of Olympic glory, said Wooles.
“It’s a remarkable story,” he said. “If you think you have the physical ability, Georgia is a great example for somebody who has that Olympic dream.”
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Several other North Shore athletes are in the mix in the second week of competition in Rio.
North Vancouver’s Tiffany Foster leaped into action on Sunday in individual and team qualification in equestrian jumping. The medals in the team competition will be awarded after the second set of finals set to start Wednesday at 6 a.m. Pacific time.
In the individual competition Foster sits in a tie for 30th place through two qualification rounds. The individual finals are set for Friday starting at 6 a.m. PDT for round A and 9:30 a.m. for round B.
In mixed Nacra 17 sailing West Vancouver’s Nikola Girke and her partner Luke Ramsay finished 15th overall, completing the medal race on Tuesday.
On the track North Vancouver’s Chris Winter got his first taste of Olympic competition Monday, finishing 10th in his qualification heat for the 3,000-metre steeplechase with a time of 8:33.95. Winter did not advance to the final, placing 25th overall.
