Canada's Alex Gough picked up her fourth individual bronze medal of the season on Friday, Feb. 8 at Lake Placid, including her bronze at the World Championship in Whistler last week. Including team relay events, she also has three silver medals to her credit this year.
The most recent medal was in the last regular World Cup of the season, with only an Olympic test event remaining at Sochi, Russia. After that, athletes will get about two weeks off before dryland training gets underway.
"It definitely was a good day," said Gough. "I had two solid runs and I am really happy with how things went. I have been working on my consistency all year. I feel like I am a lot more calm with how I handle things, and that helped me today."
Gough was fourth after the first run, but consistency paid off as Germany's Anke Wishcnewski had a bad second run to slip back in the rankings.
"I knew it was so close that anything could happen in the second run," said Gough.
Natalie Geisenberger of Germany took the win while the silver medal went to American Julia Clukey. Up until now, Gough was one of the only non-Germans to step onto the women's luge podium over the last few seasons. Kimberley McRae and Arianne Jones were 12th and 13th for Canada, while Jordan Smith placed 19th.
The Canadian doubles team of Tristan Walker and Justin Snith also had a career day, just missing the podium in fourth place - 0.013 seconds back of third.
"To be honest, I was not expecting this at all," said Walker. "This is one of the toughest doubles tracks in the world and we had a really rough week in training. These were the only decent runs we had all week."
Germany's Tobias Wendl and Tobias Arlt were first, Peter Penz and Georg Fischler of Austria were second and Christian Oberstolz and Patrick Gruber placed third.
The last two events are the men's individual races and the final team relay on Saturday, Feb. 9.
