Dougie Crawford interview: A downhill battle

Published on Saturday 28 March 2009 18:48

IT'S cost him a fortune and nearly his life, but Dougie Crawford will stop at nothing to get a medal, writes Richard Bath

HE MAY HAVE been heavily concussed and feeling increasingly unwell, but Dougie Crawford can still remember that terrifying dash down the hill in his coach's Audi. The tyres on Gunter Puringer's car squealed as they sped around the hairpin bends, tearing along the alpine roads at insane speeds. Faster even than the 80 miles an hour Scotland's most promising young downhiller had been hitting in training that day.

The 17-year-old had endured plenty of nasty crashes before and hadn't thought much of this latest prang, sustained while summer training on the glacier at the small Austrian resort of Kaprun. In fact he wasn't thinking at all: smacking your head along the compacted snow of a downhill course while travelling at motorway speeds can have that effect. Had it not been for Gunter's increasingly insistent urgings he would have simply gone to bed.

It was a good job he didn't: he may not have woken up. As soon as the medics at Zell am See took a look at him they rushed him to the operating theatre. The twisting roads in this section of the Austrian Alps are a mecca for motorcyclists; so many of them fall off that they have little difficulty recognising a ruptured spleen. The young Glaswegian's spleen wasn't just ruptured, though, it looked as if it had been hit with a sledgehammer.

"I didn't realise it at the time but I was very close to dying," says Crawford. "I was pretty concussed so it wasn't too sore, but my coach insisted we should go to hospital and as soon as the doctors saw me they just said 'shit, don't move'.

"I was bleeding badly inside and spent two weeks in hospital. It was pretty scary for me afterwards and terrible for my family. They said that I was lucky to keep my spleen, and had I lost that then I probably wouldn't be racing because your spleen governs you immune system; to lose it would mean that the sort of small infection that normally you'd shrug off without even noticing could prove fatal."

That would have been a huge loss because the prodigiously talented young kid from Bearsden, who started skiing on plastic at the age of two, soon made good on his early promise. If Alain Baxter was robbed in Salt Lake, within the sport there's a belief that his 22-year-old countryman has what it takes to atone for that loss by bringing home a medal from the Sochi Olympics in 2014.

Crawford has already qualified for next year's Vancouver Winter Olympics, but little is expected of a young skier who made his World Cup debut just two months ago. As Finlay Mickel, the 31-year-old Scot who is British No.1 but who has been out injured for 12 months after damaging his anterior cruciate ligament in Norway, has proved, downhill ski racing is all about core strength, which is why racers tend to reach their peak between 30 and 35.

So for Crawford to be competing at this level so early in his career is a huge achievement. Indeed, he is not only taking part but actually competing: in this, his first season among skiing's elite, he had three top-10 finishes in the Nor-Am Cup in Canada and an 11th-place finish in the FIS Super G earlier this month, while at last month's World Ski Championships in Val D'Isere, he finished 21st in the downhill and 28th in the Super G.

But then great things have been expected of Crawford since he won the British Championships as a schoolboy before going on to win an FIS race at Courchevel when just a few weeks out of his teens. Now he's looking long-term, targeting the top 15 world ranking that he says would give him a shot at emulating his hero Baxter by securing a podium finish in Sochi.

"Alain Baxter was a huge inspiration to me," he says. "I was away with the British children's team at the world championships in Italy when he won his medal in Salt Lake City, and was sitting screaming at the television. I didn't know him at the time but to see a Brit able to do that, and with a lot less advantages than we have now, shows that there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't get there too."

Crawford now trains with the British team, learning as much as he can from older racers such as Baxter and his brother Noel, Finlay Mickel and Chemmy Alcott, while the peer pressure of team-mates such as Ed Drake, Dave Riding and Jan Kanchelskis keeps motivation levels high, particularly in the boring summer months. He's picked up Baxter's famous work ethic, with a typical day consisting of a couple of hours in the gym, a couple of hours on the bike and then up to five hours on the mountain.

If that gruelling regime hasn't changed since Baxter first broke on to the ski racing scene, then neither has another constant: a lack of funds. Baxter used to drive around Europe in a battered old jalopy with a broken back window, sleeping in his car and digging himself out of snowdrifts in the mornings. The British team may not be that skint these days, but the amount of lottery funding has been reduced and the team has had to give up its hotel base in Austria.

Spending six months of every year on the road isn't cheap, with Crawford having to pay for his food and accommodation. At one stage his ski-mad parents Gordon and Jacqui were chipping in 12-15,000 a year, although that's now down to 5-6,000. When he's not skiing or training he's gardening to earn some money or trying to find backing. "You write hundreds of letters and either don't get a reply or get a standard brush-off, but that'll change when we get the results."

At times he thought about jacking in his chosen career, but all that changed when he experienced his first World Cup race in Wengen, from which his ragged first run down the hill became a YouTube favourite. "Even going up to the start in Wengen was amazing," he says. "You catch the train up and you're passing these huge crowds, 30,000 people who are there to cheer on the racers. It's a different world from anything else that you can experience in skiing; I suppose it's the equivalent of running out at Murrayfield for your Six Nations debut.

"You can hear the cowbells at the top but once you're set on what you're doing nothing else intrudes. Wengen is the fastest and longest downhill in the world, and no matter how much you train over the summer, no matter how much time you spend in the gym, no matter how long you spend on the bike, by the time you get to the bottom of that your legs are absolutely cooked. But what an experience."

Not as exhilarating as climbing up on to the podium after the race, perhaps. But that will surely come.