Blondin finds high point of rollercoaster speedskating ride

During a national team training camp in the summer, Blondin was on a definite high, finishing workouts on the tails of 2010 Olympians Kalyna Roberge and Tania Vicent and pronouncing herself in the best shape of her life.

But then Blondin was thrust into a major low when the Montreal-based short-track team was told only one Canadian specializing in the 1,500 metres would be chosen for the Vancouver Games, and she realized the top place wouldn’t be hers.

“That was really frustrating for me knowing that I missed out on the Olympics just because of that,” Blondin explains. “Even before short-track Olympic trials, I was kind of on a downslope. It was hard to get back on my feet.”

The next month after the Aug. 9-18 trials would offer Blondin an even greater challenge, however. The 19-year-old was in and out of the hospital undergoing tests to determine if she had breast cancer.

“Before I had my biopsy, I was telling myself what I was going to do if I do have cancer,” Blondin recounts. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have to shave my head, I’ll have to move back home and quit skating.’”

Eventually the former Gloucester Concordes athlete got some good news – the concern about cancer was actually the end result of a cyst and wasn’t a major worry.

“Afterwards, it kind of made me see things in a new perspective,” says Blondin, who didn’t train while the uncertainty about her future lingered. “I told myself, I don’t know what I’d do without skating. Skating is my life. It’d be hard to break that.”

Blondin slowly got back into her regular routine and decided to set up shop in a Calgary hotel in early December to prepare for the Canadian long-track Olympic trials. Last season, Blondin managed to earn a trip to the long-track junior worlds – and wound up finishing seventh in the world – despite not skating on an oval for at least five years.

“I had no expectations going in (to the long-track trials),” Blondin notes. “All these girls had been training for it for four years, and I only got into it two weeks before the competition pretty much.”

Blondin wound up producing tremendous results in two events that were foreign to her – the 3,000 m (seventh) and the 5,000 m (fourth, just behind 2006 Torino medallists Kristina Groves and Cindy Klassen).

And then Blondin managed to place first in those two distances at a Jan. 8-10 Canada Cup event that included the next best Canadians out of those who didn’t qualify for the Olympics, along with a few international athletes.

“I finished my race and I looked up at the scoreboard, and I was like, ‘Damn! How did I do that?’” Blondin laughs. “It’s weird to think, ‘What if I were to train for this? Could I be a world champion?’”

It turns out that’s the exact message she received from coaches on Speedskating Canada’s high-performance committee.

“If I move to Calgary and train for the next four years, they think that I could go to the Olympics and win medals,” says Blondin, who is mulling over the life-changing question of switching her focus from short-track to long-track. “If I go into long-track, I’d have to move to Calgary and leave so many people behind that I don’t want to leave behind.

“I just don’t know what to do. It’s a hard decision.”