RICHMOND, B.C. — Clara Hughes has capped her remarkable career with an Olympic bronze medal.
The 37-year-old long-track speedskater from Glen Sutton, Que., was third in the women’s 5,000 metres at the Vancouver Olympics on Wednesday, an event she won four years ago in Turin.
She finished in six minutes 55.73 seconds. The time stood as a track record before it was broken twice, first by silver medallist Stephanie Beckert of Germany and then by gold medallist Martina Sablikova of the Czech Republic.
Sablikova won in 6:50.91, followed by Beckert in 6:51.39.
The medal is the sixth of Hughes’s career, putting her in a tie with Winnipeg’s Cindy Klassen as Canada’s most decorated Olympian.
Hughes, who carried the Canadian flag into B.C. Place at the opening ceremonies, said she came into the Games thinking physical and mental excellence rather than medals or owning the podium.
“I did that in the last race of my life on ice and it was so enjoyable,” Hughes told CTV. “I’m just really proud of the process I went through to bring me to this place.”
Klassen finished 12th in 7:22.09 at the Richmond Olympic Oval while Ottawa’s Kristina Groves was sixth in 7:04.57.
“The beginning felt pretty good, pretty easy and I thought ’Hmmmm, maybe I can hold this for a while,”’ said Klassen. “But my legs got to me at the end there.”
She’s not sure if it was her last Olympic race. Having struggled with knee problems, Klassen has lost a lot of the power that propelled her to the podium five times in Turin.
“I don’t know, I’ve got to think about it once the season is over,” she said. “We’ll see.”
Klassen said Hughes has been a great teacher.
“She’s always calm and ready to compete,” she said. “It will be strange not to have her around.”
Hughes, who finished fifth in the 3,000, had already won a pair of cycling bronze medals at the 1996 Summer Games and added 5,000 bronze in 2002 at Salt Lake City plus team pursuit silver in 2006 to go with her gold in Turin.
Groves said Hughes excels at the big competitions.
“She’s done it so many times and she did it again today to finish her career with another Olympic medal,” Groves said. “It’s phenomenal.”
Always effervescent, Hughes is a relentless competitor with off-the-charts aerobic capacity and pain threshold that made her a perfect fit for cycling and speedskating. She credits her determination to a difficult childhood in which she experimented with alcohol and drugs as a teenager.
“I don’t come from the most stable, nice upbringing,” she said in a recently. “I’ve gone through a lot in my life and it’s given me a tenacity and an edge in what I do in sport.”
But she’s also become more than simply an athlete.
Hughes has grown into a role model through her environmental work and by supporting Right to Play, a humanitarian group dedicated to bringing sports to underprivileged children around the world. At the 2006 Games, long before the Canadian Olympic Committee started giving cash prizes for medals, she donated $10,000 of her own money to the group.
“I want to stay connected to humanity and contribute the human condition and try to make it a little better maybe,” Hughes said with a shy laugh. “That’s always been a goal of mine and I feel like as an athlete I have this incredible platform to try and make a difference for people.”
The desire to use that platform in a positive fashion, rather than shy away from it like some athletes, helped earn her an Officer of the Order of Canada and the International Olympic Committee’s sport community award.
Hughes has been vague about her future plans, but in the past has worked in the media and is likely to remain to the public eye. She’s also an avid mountain biker, hiker and mountain climber, so she’ll have plenty more time to pursue those passions.
She also has an artistic side, taking classes in woodworking, Japanese wood block print-making, and Chinese calligraphy, among other things.
“I always try to have some kind of creative outlet because what I do as an athlete is just a physical output, so I want to keep a connection with creativity,” she said recently. “I feel like it opens me up and let’s me come back to what I do in sport with a more open mind. Also, it kind of takes me away from what I’m doing in training every day. I’m an avid reader and I write a lot but I always try to have some creative outlet, whether it’s redecorating my condo, my husband’s always like, ’You’re doing this again?’ I’m like, ’It’s my creative outlet.”’