Kirby deserved to be in that fifty-kilometer race and the other events too. It irritated her that everyone treated the distance races like Mara May’s preordained due.
The press, US Ski and Snowboard, their teammates—they’d all done the same thing four years ago. They’d acted like that gold was already on Mara’s neck, and everyone else was table dressing at her coronation. And they’d all been wrong.
Mara let out an inaudible sigh but didn’t respond to Kirby’s needling.
Mara was so uptight in interviews. It was hard to play off her, to get a natural rapport going.
“Then is it true?” Janette asked Mara. “You’re not planning to do any sprint events.”
“It’s true.”
“What’s your reasoning?” Janette said, seemingly unfazed by Mara’s bland answer.
Kirby wasn’t unfazed. She wanted the spicy Mara. The Mara with bite. She wanted Mara to reveal her true self, to level the playing field.
Janette continued, “You are currently the sport’s preeminent and most well-rounded competitor. It’s amazing that you have managed to dominate in so many events for so long. Why have you made the change?”
Kirby couldn’t keep her scoff in, and Mara glanced at her. She looked like she was grinding glass with her teeth.
“I’ve gotten older,” Mara said. “I’ve juggled knee and hip flexor injuries off and on in recent years.”
“That’s true but not the truth,” Kirby said, infusing her voice with as much fake sweetness as possible. She didn’t understand what it was about Mara that made her feel so mean, but she suddenly resented this whole circus.
If the purpose was to set up Mara as cross-country royalty, Kirby wasn’t playing along.
“And what do you think the truth is, Bonham?” Mara asked blandly, and Kirby resisted the urge to fist pump. Getting Mara to acknowledge her at all was a win.
“You want your gold medal.”
“Of course.”
“So you’re putting your energy into the events where you have the best chance of medaling. Quality versus quantity. It’s a common tactic. It doesn’t make you special. It just makes you strategic.”
Mara didn’t respond. She went back to clenching her jaw and blankly staring at Janette.
“What do you have to say to that?” Janette asked, her voice soft and conciliatory, like she was trying to coax Mara out of her shell. It wasn’t going to work. Mara’s shell was made of steel.
“Nothing.”
Kirby almost laughed. Mara’s blandness was impressive.
“Maybe your motivation is something else. Redemption, perhaps?” Janette said.
The temperature in the room plummeted. Mara had already been all sharp angles and discomfort. Now with the roundabout reference to her losses in Beijing, she was even icier.
“Part of competing is learning from and letting go of your losses and mistakes. Focusing on the next race. Otherwise, it would be torture.”
It was a rote answer, straight out of a media training handbook, but Kirby couldn’t help but wonder if it was true.
She certainly hadn’t let go of her win against Mara. She held tight to it, treasured it as proof she was worthy. Sometimes she took it back out when the world tried to batter her down, to tell her she didn’t deserve to be there.
“This is the first Olympic Games where men and women are racing equal distances,” Janette said. “You’ll both be racing in the very first Olympic women’s fifty-kilometer mass start. Four years ago, your longest race was thirty kilometers. What do you think of these changes?”
“It’s about time,” Kirby said. “There should never have been a question that women are just as capable as men at longer distances. Other sports don’t have different distances for women and men. Swimming doesn’t. Track and field doesn’t. Why should cross-country skiing?”
Kirby believed that with her whole heart, but it was no secret she had struggled with the fifty-k. Coming up in the sport as a sprinter, she’d had a hard time adjusting. She always finished it, and sometimes she raced it well, but not like Mara. Almost doubling the distance had been a cake walk for Mara. It had made her even more dominant. She probably would have loved to add another twenty kilometers.
“Mara, what would it mean to you to be the first ever winner of the women’s fifty kilometer in the Olympics?”
