Tremblay sharp in return

SEAN GORDON - Globe and Mail -Sep. 18, 2009

For all the perils that short-track speed skating presents to the knees and ankles of its practitioners, it was an encounter with a tree root that did in François-Louis Tremblay.

"We're not going over there to skate like superheroes, we know the more important races are to come," skater Olivier Jean said before the team decamped to China for the first of two World Cup meets in Asia this month.

That didn't stop Jean from posting the fastest 500-metre time yesterday

"You want to skate well, but we know it's not all that important to win here. ... It's actually a complicated balance, you want to perform, but you can't afford to do anything stupid and get injured," national team rookie Valérie Maltais, 19, said in a recent interview.