Jack Todd

She came through the mixed zone long after her teammates had appeared, trailing them as always because the networks kept her longer than the others, that characteristic mane of red hair a little more tousled than usual, grinning from earlobe to earlobe.

Clara Hughes, an Olympic medallist again, savouring this one like no other simply because this was a team medal, something she could share with four other skaters who helped the Canadian squad move from round to round to last night's silver-medal skate: Kristina Groves, Christine Nesbitt, Shannon Rempel and the great Cindy Klassen.

Klassen, with three more races to compete in here, skated the semi-final to make sure Canada got as far as the final, then turned it over to Nesbitt. The Canadians were good, but not good enough, losing the gold to the experienced German trio of Daniela Anschuetz Thoms, Anni Friesinger and Claudia Pechstein.

Still, it was part of a brilliant night with Canada also winning a silver medal in the men's team pursuit - and the happiest athlete in town was the 33-year-old Hughes, still capturing Olympic medals a decade after winning her first in Atlanta.

"This was the first team medal I've ever won," Hughes said, "and it was so much fun. It's been a great experience, a great couple of days. I think if anything, we came out of this with the least amount of stress among all the teams because we just enjoyed it and shared it and didn't worry about what we couldn't do.

"We just looked at what all our strengths were and we played on them. We respected them. Our goal was to start every race together and finish together."

Hughes has now won four Olympic medals, two in the winter Games and two in the summer Games. She is the only Canadian athlete to capture medals in both the winter and summer Games. She is one of only four athletes to have won in both summer and winter, and the first Olympic athlete to have won multiple medals in both.

(Christa Luding-Rothenburger, an East German, won four speed-skating medals and one in cycling between Sarajevo in 1984 and Albertville in 1994.)

She will let us do the counting and dole out the accolades, thank you very much. Hughes is about a lot of things: touting her own triumphs is not one of them and her legacy was not one of the things on her mind last night.

"No, absolutely not," she said. "Today is today and tomorrow is another day. For me, I just don't think about what I've done in the past. Skating, competing in any sport is so difficult that if you start thinking about all the great things you've done, it's going to be even harder. For me, this is totally unique and special and I don't add it on to anything else."

Instead, she'll turn her attention to preparing for the 5,000-metre race to be held on the same oval a week from tomorrow, when she has a chance to win her fifth Olympic medal.

"I love to train," Hughes said. "I don't want to sit around. I'm at the Olympics, I want to just fine-tune everything. If anything, the team pursuit has given me my rhythm because I didn't have my rhythm on this ice at all in the 3K. I just felt like my legs weighed two tons each. I came out of that race, I watched the video and I looked horrible, like I was skating in quicksand.

"Since then, I've been working on finding my rhythm. The girls in team pursuit really helped me to do it. I just have to calm down and relax and prepare for the race of my life and the fight of my life on the 25th."

If you appreciate genuine athletes at all, you will be watching and pulling for her on that day. Hughes is the ultimate Olympian. Whatever Baron Pierre de Coubertin had in mind when he conceived an international stage upon which the world's best athletes competed in an atmosphere of pure sportsmanship, Hughes embodies it.

She knows all too well that the brief moments of glory are interspersed with weeks, months and years of brutal training, long hours when she drives those powerful thighs until, as she put it to me once, "you can see Elvis."

Since she was a teenager going back and forth between speed skating and cycling, Hughes has never cut corners.

"If I told myself I was going for a four-hour bike ride," she once said, "and I came home after three hours and 55 minutes, I'd keep going around the block for another five minutes."

No shortcuts, no cheating. Compete hard, compete clean. This is a woman whose idea of a little down time between competitions is to bike across the Northwest Territories or across Baja, Mexico - an experience which is the subject of a travel book she is now writing.

In her spare time, Hughes will travel to northern Manitoba to share her passion for sport with disadvantaged First Nations children, with anyone she can inspire or help in anyway.

After winning her bronze medal in the gruelling 5,000-metre event at Salt Lake City, Hughes and her husband went on a bike tour through the Northwest Territories. During a stop in Taktoyaktuk, she had one of those experiences that made her realize the impact athletes can have.

"A whaler from a First Nations band came in right off one of the boats," she said. "He walked up to me and he said, 'Thank you, thank you very much. I want to thank you for what you've done for this country.'

"I didn't know what he was talking about because I didn't think anyone there would recognize me.

"He said, 'You're Clara Hughes. You're the cyclist; you're the speed skater.' It just showed me how far sports runs. It just inspired me as an athlete to continue doing what I do because it's really for hope and for our country."

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