CESANA PARIOL, Italy -- There were lawyers. There were sport officials. There were Olympic officials.
But sometimes you need your mommy.
When it was announced that Lascelles Brown would finally receive his Canadian citizenship, Pierre Lueders referred to an event which happened in early January as being the key.
He refused to say exactly what the event was. But here yesterday after a practice run prior to the start of his two-man bobsled competition tomorrow, he told the story.
"It was an accident in a flower shop," he said. "It was a woman in politics by the name of Anne McLellan and she was, at the time, before the election that month in Canada, the deputy prime minister or No. 2 in Canada.
"She's from my hometown of Edmonton. My mom happened to be in the same flower shop. She said hello and my mom told her she was the mom of Pierre Lueders and away they went," he said of mom Katie.
Lueders said his mom filled in Deputy Prime Minister McLellan on how it was that her son might lose his brakeman for the Olympics because of problems Bobsled Canada and the Canadian Olympic Committee were having attempting to make the Jamaican bobsledder legal for the Olympics.
"She said, 'Look, have Pierre give me a call at home.' I tried and tried and finally got her. She wouldn't make any guarantees but she said she'd look into it at a higher level and she was true to her word."
Lueders took on several subjects following his training run at the track where later in the day Eckville's Mellisa Hollingsworth-Richards would win Canada's first Olympic medal in skeleton. A European writer asked if he had the same financial means as his competitors.
"No way," replied the defending world champion in the two-man with Brown as his pusher. "I don't know how much the gap is. Probably millions of dollars," he said. "That's okay. Money doesn't always make everything happen."
The pilot who has won 68 World Cup races over his career was also asked about whether he was enjoying his Olympic experience at the much-maligned Sestriere athletes village.
"Not really," he said. "It's not quite finished. They could have finished the facility a little better. You name it, it's not finished. It's basically half a construction zone. It's not a lot different than out here at the track ... In a couple of years this track will be ready.
"The Olympics are supposed to be for the athletes and when they don't even have the village finished, well, that's not the way it should be. The food is also less than average."