WHISTLER, B.C. -- In the beginning, it was a true romance. A boy met a girl at her family reunion. They were little more than kids at the time, but they fell in love, and almost 25 years later they will swear to you it was love at first sight.
Jeff and Aly Pain just knew, and when the boy went back to Calgary and the girl stayed behind in Kelowna, B.C., they would write each other letters. Pages and pages, pouring out their hearts, sharing their secrets, like young lovers often will.
They said they were going to last forever. They said nothing could ever break them apart. And then the other woman appeared on the scene and a true romance -- that blossomed into a marriage in 1997 -- became a battlefield strewn with broken promises and wounded hearts.
"Do I have guilt about it? For sure," says Jeff Pain. "Do I feel ashamed of some of the ways I acted and the things that I did? For sure, but all I can do is move forward with those lessons and be a better husband, be a better father and be a better friend."
Wait -- it isn't what you're thinking. The other woman, in this case, was not a woman at all. She was a sled, and the pulse-pounding sport of skeleton racing, which has consumed Pain -- a silver medalist at the 2006 Turin Olympics -- since he started competing in 1995, two years before he married Aly.
"My friends call skeleton a very unforgiving mistress," Aly says. "It is like having three people in the marriage."
The arrangement was a disaster from the start. The marriage did not simply hit rock bottom. It bottomed out, and kept scraping down the skeleton track year after year, winter after winter, race after race, fight after fight.
Pain's was a runaway addiction. And Aly was the one left to deal with the fallout in Calgary, while he slid his way across Europe for months at a time, draining away the couple's meager finances.
"The low point for my ego was having to pawn items to buy food," she says.
Pots, pans, tools, practically anything of value, including one of the things Aly valued most. A star athlete in high school, she loved the Olympics. She carried the torch in the lead up to the 1988 Calgary Games.
"The biggest thing for me was pawning my 1988 special edition Calgary Olympic Walkman," she says. "It was special for me because I was a torch bearer and a huge sports fanatic. And I remember so clearly holding it, it was yellow..."
Pain did not feel loved. She felt forgotten much of the time, and angry the rest of the time, as though she were a sticky inconvenience stuck to the soles of her husband's skeleton racing shoes. So in 2002, she decided it was over. She was going to take Kyle, the couple's 18-month old son, and move home to her parents in BC. She had it all planned out, right down to the breakup speech.
"When he came home, I let him know that that was it," she says. "We were done. And once again, he would always snap to it, start making calls to try and find a sponsor, try to get some help financially.
"He would literally snap to. It was a dog on a leash that you have to give a good yank. The dog pays attention for a certain amount of time, and then it starts pulling again."
Jeff could be a super-dad and a super-husband, though only in spurts, only until skeleton season cocked its finger and beckoned him back.
"I was blinded by passion for my career, blinded by my drive. I had the blinders on, but luckily they came off a few years ago and everything has gotten better," says Pain, who sits 10th overall in the World Cup standings heading into the Olympics.
"There were several moments of Aly forcing me to open my eyes, and there was some self-realization that I wasn't as happy as I thought I should be, and that things weren't going as well as they should have based on the successes I was having. It was like, 'Well, if I am this successful, why are these other parts of my life not the way I want.' "
Things have changed for the Pains, though the scars from the past are still visible. Aly is a life coach. Healing people is what she does, but a side of her will always abhor the other woman in her husband's life, no matter how many Olympic medals he wins.
Part of the healing has involved coauthoring a self-published book with Jeff, The Business of Marriage & Medals, due for release after the Olympics.
It is a true romance. Honest, and imperfect. Pain is 39-years-old now. This is his last Olympics. Asked why his wife stuck by him through the others, and his voice begins to crack.
"I don't know," he says. "All I know is that I am really blessed to have her."
