Guntis Rekis ( Latvian: Guntis Rēķis , November 3, 1974 , Riga ) is a Latvian sleigh rider who played for the Latvian national team from 1997 to 2010. Participant of the four Winter Olympic Games, two-time bronze medalist of the World Cup.
 Guntis Rekis | |
|---|---|
| general information | |
| Citizenship | |
| Date of Birth | November 3, 1974 ( 44) |
| Place of Birth | Riga |
| Height | |
| The weight | |
| Specialization | |
| In the national team | since 1997 |
| Status | completed his career |
Biography
Guntis Rekis was born on November 3, 1974 in Riga . He began to actively engage in luge at the age of eleven, in 1997 he was selected for the national team and immediately began to show good results. Thanks to a series of successful performances, he was awarded the right to defend the country's honor at the Nagano Olympics , where he took a modest seventeenth place. In the 2000/01 season, he made his World Cup debut, rising overall to twenty-eighth position. I went to the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City , planned to compete for prizes, but in the end I finished only twenty-ninth.
The closest thing was to the podium of the World Cup in 2004, when it took the sixth line in the standings of mixed teams. The following season, after the end of all stages of the World Cup, he settled in seventeenth place in the world ranking of the strongest riders. In 2006, he competed at the Olympic Games in Turin , where he could only get to the twenty-first place.
Rekis continued to compete after this failure, took part in major international starts, but failed to achieve any outstanding achievements, most often remaining in twentieth places. Nevertheless, he always performed much better on the home track in Sigulda than elsewhere, so at the 2006/07 World Cup stage he came here seventh, showed sixth and fifth time next year, and fourth the next year. At the 2008 World Cup, he received a bronze medal for mixed-team competitions, a year later he replenished the medal collection with a second such award, taking third place in the team competition at the world championship in Lake Placid.
The culmination of his career as a professional athlete was the 2010 Vancouver Olympics , he had high hopes for them, but finished only twenty-sixth. After that, he also participated in the races of the European Championship in his native Sigulda, where he closed the top ten strongest, and at the age of 36 decided to leave the sledding. All this time Guntis Rekis served as a police officer, and after completing his career continued to work in Latvian law enforcement agencies. He also held the position of head coach of the New Zealand national luge team for some time and was an assistant coach in the Canadian junior team. He is fond of fishing, prefers to spend free time sitting at a fishing rod by a reservoir.
Links
- Profile on the FIL website
- Guntis Rekis - Olympic statistics at Sports-Reference.com