MEDAL MACHINE
Motivational force Mckeever has established Canadian Winter Paralympian standard
As 2020 winds to a close, Postmedia's Wes Gilbertson will be profiling Calgary's sporting icons of the 2000s so far. Today: Cross-country skier Brian Mckeever.
It's an everyday storage solution for a historic collection.
Cross-country skier Brian Mckeever is the most decorated Canadian Winter Paralympian of all-time, the owner of 17 medals — including 13 golds — from that once-every-four-years international sporting spectacle.
With so many shiny keepsakes, you almost imagine a guy who has no room for socks in his sock drawer.
Close. Mckeever, who started to lose his vision in his late teens and was soon legally blind, keeps his record-setting stash of souvenirs in a Tupperware container, individually wrapped in cloth sunglasses cases to avoid any dents and dings.
“I've always said medals are for other people, because that's never why I did it,” said Mckeever, now 41 and still competing. “I mean, they're nice. There is no doubt they're nice, and every medal I've won, I'm proud of. But it's more about what they represent, because they represent four years of kicking your own butt to be better. It's always like, `Today was good, tomorrow needs to be better.' You wake up and think, `Let's be better today than I was yesterday,' and you do that again and again and again.
“So the medals mean something, but it wasn't like, `I want that.' They're a representation of the work that is done.”
On the Paralympic stage, no winter athlete has represented Canada with more success.
The Calgary-raised Mckeever won a pair of gold medals in Salt Lake City and added two more to his collection in Torino. He finished first in three races — the one-kilometre sprint, 10-km classic and 20-km freestyle — at Vancouver 2010 and completed that same hat trick in both Sochi and Pyeongchang.
Along the way, he's also picked up a couple of silver showpieces, plus two bronze.
“It just means that I stayed in it, that I stayed excited,” Mckeever said. “I think I was in it for the right reasons for most of my career. It wasn't about accomplishments and it wasn't about trying to achieve a result. It was about trying to achieve a feeling. For me, it was about trying to achieve my own sense of accomplishment and that wasn't measured in time or placements. It was in satisfaction, knowing how much work had gone into that year or that quad.
“And that's actually what I'm really proud about is I was able to stay on the cutting edge for as long as I did by continuing to push for more — and again, not more results, but more out of myself.”
Mckeever, who grew up in the northwest neighbourhood of Varsity and graduated from Sir Winston Churchill High School, was a top cross-country prospect when he was diagnosed with the same genetic eye condition that his father and aunt were already living with.
He had just returned from the world junior championships. His older brother Robin, later his racing guide, had represented Canada that winter at the Olympics in Nagano.
On this day, along with Robin's now-wife, they were headed to an end-of-season shindig.
“We were looking for the address and Robin and Milaine were reading the signs, and I couldn't even see the signs, let alone what was written on them,” Mckeever said. “I was like, ` Where are you guys seeing the addresses?' They're like, `On every street corner! We grew up in Calgary — they're where you expect the green cross-signs to be.' But I couldn't see them.”
Mckeever's eyesight deteriorated quickly — today he has less than 10 per cent of normal vision — but his ultimate goal didn't change.
As Robin, now head coach of the Para Nordic national program, put it: “He was driven by a high-performance standard that was above and beyond where he was going to be at the Paralympics. He was driven by the Olympic dream, right from a child.”
During his remarkable career, that's the one dream Mckeever hasn't fully achieved.
Although he became the first Paralympian to earn a spot on Canada's able-bodied Olympic team in 2010, he didn't get the chance to compete, serving only as an alternate. He believes he should have been considered again in Sochi but wasn't named to the roster.
“That politics kept me out of two Games anyways, that's hard to take and will always be hard to take,” Mckeever said. “It was a lot of psychological knocks, four years at a time. That's what I was always aiming for. That was the goal was to see where I could stack up against the very top guys at the biggest event. And to be on the edge of doing that twice and then not having the opportunity, it was really hard. It is really hard.”
He might not have realized it at the time, he might not still, but he inspired a generation by simply putting himself in the conversation.
“The fact he was able to qualify for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, it's just mind-boggling. It's such a cool thing,” said Calgarian triathlete Stefan Daniel, who was born with bilateral radial club hands, won a national junior title against able-bodied racers and at 23, is a three-time world-champion in his disability category. “Being a Para athlete myself, when I was growing up, I thought, `Oh, maybe I'll never be as good as my peers. I'll always have a disability, so I'll always be a bit slower or whatever.' But seeing what Brian has been able to do in his career and how he didn't use that disability as an excuse, that really rubbed off on me.
“After Tokyo, I've always wanted to take a crack at able-bodied racing, maybe take a shot at an Olympic team,” Daniel continued. “It's a little too early to tell if I can do that or not. But I think it's something that I can shoot for. And the fact I'm even thinking about it is because of Brian.”
That is quite an impact, quite a legacy. It's quite a compliment.
Mckeever, as his eyesight worsened and he battled mononucleosis in his first season at the senior national level, admittedly wondered about his future in cross-county skiing. He had invested so much time and effort already that he figured he owed it to himself to carry on, moving to Canmore for easier access to training facilities.
He remembers telling Robin, “I think I'm going to continue as long as it's safe.” The brothers, six years apart in age, now credit their tight bond to their teamwork in a competitive setting.
“You have these knee-jerk reaction to diagnosis,” Mckeever said. “You think your life is going to change in all these massive ways — `Oh, it's going to be so different. Tomorrow is going to be so different than yesterday because of what happened today.' And of course, that's not really the case.
“I think we see bigger things than our real in those situations, and I think that's normal. We don't know what it will be like, so we concoct these scenarios in our heads. Looking back on it now, I mean, how much has really changed?”
What changed … what he changed … is Canada's Paralympic record book. Asked what he's proven in a career that has spanned two-plus decades, Mckeever ponders the question and offers a powerful answer.
“I think that disability, at least in traditional terms, is kind of meaningless,” he said. “What
I've seen with myself and with my teammates and at the highest level of Paralympic sport is that not a single one of those guys has a disability. They are some of the most able people you have ever met.
“So what, somebody rolls up in a wheelchair … The more you're around that and realize what these people are doing and the amount of dedication and effort and desire they have and the way that they live their lives to the fullest, you quickly stop seeing the disabilities. You see the people.
“It's not about ability/disability. It's just about living your life.”