RIDING HIGH
Curt Harnett on his sweet city bike, his Thunder Thighs and Ben Johnson
It is a great bicycle to have in the city, Curt Harnett was saying, proudly listing the accessories on his rebuilt Schwinn Cruiser Deluxe. It only has one gear, the handlebar is rusting and he does not bother storing it inside for the winter: “I’m not going to go ride the Tour de France with it, but it’s built to have the living sh-- kicked out of it.”
Harnett, the four-time Olympian and three-time Olympic medal winner in cycling, will be 50 years old in May. He was still sweating as he arrived at an appointment recently, the result of riding his vintage bicycle through busy downtown Toronto streets, quietly racing the other cyclists on the road.
“If you’ve ever spent time with me, you would recognize that I don’t follow very well,” he said with a smile. “I don’t like to follow.”
Harnett will be a leader this summer, serving as chef de mission for the Canadian team at the Pan American Games. It will be a sprawling endeavour, with venues sprinkled across southern Ontario. Several of those venues are brand new, because of the Games, which is what organizers highlight when discussing the cost — a budget of about $2.57-billion.
Harnett has been a fixture in Canadian amateur sports for more than 30 years, after giving up on hockey to focus on cycling. He won a silver medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Games and added a pair of bronze medals in sprinting, one from the 1992 Games in Barcelona, and another from the 1996 Games in Atlanta.
Known for his flowing blond hair — and a famous shampoo commercial — Harnett is volunteering his time to the Pan Am Games, but he is working fulltime hours trying to promote their benefits. The Games open in July.
On a clear, cool afternoon a few months before the show opens, Harnett took time to field 20 Questions from National Post, talking about shaved legs, the lingering spectre of Ben Johnson and the Thunder Thighs from Thunder Bay.
1. I’m a general manager in the Ontario Hockey League looking to pick up a centre with my 10th-round pick in the 1982 draft: Have any suggestions?
CH I’d avoid that Harnett kid. He’s got wheels, but I really think his passion is elsewhere.
2. Pat LaFontaine went in that draft. So did Bob Probert. Against whom would a 16-year-old Curt Harnett have fared better?
CH Uh, LaFontaine, definitely. To be brutally honest, one of the reasons why I decided to pursue the cycling route over the hockey route was I found out that I was a cyclist and not a fighter.
3. Which hockey player do you think would best represent the way you rode on the bike?
CH Oh, Gordie Howe. I hate the phrasing ‘do what it takes.’ The type of cycling that I did was a bit of a battle.
4. You won your first Olympic medal in 1984, in the now-discontinued 1,000-metre time trial. Describe how one’s legs feel after 1,000 metres of sprinting.
CH In a short answer, when you get off your bike, you can’t stand up. Normally, your coach has to catch you. You come to the side of the track, you get unstrapped and normally you fall to the ground and sit to the side of your bike until you can recover and get yourself back up on your feet.
5. Shaved legs? CH Absolutely. Shaved legs, you know what the funny thing is? The common misnomer is that it’s aerodynamics. And it’s not. Its main purpose is twofold: One, massage therapy was a common occurrence. Massage therapy on big, wiry-haired, Brillo pad legs can be uncomfortable both for the massage therapist and the receiver of said massage. The second element is cycling and crashing and bandages. It helped keep the bandages on the wound for the short term and kept the wound cleaner.
6. Everyone has a nickname, give me yours. CH I have a variety. My earliest nickname as a kid was ‘Crash,’ Crash Harnett. You name it, I crashed it. As I grew, I got various camps that built nicknames for me. My cycling nickname was ‘Der Weisse Hai,’ which is ‘The White Shark’ in German. And when I first heard that nickname, I was like, ‘Wow, The White Shark, yeah, man, that’s pretty cool that my competitors think I’m ruthless.’ And that was only to find out the reason they called me ‘The White Shark’ was because I had this riding style. My riding style was quad-heavy versus hamstrings, a smoother riding style. So that caused a bit of a mash, and when I mashed my pedals, I had this shark-like movement along the track, which was less than efficient.
7. Didn’t I read something about “Thunder Thighs from Thunder Bay?” CH Eh, come on, that rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it? I mean, look, you got excited. I saw the hair stand up on your arms you got so excited. Thunder Thighs from Thunder Bay. That’s where the stadium entertainment approach to match sprinting came in. (Uses dramatic voice of a public address announcer) ‘Curt Harnett, Thunder Thighs from Thunder Bay.’
8. In 1992, it was reported your thighs measured 27 inches in diameter: How does one go about buying a pair of jeans for legs like that? CH The athletic fit out there is something I still search for, even though it’s 20-odd years later and atrophy has obviously set in. It’s one of those things where I was blessed with a friend whose father was in the men’s clothing retail business. So we’d always buy jeans four or five sizes too big and have the waist taken in. To this day, the pants still have to be a couple of sizes too big, especially with this new fad of skinny jeans. I don’t get it at all, man. (laughs) The thigh portion of a skinny jean barely fits over my calves.
9. Given your sport, your 27-inch thighs and the fact you once shared a strength coach in common with Ben Johnson, how strong was the lure of steroids? CH You know what? It’s an interesting question. I had an encounter once in my career where there was this conversation, and it was just never something I considered. To me, sport was about being the best Curt that Curt could be. It was also about taking on the world and trying to be the best in the world, but it wasn’t at all costs. And to me, it’s either going to come out in the wash at some point in time that you did it, or you lose self-respect. Because as you mature, you go, ‘Why did I do that?’
10. Should Canadians ever forgive Ben? CH Should they? (pauses for five seconds) The issue that Ben has in front of him is he went through the one experience, got caught, paid the price for it and, unfortunately, just didn’t learn from that lesson. I’ve seen Ben since. Ben’s actions impacted — I’ll put it bluntly — the earning potential of maybe what I had as an athlete. It’s one of those things where I think we’re coming out of that, where I think the corporate community is starting to get more engaged, and Canadians are starting to sort of embrace high-performance, Olympic-level sport again. I just really think it’s an individual decision to forgive somebody.
11. You competed in four Olympics: How often did you race against someone you knew or suspected was on performanceenhancers? CH (thinks for five seconds) I don’t know. And that’s an honest answer to that question. If I felt I could be competitive in that field, and competitive at that level without it, why can’t anybody else? I will still say to this day, any time I got beat, I got beat by a better rider … I never showed up at the start line thinking I couldn’t win a race.
12. Why does cycling seem to have produced so many of the most famous drug cheats? CH Well, I think there’s more famous ones in baseball, but that’s where you and I could probably sit in the local pub and have a beer over that one. There’s many factors at play as to why cycling has come out as it has. Some of them would be speculation and probably not my place to comment publicly on. But it is a sport that recognized there was an issue that needed to be rectified. It was the first professional sport to institute the testing that paralleled, if not exceeded (World Anti-Doping Agency) standards. It really, I feel, made an effort to eradicate, at least to the extreme cases, the issues it was having.
13. What should someone do if their hair is a “sweaty, tangled mess?” CH You know, there’s these great shampoos called ‘two-inones,’ where you get shampoo and conditioner as one. I’ve tried many two-in-ones, but to me, Pert Plus is the best.
14. How much time do you spend on your hair in the morning? CH Uh, does it look like a lot? (laughs) The beauty of long hair is that it becomes less maintenance, I believe. I’ve had short hair, and I’ve found short hair to need more maintenance than the long hair. Of course, using quality shampoo is necessary. Secondly, the long hair came to be for me because the only person who ever cut my hair was my mother. And I would travel for great periods of time and go without a haircut. I didn’t even know what it meant to walk into a barber or a hair salon or anything like that. So long hair just became a natural thing to have.
15. Why don’t we see more Olympians doing more commercials in Canada? CH That is a pretty fair question. I think the broader answer to that is the globalization of the world’s marketing campaigns. We do see athletes who are a part of commercials, and the head office makes the decisions on that athlete. My era was one where local companies had a little more say in the regional use. I do believe that momentum has shifted more to our side and that we will start seeing more use of our athletes in our commercials.
16. You will be chef de mission for the Canadian team at the Pan American Games this summer: Give me chef Harnett’s specialty in the kitchen. CH I make this potato casserole, but we call it Harnett Potatoes. And it was something my mother created, where it’s simply potatoes, onions, garlic powder and butter roasted in the oven for an hour-and-ahalf. And it’s absolutely fabulous. Pair that up with a steak, expertly grilled. My lemon chicken is awesome.
17. After years of reading reports about the cost of the Games — more than $380,000 has been spent just to develop the mascot, Pachi — how do you think Torontonians will react when they actually begin this summer? CH I think Torontonians are already reacting very positively about this. Let’s think about the 60,000 volunteers who have lined up, and they only needed 24,000. The demand for tickets is strong. I walk the street every day, people know me as the ‘Pan Am Guy.’
18. I can only get tickets to one event, where should I … CH (cuts in) Men’s match sprint cycling at the velodrome, which I believe is the 13th or 14th of July. There is no bad ticket.
19 You won a gold medal at the 1987 Pan Am Games in Indianapolis: Where is it now? CH It’s actually in my parents’ curio cabinet back in Winnipeg. If you were to ask me today even where my Olympic medals are … I’m actually pausing (to think) right now … we have a kitchen cupboard that becomes a multipurpose cupboard, and that’s where the medals are now. Always fun to have available for people to touch and feel and experience. That’s where there true value is. 20. Complete the following sentence: Old cyclists never die, they just … CH They just keep on cycling, man.