Hamber’s golden glory one to remember
Griffins’ 4x400 senior boys relay victory captures essence of high school sports Howard Tsumura
The greatest thing about each and every season of B.C. high school sports lies in the fact that its sense of drama is never compromised by its sheer length.
From the moment that first afterschool bell rings on the Tuesday after Labour Day in September, to the time the calendar turns to June, a tapestry is woven, nine straight months in the making, each stitch holding significance in the lives of the thousands of student-athletes who take part in our inter-school competitions.
Yet there are so many sports, so many games, and so many athletes that so much of what occurs goes unreported.
Thankfully then, there are also those rare instances when the incredible happens with everyone watching, when underdogs with sheer belief defy their own history and rise to the top, their triumphs so unexpected they transcend the moment.
I was witness to just one of those last Saturday, although I am not sure there were too many others who realized not only the significance of the moment, but the incredible timing with which it arrived.
It came during the final event on the final day of the final high school championship of the season.
How perfect, I thought, that the 2014-15 season would end with a Cinderella story.
Humble history
We’re talking, of course, about the Subway B.C. high school track and field championships.
Flip open the event’s souvenir program each year, and you’re immediately struck by the rows and rows of neat type which, page after page, list the gold-medal winners of every senior boys and girls event contested since its debut in 1967.
Here’s a test: Scan those pages of results and see how many times anyone from Vancouver’s Eric Hamber Secondary, over the previous 47 years of competition heading into this past weekend’s meet, had ever won a gold medal.
If you complete the exercise properly, you’ll discover that the last time it happened was in 1976, some 39 years ago.
And if you’re looking for the first, last and only time the school has had a male winner, you have to go all the way back to the very first meet, in Canada’s Centennial year, when Mark Blaker won at the now-retired distance of 220 yards.
That was the kind of history four Hamber students — three of them high school seniors, two of them identical twins and one of them still a ninth grader — carried onto the track late Saturday afternoon for the meet’s final event, the senior boys 4x400-metre relay.
Lead Griffins runner Jee Woon Ha, ninth-grader Sam Prevost, and twin brothers Rui and Leo Ando knew they didn’t have history on their side.
Aside from Hamber’s near-four decade gold-medal drought, a team of schoolboys from a Vancouver public high school had not won this race since 1971.
“But even though we knew there were some tough, strong teams, with big coaching staffs to help them out, we weren’t going to let anything disrupt our mindset,” Leo Ando said. “I don’t think we were intimidated.”
A family of four
Track and field, from an actual competition standpoint, is an individual sport. Except in the relays.
There, in those three instances where a baton is passed from one athlete to the next, every tenet of team sport comes into play, especially trust.
In the weeks leading up to Saturday, the Griffins had done everything in their power to nurture that trust.
“We talked about track every day,” Leo began. “Even when it wasn’t track season. We’d meet at our school track three times a week, under any conditions, rain or shine. We’d even meet at 7:30 (a.m.) to practise together. We wanted firm, strong chemistry.”
That’s because the season before, they’d finished sixth at the provincial meet after earning the eighth-and-final spot coming out of the qualification heats.
“They said to me ‘Coach, we’ll win gold,’ ” Hamber coach Stacey McEachern said. “I could only take them to a certain level before their passion kicked in. I told them to just go have fun and do their best. I told them that if they did awesome, it would be an even prouder moment, and that if they wanted it, the gold could be theirs. But it was such a mental game for them. Before the meet, they were sleeping with their jerseys on.” In actuality, it went beyond that. “I borrowed my school’s baton,” began Leo Ando. “The 4x400, it’s a step-by-step process. From Grade 10 to Grade 11. From Grade 11 to Grade 12. We built chemistry together because this (race) encourages you not to give up. With the baton itself, holding it every day reminds you to work hard. I’ve even slept with it.”
A photo finish
Six schools had come into last weekend’s meet with faster qualifying times on the season than Hamber, whose mark stood at three minutes 36.01 seconds. Dover Bay of Nanaimo had the best time at 3:28.78. In the track world, that’s a massive gulf.
Yet the Griffins posted the secondbest time in Friday’s heats at 3:28.82, just a hair behind Vancouver College’s 3:28.44.
And while running the senior boys 4x400 is tough, the waiting can be just as difficult.
All competitors in the junior boys and girls, and senior boys and girls races are sequestered on the track’s infield turf, a total of 128 athletes. Saturday’s heat was sweltering, and as the final race of the day, the Hamber boys along with the rest of their foes, were left to sweat it out the longest.
The Griffins were up and down over the first two legs of the race, and when Prevost, the second man, passed the baton to Rui Ando, they sat in fourth place, their chances of even earning a medal still very much in doubt.
“But honestly, I wasn’t nervous,” Leo Ando said. “My brother has always had my back and I knew he would finish strong no matter what. He likes to chase and I like to finish.”
Call it twin telepathy, because when Rui handed off to Leo for the final leg, the Griffins were suddenly challenging at the front of the pack.
The end result? All you have to do is look at the picture of a jubilant Leo Ando, dramatically captured by UBC photographer Wilson Wong just seconds after he crossed the finish line, to know what happened.
For the record, Hamber won in a time of 3:28.20, just a fraction of a second ahead of Vancouver College (3:28.86).
“They were so excited, they seemed almost shell-shocked,” said McEachern. “Nothing like this has ever happened to Hamber before. People we didn’t even know were coming up to us after the race to talk to us about it.”
Added Leo Ando: “In Grade 10, we didn’t even make the final. We were just a bunch of average athletes who wanted to form a team and have fun. It means so much to all of us. There are no words to explain this.”
Thankfully, though, there is a picture. And if you take just a second to study the look on Leo Ando’s face, you know why high school sports matter in ways that go beyond the words.