Winterland who’s who cool under fire
To celebrate our country’s birthday, the Star is showcasing 150 of the quintessential Canadian sporting characters and moments of the last 150 years. In the seventh of a 10-part series, we highlight Canada’s winter sports stars:
Crosby golden goal
The country had basically come to a standstill on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010, homes and restaurants, bars and public gathering places all packed with fans riveted to Olympic drama.
It was the final day of the Vancouver Games, a fortnight of Canadian celebration that had shown the world how well we could host one of the premier sporting events on Earth.
But to so many of us, generations who had been brought up on hockey and taught that it was “our game,” the party couldn’t be complete until the men’s gold medal had been decided.
It would be our shining moment, we hoped, the coup de grace of the Games: Canada vs. the United States for gold, for bragging rights, for national pride. A week earlier in the preliminary round, the Americans had beaten Canada 5-3, putting even more pressure on the home side. And it was left to a singular star to send the country into a paroxysm of joy.
Sidney Crosby, the somewhat unassuming Atlantic Canadian who had emerged as one of the best players in the NHL, took a pass from Jarome Iginla and deposited a shot behind American goaltender Ryan Miller at 7:40 of overtime to conclude one of the most epically emotional games in the sport’s history.
“Guys like that find a way,” was how Crosby’s teammate, Chris Pronger, put it.
The goal wasn’t exactly Paul Henderson’s Summit Series winner because the undercurrent of Canada-Russia wasn’t a factor at the Vancouver Games, but it was close. The Americans had become one of Canada’s greatest rivals, there was the pressure of being at home and the sheer significance of a gold-medal game in sudden-death overtime. And exultation across the country.
“I’ve always been proud to be a Canadian,” Crosby said amid the celebration. “It doesn’t have to mean going to an Olympics. You could see the passion tonight, the passion for hockey, but also everything in general. I’m proud to represent that.”
Barbara Ann Scott
She was the nation’s first sporting sweetheart. Scott’s gold medal at the 1948 St. Moritz Olympics was Canada’s first individual gold at a Winter Games and no Canadian has claimed that figure skating title since. The public loved her. And while much of the coverage in Scott’s day described her as a pretty doll — the Reliable Toy Company even made one in her image — and emphasized her beauty and grace, it was her athleticism that changed the sport forever. At age 9, she was training for hours every day; at 13, she became the first woman to land the double Lutz in competition; and in 1948, at the Olympics on an outdoor rink full of potholes and slush, she revised her fourminute program, ending with three double salchows to emerge victorious. She set the standard for generations of female skaters to come.
Nancy Greene
She grew up on the hills of Rossland, B.C., but didn’t start serious competitive skiing until she was 14. After agreeing to be a last-minute fill-in at the Canadian junior championships, she landed on the podium — twice. Her strength — she was one of the first female skiers to do extensive weight training — and aggressive racing style earned her the nickname Tiger and set her apart. She was so dominant that she won the 1967 overall title even though she skipped three World Cups in Europe to boost the domestic race scene by competing in Canada. At the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France, she won gold in giant slalom in spectacular fashion, finishing more than 2.6 seconds ahead of the silver medallist — a margin so wide she was jokingly accused of breaking the clock, which took several seconds to display her astonishing time — and also captured a silver in slalom.
1964 bobsled team
There was no bobsled program, not even a single track in the entire country to train on, but that didn’t stop a group of young Canadian men from turning up at the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics believing they belonged with the best in the world.
Spectators expected a joke but the four-man squad — brothers Vic and John Emery, Douglas Anakin and Peter Kirby — showed them what could be accomplished with determination, infrequent trips to the track in Lake Placid, N.Y., and countless dry runs in a Montreal gymnasium. The underdog Canadians upset the European favourites to win Olympic gold in the fourman event — Canada’s only gold during those Games. Labelled ski bums, they were in fact: a Harvard MBA, a plastic surgeon, a geologist and a teacher. All of them well-rounded sportsmen. Vic Emery, the pilot, along with brakeman Kirby and two newcomers won the world championship the following year in St. Moritz, proving their Olympic gold was no fluke, and helped pave the way for the development of a national bobsledding program.
Hayley Wickenheiser
Her sporting idols were Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier, but her national team career — 1994 to 2017 — helped a generation of girls grow up with a female hockey role model. Wickenheiser started playing hockey on the backyard rink her father built in Shaunavon, Sask., and by 15 was good enough to play on the national team. She amassed five Olympic medals, including four consecutive gold ones, and is the all-time leader in goals, assists and points for women’s hockey at the Olympic level. And with all that she still managed to play softball for Canada at the 2000 Sydney Games, making her one of the few Summer and Winter Olympians. In 2003, Wickenheiser also became the first woman to score a goal in a men’s professional league, in Finland.
1920 Winnipeg Falcons win
It truly was hybrid scheduling that resulted in the Allan Cupwinning Falcons capturing the first Olympic men’s ice hockey gold medal. Hockey and figure skating were actually part of the Summer Games program, but the competitions were held in late April in Antwerp, Belgium, so there could be suitable ice conditions. It probably wouldn’t have mattered, though. The Falcons rolled past the opposition, beating Czechoslovakia (15-0), the United States (2-0) and Sweden (12-1) en route to the gold medal. And in the hyperbolic media times of the day, they were heralded by the Toronto Globe as having the “gallantry of Canadian troops on Belgian soil in the defense of Ypres in the Great War.”
Crazy Canucks
They burst onto the scene in the mid-1970s, taking on the storied European mountains seemingly with reckless abandon and put Canadian men’s skiing where it have never been before: the podium. Ken Read started things off with his 1975 historymaking World Cup downhill win in Val d’Isere — the first by a North American man. But that’s not all. Canadians covered the scoreboard with Dave Irwin, Jim Hunter and Steve Podborski also cracking the top 10. The Crazy Canucks label, bestowed by European press, was meant dismissively but for nearly a decade their wins kept coming. Canadian men won the Hahnenkamm downhill, the Super Bowl of speed skiing, for four consecutive years and amassed more than 100 top-10 World Cup results. They weren’t just the Cinderella story of athletes with few resources finding sudden success. They made it happen, working as a team while sharing information, strategies and a minuscule budget.
Jennifer Jones
The Olympic Games bring together the best athletes and teams in the world and to simply get there is a true measure of excellence. How about get there and run the table? It had never been done until Jones and her Winnipeg rink took to the ice in Sochi in 2014 and beat every team in their way on their march to the gold medal. Jones and her team — third Kaitlyn Lawes, second Jill Officer, lead Dawn McEwen and alternate Kirsten Wall — went 9-0 in the round-robin, beat Britain in the semifinals and Sweden to win the gold, marking the first time a Canadian women’s team had gone undefeated at a worlds or Olympic Games.
Gaetan Boucher
Not only was Boucher’s Olympic speed-skating career one of the best in Canadian sports history. It was one of the longest as well. The native of Charlesbourg, Que., now 59 years old, competed for Canada at the Winter Games in 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988, finishing as one of the country’s most decorated Olympians as well as the first Canadian man to win an individual gold at a Winter Games. In Sarajevo in 1984, after serving as the Canadian flagbearer for the opening ceremonies, Boucher won gold medals in the 1,000- and 1,500-metre races and a bronze in the 500. Until skater Cindy Klassen won five medals in 2006, Boucher held the Canadian record for most in a single Games.
Howie Morenz
Such a tragic end to such a wonderful career. Considered by some historians to be the first legitimate NHL superstar, the Ontario-born speedster known as the Stratford Streak and Mitchell Meteor was a wizard with the puck and a crippling bodychecker. He won three Stanley Cups and three most valuable player awards with the Montreal Canadiens before tragedy struck. Three days after suffering a gruesome compound fracture of his left leg, Morenz died in a Montreal hospital. More than 50,000 fans filed past his casket during a funeral ceremony at the Forum to pay their respects, while thousands more across the country listened to a live radio broadcast. The Canadiens later retired his No. 7 jersey.
Firth sisters
Shirley and Sharon Firth utterly dominated cross-country skiing in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, winning 48 national titles between them and representing Canada at four consecutive Olympic Games. The twin sisters were members of the Gwich’in First Nations and grew up north of the Arctic Circle near Inuvik, N.W.T., one of the most remote places on earth. They were raised in a traditional hunting-and-trapping family who lived off the land, and that served them well when they were introduced to skiing for the first time at 12. In the winters, they trained in complete darkness and horrendously cold temperatures; in the summers, they ran across the tundra battling their own fatigue and swarms of mosquitoes. Their skill and determination was so great that they were members of Canada’s cross-country team for 17 consecutive years, and in 1972 they were named to Canada’s first women’s Olympic crosscountry team.
Manon Rheaume
The goaltender was a trailblazer as a young girl, the first to take part in Quebec’s prestigious international peewee tournament, and she continued unabated for decades. The native of Lac-Beauport, Que., now 45, is best remembered as the first woman to ever play for an NHL team, suiting up for a period of an exhibition game in 1992 for the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning, allowing two goals on nine shots against the St. Louis Blues. It wasn’t a one-off publicity stunt, though, as Rheaume went on to play five seasons of minor league hockey with seven teams covering 24 games. She was also a gold medal winner with Canada at the 1992 and 1994 women’s world championships and part of the silver-medal team at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. And lineage? Her son Dylan St. Cyr was on the American team that won gold at the 2017 world under-18 championship.
Lela Brooks
How dominant was Canada’s first true speed-skating star? If they held a race any time from 1921 to 1935 — sprints and long distances, indoors or out — chances are the Toronto-born Brooks won it. In that span, the woman dubbed the Queen of the Blades won every speed-skating title available to women, from provincial to international levels and continually shattered world records. She had no formal training and hardly needed it. Her style was to explode from the start and let her stamina carry her to victory. The only thing to elude Brooks, who died in 1990 at 82 years of age, was an Olympic medal. She didn’t make the podium at the 1932 Games and, after being named to the 1936 team, decided to forego the Olympics to retire and get married.
Kaillie Humphries and Heather Moyse
Just before their final history-making run to back-to-back Olympic gold medals in women’s bobsled, Moyse said two words to Humphries: “It’s possible.” And, with Humphries driving and Moyse on the back of her sled, anything was possible. Humphries was a relative unknown when she won with Moyse at the 2010 Vancouver Games, and winning four years later at the 2014 Sochi Olympics was an even harder proposition as they carried heavy expectations to an unfamiliar track. Their success wasn’t limited to those victories. Humphries became the first to break the gender barrier by competing against men in a four-man sled at the world championships in 2014, while Moyse competed for Canada at the Rugby World Cup and is a member of the World Rugby Hall of Fame.
Hans Gatt
It’s hard to imagine a winter sport more suited to Canada’s vast northern landscapes than what Gatt does so successfully with his sled dogs. Four times he left Fairbanks, Alaska — racing over frozen rivers, brutal mountain ranges and through isolated villages for 1,600 kilometres — and arrived in his hometown of Whitehorse, Yukon, before anyone else. Those Yukon Quest races (2002-04, 2010) took nine to 11 days in temperatures that dropped as low as -50C along a course that honours the historic transportation routes of the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush. Gatt has also posted five top-10 results, including second place in 2010, in the better known but less extreme Iditarod race. Sled dog racing is the original extreme winter sport and for Gatt, who started mushing in 1988, three decades at it hasn’t changed his love of the dogs, the challenge and the great Canadian wilderness.