OLYMPIC GLORY & THE REST OF HER STORY
Canadian ski icon and senator Nancy Greene Raine reflects on the bar she set 50 years ago as she prepares to start a new chapter in her life
Around the time she turned 50, Nancy Greene Raine suffered a serious knee injury during a celebrity ski event in California.
The damage, to her anterior cruciate ligament, was then, and remains today, a serious injury.
Soon after, back home in British Columbia, Greene Raine received a call from a friend imploring her to visit the Whistler ski club as soon as possible. “Why?” Greene asked. It seems Greene’s friend had ridden a chair lift with a young participant in Whistler’s version of the Nancy Greene Ski League. Greene’s friend asked if the youngster had met Nancy Greene, the World Cup and Olympic champion after whom that developmental program was named.
“Oh no!” the child said. “She’s dead!”
Greene Raine never found out who that child was, but the “first opportunity I got,” she said, “I went up to the club and talked to the kids and talked to the parents.”
Thus Nancy Greene Raine proved she wasn’t dead.
Today, approaching a 75th birthday on May 11, she remains a lively and immensely popular personality. She has spent the past nine years in Canada’s Senate, a post she will have to vacate upon her birthday, which will bring her to the Senate’s mandatory retirement age.
Yet it’s safe to assume her lofty profile owes much more to her accomplishments on ski slopes a full half-century ago than to her time in the parliamentary precinct.
Canada Post didn’t feature Nancy Greene Raine among the half-dozen featured figures in its Women in Winter Sports stamp series because she introduced the Child Health Protection Act or because she and husband Al Raine had been longtime promoters of Western Canadian ski tourism, first at Whistler and later at Sun Peaks, B.C.
These kinds of things happen because most Canadians think of Nancy Greene Raine as the best female skier in the world during her heyday and still one of this country ’s most successful athletes in any sport.
There have been multiple opportunities to reflect on that, and there will be more.
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the first of two consecutive World Cup overall titles; the second, obviously, is this year. February also features the 50th anniversary of Greene Raine’s Olympic silver and gold medals at Grenoble, France.
Closer to home, Greene Raine and her husband, Al, a former national team program director, will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary in 2019, one year before twin sons Willy and Charley turn 50.
“Al …” Greene Raine interjected during a recent telephone interview from the family ’s B.C. home. “Did you realize next year’s our 50th anniversary? I’d forgotten about that one.”
OK, so time may have slowed some reflexes and faded a few memories, but it can’t erode recorded accomplishments, of which there are mountains and mountains associated with Nancy Greene Raine.
For one thing, her 13 World Cup race victories — all in 1967 and ’68 — are still the most by any Canadian alpine skier. For another, of a select circle of nine Canadians with Olympic alpine ski medals, only Greene Raine and Karen Percy, who earned a pair of bronze medals at Calgary’s 1988 Games, have two.
Coincidentally, when Ottawa’s Anne Heggtveit became the first Canadian to win alpine gold in women’s slalom at Squaw Valley, Calif., in 1960, her roommate was an Ottawa-born 16-year-old named Nancy Greene.
The teen skier placed 31st in that slalom event. She was also 26th in giant slalom and 22nd in downhill.
Four years later, in the 1964 Tokyo Winter Olympics, Greene upgraded all those results to 15th in slalom, 16th in giant slalom and seventh in downhill, but still no medals.
By 1968, Nancy Greene was a World Cup overall champion shouldering great expectations even though a pre-Olympic ankle injury caused angst, and there was disappointment when the Canadian hopeful finished 10th in the Feb. 10 downhill outside Grenoble, more than two seconds behind the winning time of Austria’s Olga Pall.
Greene finally earned her first Olympic medal, silver, in women’s slalom on Feb. 13. She had the fastest time on the second run, but a first-run deficit of 1.18 seconds was too much to overcome, so she finished 0.29 seconds behind France’s Marielle Goitschl.
Two days later, though, on Feb. 15, Greene blew them all away in giant slalom. The ninth athlete out of the start gate, she crossed the finish line in 1:51.97, an eyespinning 2.64 seconds ahead of France’s Annie Famose. Bronze medallist Fernande Bochatay of Switzerland was nearly three seconds off Greene’s pace.
According to legend, Greene was so fast that she broke the timing device. In truth, the mechanism had been calibrated so anyone clocking outside a specified variance from the next closest time was checked manually before it was posted.
Either way, it was a performance for the ages, and it remains something to inspire Canadian skiers.
“I think that having had someone like her being so dominant, being from Canada, is really cool,” said Marie-Michèle Gagnon, a 28-year-old Quebecer who represented Canada in 2010 at Whistler and in 2014 at Sochi, but who will miss the 2018 Pyeongchang Games because of a knee injury. “It’s not in my lifetime, you know, but it shows it’s possible for us Canadians to be dominant in this sport.”
The Raines watch World Cup racing on television at every opportunity, and Greene Raine said she still enjoyed meeting current national team members, cognizant of how hard they worked “and how tough it is.”
“I really enjoyed the time when I was there,” she said.