Cross-country skiers groomed in Whitehorse
Canada names 11-member team, along with alpine selections for Winter Games
Knute Johnsgaard freely admits he loves to brag about all things Yukon, even traits he cannot easily explain.
“It’s one of those statistics that almost doesn’t make sense,” he said.
As it turns out, he’s correct. Canada’s 11-member crosscountry ski team, named Monday, has plenty of experience and podium dreams.
“Three of those, or 30 per cent, come from a town that makes up something like .07 per cent of the country’s population. It’s just crazy,” Johnsgaard said.
Cross Country Canada nominated 11 athletes to the Olympic team on Monday, and three of them hail from Whitehorse: Johnsgaard, Dahria Beatty and Emily Nishikawa. Almost 30 per cent of that Olympic team comes from a rather remote place with a population of around 25,000. And all three sharpened their skill sets and bolstered their aerobic capacity as members of the Whitehorse Cross Country Ski Club.
The seven men and four women named to the Olympic squad will be looking to put Canada back on the podium for the first time since 2006, when Chandra Crawford skied to gold and the team of Beckie Scott and Sara Renner claimed silver.
The men’s team will be led by Olympic veterans Alex Harvey (Saint-Ferreol-les-Neiges, Que.), Devon Kershaw (Sudbury, Ont.) and Len Valjas (Toronto), who challenged for medals in Vancouver. Also back for another Games are Jesse Cockney (Yellowknife) and Graeme Killick (Fort McMurray, Alta.). The only returning veteran on the women’s side is Nishikawa.
The Olympic rookies are Johnsgaard and Beatty, Cendrine Browne (Saint-Jerome, Que.), Anne-Marie Comeau (SaintFerreol-les-Neiges) and Russell Kennedy of Canmore, Alta.
As for the Whitehorse Cross Country Ski Club, it’s among the largest clubs in Canada, with more than 1,300 members, all of whom get an early jump on the ski season every fall. They have 700 kilometres of groomed trails at their disposal.
The program’s storied history dates back to the 1970s. It has had a paid head coach longer than perhaps any other club in the country and it hosted Canada’s first cross-country skiing World Cup in 1981.
A strong club and supportive community certainly play a part in sending any athlete to an Olympics. Alain Masson has been head coach in Whitehorse since 1995. A former national team member and Olympian, he knows how to transform talented kids into elite-level racers. And he knows he’s in a great spot to keep doing it.
“We have so many advantages. Our club is five minutes from downtown, easily accessible to kids. They can take a school bus, they can take transit,” Masson said. “We start training right after school. We have multiple programs, we have a really strong coaching community, we have 30 volunteer coaches running all these programs, a long ski season, the terrain is fantastic, and it’s all right there, accessible for everyone.
“The club has had great support from the community, the territorial government, and the ski community in terms of hosting events and having volunteers. We have everything you need to produce skiers.”
And they have done just that. Johnsgaard tried hockey and soccer, but gravitated to endurance sports like biking and eventually decided skiing offered him the greatest opportunity.
“I saw skiing as the sport that could take me places, something I could make a name for myself in. Once I began ski training full time it demanded my full attention and any other sport got pushed to the side as things I would do just for fun.”
Those other sports aren’t going to be pushed aside in Whitehorse much longer. The Canada Winter Games of 2007 funnelled federal funds into the sport community and left a valuable legacy, the Canada Games Centre.
It boasts an Olympic-sized pool, a track and Olympic-sized hockey rinks.
“When I came here there were four, five sports that had structure, programs and leadership that could take kids to a national level,” Masson said. “That has more than doubled.”
ALPINE SKI TEAM NAMED
Four-time Olympians Erik Guay and Manuel Osborne-Paradis will lead Canada’s alpine ski team at the Pyeongchang Games.
Guay, a 36-year-old from Montreal, is the country’s most accomplished alpine skier with 25 World Cup podium finishes, and three world championship medals. He captured gold in the super-G at last year’s world championships, where OsborneParadis, from Invermere, B.C., won bronze.
There was concern about Guay’s health after he revealed earlier this month he had a ruptured disc in his back, and would skip a couple World Cup events to return home to recover.
Canada, which named its 14-member team Monday, has won 11 Olympic medals in alpine skiing — including four gold — since the sport’s Olympic debut in 1936.
Pyeongchang will mark the debut of the team event, in which Canada claimed silver at the 2015 world championships.
Other team members are Toronto’s Philip Brown, Dustin Cook of Lac-Sainte-Marie, Que., Toronto’s Jack Crawford, Calgary’s Trevor Philp and Erik Read, Broderick Thompson of Whistler, B.C., Benjamin Thomsen of Invermere, Toronto’s Candace Crawford, Valerie Grenier of Mont-Tremblant, Que., Erin Mielzynski of Guelph, Ont., Toronto’s Roni Remme and Laurence St-Germain of SaintFerreol-les-Neiges.