Olympic ski queen from 1960 among sports dinner honorees
Heggtveit-hamilton among guests to be feted at ceremony
Anne Heggtveit-Hamilton didn’t ski last season — recovering from knee-replacement surgery ended her 71-year streak on the slopes.
This year the other knee is acting up, and she doesn’t want to miss her grandson’s university graduation in May.
“It’s nice to get on the mountain, but skiing for sport, in the way that I did it, those days are gone,” Heggtveit-Hamilton says with a chuckle during a telephone interview from her home in Vermont.
‘It’s nice at this stage of the game that it’s considered worthy of having me there’ ANNE HEGGTVEIT-HAMILTON
Olympic skier
Vermont is where Heggtveit-and her husband, Ross Hamilton, have lived since 1979, but Ottawa was where she was born and raised before becoming an international sports celebrity and where she received three female athlete of the year awards at the Associated Canadian Travellers (ACT) Sportsmen’s Dinner.
The first such award was presented in 1954, when Anne Heggtveit was just 15, so it makes sense that she will be the 1950s representative for a special collection of athletes who will be celebrated to mark the 60th anniversary of the event now known as the Ottawa Sports Awards.
Others to be feted at Wednesday evening’s ceremony at Algonquin College are former ski jump champion Pat Morris (1960s), Takahashi family members who won a combined 23 Ottawa Sports Awards (1970s), Olympic gold medal pistol shooter Linda Thom (1980s), sprinter and Olympic gold medal relay team member Glenroy Gilbert (1990s) and four-time Olympic speedskating medallist Kristina Groves (2000s)
As well, four lifetime achievement awards will be presented, as will top athlete, coach and team awards for both male and female athletes, and the area’s top athletes in more than 60 sports will also be recognized.
“It’s nice at this stage of the game that it’s considered worthy of having me there,” says Heggtveit-Hamilton, who remembers the ACT awards dinners she attended a half-century and more ago, and that somewhere at home she has a photo of herself with baseball icon Jackie Robinson, the guest speaker in 1957.
Nine years earlier, when she herself was only nine, Heggtveit was among the thousands who stood along Ottawa streets to watch a parade marking the triumphant return of 1948 Olympic figure skating champion Barbara Ann Scott.
Six years later, Heggtveit stunned the ski world when she became the youngest ever winner of the famed Holmenkollen alpine giant slalom race, and in 1960 there was a hero’s welcome in her hometown for the 21-year-old who had claimed Canada’s first Olympic ski gold medal in the slalom race of the Winter Games at Squaw Valley, Calif.
The accomplishment also helped earn Heggtveit the Lou Marsh Award as Canada’s top athlete for 1960.
There are still some family members in the national capital region so Heggtveit-Hamilton does occasionally visit her hometown. This time, she wants to make sure she visits the Barbara Ann Scott Gallery in the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame at City Hall, partly because she’s in the process of trying to figure out what to do with her own artifacts and would like them to be kept in the Ottawa area.