Nordic skiers set their sights on Olympics
Athletes from the north want to blaze a path to the Olympics
The staccato swickLA RONGE swick-swick sound of skis hitting snow speeds up as Timothy Ratt shortens his stride to take a tight turn around a pylon.
The 12-year-old leans forward, using his arms and legs to power himself ahead. He shifts his weight gracefully from foot to foot. He makes it look easy.
It was just three years ago that the youth from the northern Saskatchewan community of Sucker River first hopped on skis. He was drawn to the sport because many of his friends were playing around with it, and he stuck with it after most of them quit. He was getting good and realized that if he kept pushing, kept practising, skiing could open doors for him to explore the world beyond Sucker River.
It’s already happening. Earlier this year, community members fundraised to send Ratt and a teammate to a skiing training camp at Lake Louise in Alberta’s Banff National Park. It was Ratt’s first time out of the province and he hopes not the last; the young athlete already has dreams of competing in the Olympics.
“Then there will be a bunch of people calling my name and I’ll be more motivated,” Ratt says. “(The community) would probably be pretty proud of me because no one ever went to the Olympics from Sucker River.”
Northern Saskatchewan is a rich playground for cross-country skiers. Winters are long, snow is plentiful, the terrain is varied and beautiful. Many schools in the area have cross-country ski equipment and most students have opportunities to try the sport. But while some athletes from La Ronge have competed for Team Saskatchewan at the Canadian Ski Nationals, none has ever represented Canada at the Olympics.
Sally Venne, a retired principal who runs the Sucker River ski team, says it doesn’t surprise her.
“There hasn’t been the coaching,” the lifelong skier says. “Most of the schools are just letting the kids use the skis rather than ac- tually coaching them and taking them to races.”
Sucker River, a community within the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, is located on the shores of Lac La Ronge, about 270 kilometres north of Prince Albert. Venne started a ski club there in the 1990s; it began a recreational group that got kids playing on skis and participating in the occasional competition.
Then, about 10 years ago, two of her young skiers approached her after they failed — again — to make it to the podium.
“Why do the kids with the suits always win?” the boys asked her, referring to their competitors’ skin-tight racing outfits.
A bemused Venne told the skiers it was the athletes’ training, not their clothes, that made them fast. She told the boys that if they were prepared to do more training she would support them and make sure they got to races.
Venne began driving the boys to the Don Allen ski trails, about 10 kilometres south of Sucker River, two times a week so they could train with the La Ronge Nordic Team. As soon as they started training regularly, their performance improved and it wasn’t long before other skiers took notice.
“They thought it was really cool that the boys were going out and practising twice a week and all of a sudden were good skiers,” Venne said.
Other kids clamoured to be part of Venne’s competitive team and the former principal did her best to help everyone who was prepared to put in the work. Today, she continues to drive athletes to races and two practices a week. She keeps an eye out for discounted winter clothing and has a stash on hand for her young athletes so their clothes aren’t a barrier to their training. She applies for grants and organizes fundraisers so the kids can attend training camps and competitions and have access to good-quality equipment.
Her work is paying off. Sucker River skiers — including young Timothy Ratt — have become a force to be reckoned with in Saskatchewan. They even have racing suits.
But Venne worries about what will happen when she can no longer support the ski team. Poverty is a problem in the First Nation community and, although skiing is a relatively inexpensive sport, many families are not able to get their children to practices and competitions without help.
Venne knows that if no one is prepared to drive and clothe young athletes, competitive skiing in the community simply won’t happen.
“If you’re dealing with a culture of poverty, that’s always an issue. Always,” she says.
Simon Bird, director of education for the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, says he’s grateful Venne has invested so much time and energy in the Sucker River ski team. While having kids ski for fun is good, young people need to be able to go further in the sport if they want to, he says.
“It’s very important to be able to have your youth see an end goal,” he said. “For a lot of our youth, they do want to see the competitions. It brings a lot of pride to the communities and the families when they see that. And it’s also offered in many of our provincial schools. So why shouldn’t our First Nations athletes compete at those same levels with the same opportunities?”
Venne organizes the Sucker River ski team on a volunteer basis. Bird says he wishes more re- sources were in place to support her and others who want to work with young athletes, but money is a perpetual challenge.
Schools on reserves receive less funding than provincially funded schools, which means teachers are called on to do more with less and don’t always have time to devote to extracurricular activities. It’s also difficult to attract and retain teachers with specialized skills, such as coaching.
“Sports require a foundation of consistency and human resources and we do not have a consistent working environment for quality coaches. They move on to find stability for their lives and their families,” Bird says.
Stanley Mission — a community within the Lac La Ronge Indian Band — was the powerhouse of skiing in northern Saskatchewan when Bird was growing up because there were excellent coaches in the area at the time. But the coaches left and the ski team stopped winning.
“A lot of those coaches that do come, they do get recruited by other schools that have a lot more to offer and so the quality of the programs is immediately noticeable in the absence of somebody that’s passionate in the sport,” Bird says.
But he’s optimistic things will change. If the Lac La Ronge Indian Band is to put resources into recruiting a top-level coach, it makes sense to look for someone who knows cross-country skiing, given that the community is a skiing mecca.
“It’s something that’s just outside our front steps in the wintertime,” Bird says. “We need to utilize our immediate resources that we have readily available.”
Bird and Venne are convinced La Ronge can be a training ground for future skiing Olympians, but they say youth need proof that Olympic dreams are possible in order to be motivated to put in the work. There aren’t many Indigenous Olympic athletes kids can look up to; in Venne’s words, becoming an elite athlete is simply “not something that’s in their realm of experience.”
In an effort to inspire the community’s young people, Bird and Venne were among those who arranged to have four-time crosscountry ski Olympian Sharon Firth and her former coach, Anders Lenes, tour La Ronge this spring.
Firth is a member of the Gwich’in First Nation in the Northwest Territories and learned how to ski when she was a student at a residential school in Inuvik in the 1960s. She and her twin sister, the late Shirley Firth, were trained through the now-defunct Territorial Experimental Ski Training (TEST) Program, which brought ski coaches to Inuvik to teach Indigenous children to ski competitively. Athletes who showed the most potential were given opportunities to travel and compete.
Sharon, now 64, told students in La Ronge that her childhood spent on a trapline prepared her for the rigorous training expected of TEST athletes and she was soon winning competitions.
When she started skiing, she — like the youth from La Ronge — didn’t have access to big arenas or training facilities; she and her sister ran and skied outside and did strength training on equipment they made themselves.
Her success wasn’t because of the resources she had access to, but because of the work she put into her training, she said.
“There’s not a lazy bone in my body,” she told kids.
The Firths eventually moved to Banff to train full time at the Canmore Nordic Centre and represented Canada in four Winter Olympics. They remain the only Indigenous women to be inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.
“We proved it to ourselves and to the world that native people can do something with their lives,” Firth told students during a classroom presentation this spring. “We never let anything get in our way.”
Venne said she hadn’t heard of Firth until the Olympian visited her community. She wishes Firth’s story was better known.
“It’s something really important to let kids know about, that you can come from a trapping background, from a small, isolated community, as long as you’re willing to get up and put the work in,” Venne said.
She believes there are many children in La Ronge who, like Firth, are predisposed to becoming great athletes simply because they have grown up on the land.
“Bush kids, kids that have spent a lot of time on traplines, are naturally more physically fit,” Venne says.
Firth’s former coach, Anders Lenes, knows potential Olympians are living in La Ronge.
“I’m convinced that among the Aboriginal community, the Canadian community, there are some tremendous talents,” he said.
“I see it. They excel faster, the kids are stronger, faster, earlier than the rest of us white people. They are. I am absolutely convinced. You see them, you go up in the community and put skis on them, the second time on skis they race already.”
When Firth and her sister were selected to compete for Canada’s first women’s cross-country ski team at the 1972 Winter Olympics, the team was predominantly made up of First Nations athletes from the Northwest Territories who had been identified and trained through the TEST program.
TEST was phased out in the 1980s. Now, without qualified coaches and structured training programs in the north, some talented athletes may go undiscovered or not receive the instruction and encouragement they need to reach their full potential, Lenes says.
Having people like Venne leading competitive teams is a good first step to making sure athletes can succeed. If every northern community has someone like her promoting cross-country skiing and supporting youth, elite athletes will be produced as a byproduct, Lenes says.
Not long ago, he explored the idea of setting up a program where coaches would travel to First Nations communities, scout out athletes who had the potential to make it to the elite level and give them the coaching they need to succeed.
He imagined athletes could alternate between spending a few weeks training at the Canmore Nordic Centre and training in their home communities — but the idea never got off the ground, largely because it involved taking children from their homes.
Bird knows that if athletes from the Lac La Ronge Indian Band are serious about skiing in the Olympics, they’ll eventually need to leave home and train at facilities like the Canmore Nordic Centre.
“But before you can move to a place that has Olympic-level athletes, you need to be able to afford where you live, you need to have that community support and you need to be feeling comfortable, like you’re among family and friends,” he says. “And I think that’s what La Ronge will definitely meet. It can definitely be a training ground for many, many future Olympians.”
Timothy Ratt, the aspiring Olympic skier from Sucker River, certainly thinks so.
Like Firth, he’s a trapline kid — and he’s convinced a summer spent on the land will help him build his strength before the ski season begins next winter.
“Water hauling — that can be a good workout. All the way from the lake to the cabin,” Ratt says. “And then there’s chopping wood.”
Ratt is keen to be the first Olympian from Lac La Ronge Indian Band. And he hopes his story will help others from Sucker River and surrounding communities realize that it doesn’t matter where you come from — as long as you work hard, you can achieve your goals.
“They’d probably try to follow my tracks or something, just to get where I will be,” he says.
“If you do that, that smacks of residential schools … and the parents, they buck at that, and rightfully so,” he said.
“Maybe the time is not ready for it quite yet. You need a trust between the Aboriginal caretakers or parents or whatever and the ones that are going to teach them how to do the sport."