Yukon’s northern light shines bright
LONDON — Zach Bell is a different Olympian this time around.
The 29- year- old from North Vancouver, via Yukon, has a maturity, a bearing, he didn’t possess in Beijing, the track cyclist’s first Olympics.
“For me it’s a different journey,” Bell said after Tuesday’s training session at the Olympic velodrome, nicknamed ‘ The Pringle.’ “I was one of the qualified athletes, trying to hang on for dear life. This time, hopefully I’ll be able to make things happen more on my terms.”
A two-time silver medallist in world championship competition, Bell joins two-time world champion Tara Whitten of Edmonton as Canada’s top individual threats during track events starting Friday.
That Bell is here at the summer Olympics is no surprise to him — he’s imagined nothing else since he was in high school in Watson Lake — but he was supposed to be throwing someone on a mat, not challenging him on the banked wooden track of a velodrome.
Bell was obsessed with wrestling until he experi- enced an epiphany at the start of his third year. He wasn’t keeping up, and he knew it.
“I saw the writing on the wall ... I was competitive at the high school level but at the university level I was nothing,” he said.
Bell had already dabbled in cycling as a means of cross-training, but hardly took it seriously. The idea of changing sports was traumatic.
“To me, it was like I was leaving wrestling to participate in a hobby,” Bell says.
By chance, he was invited to take part in a physiological testing program at the University of Calgary run by Dr. David Smith, a kinesiology professor who still works with Canadian high performance athletes.
Assessing Bell’s results, including his posture on a bike, Dr. Smith determined that bike racing held Bell’s future as an athlete.
For a time, Bell wasn’t sure. In his early road races, he was either getting creamed or getting disqualified.
“It was six months before I saw some things happening on the bike. It was a very tough shift, to what I was supposed to be, from what I wanted to be.”
He won a couple of road races in B.C., and it gave him confidence, paving the way for his new venture on the track.
Blessed with his father’s strong thighs, Bell was voted Canada’s top track rider by Pedal Magazine in 2006, a rapid ascent considering the decade he spent in wrestling. It’s not uncommon for Canadians to come to cycling from other disciplines. Tara Whitten was a skier.
Bell admits the more celebrated track programs compete on a different playing field, with greater resources, but the gap is closing.
Men’s head track cycling coach Richard Wooles comes from Wales, and he has convinced the Canadians they can compete against the best of Britain, reminding them that some of the sport’s biggest stars, even Sir Chris Hoy, had to grow in the sport.
“At the end of the day, it’s still the athlete versus the athlete, and that’s the beauty of sport,” Bell says. “You can’t strictly win with money in sport. At the end of the day somebody’s got to perform. And as long as we keep that in mind, then I think you’ll see those performances.”
Just reaching the Games, Bell is a huge inspiration to his hometown of Watson Lake and all of Yukon, just as a visit to Yukon by Canadian wrestler Chris Wilson, a 1992 Olympian, inspired Bell.
Bell routinely speaks to kids in the North, tells his tale of making something, urging them to avoid the usual temptations of northern life to take up sport of some kind — any kind, says Bell, athlete ambassador to the Arctic Winter Games.
“In Yukon, sport doesn’t just change the life of a kid, it can change an entire community,” he says. “No one from Yukon has won an Olympic medal. Bell figures that returning with one would be like “bringing the Stanley Cup home.”