Speedskating passion led to Olympic races, hall of fame honours
Craig Mackay, who played shinny with Gordie Howe while growing up in Saskatoon’s Westmount area before launching a life as a worldclass speedskater, died Friday at age 92.
Mackay competed at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, skated deep into his life, and was inducted into the Speedskating Canada Hall of Fame, as well as the sports halls in both Saskatoon and Saskatchewan.
He passed his passion for speedskating on to his six children. Cam competed at world championships, and Heather is a Canadian champion.
“Dad used to pull me on a broom handle at Optimist Park,” says Heather, noting that she was on skates before she could walk. “I spent many nights getting in the car with dad after supper, driving over to old Optimist Park, and skating laps and laps. Then when we moved over to the new oval, same thing — dad would say, ‘Put in the laps; put in the laps.’ His token yell when he’d walk in was, ‘Hey hey, ho ho’ and everybody knew dad was there.”
Mackay, who was born in Banff before settling with his family in Saskatoon, started speedskating in the fall of 1942, with encouragement from sister Henrietta and local club president Clarence Downey.
He quickly showed an affinity for the sport, began assaulting the record books, and at the 1948 Olympics in St. Moritz he placed 11th in the 5,000-metre race and 13th in the 10,000.
He had identical placings at the 1952 Games in Oslo.
“I liked it,” Mackay told Ned Powers in 1991, talking about his first try at the sport. “Clarence (Downey) took me down to Wilk’s Cycle and bought me a pair of $10 skates and I was on my way. I knew I’d never get out of the province as a hockey player, and the speedskaters were already making trips to Winnipeg and Edmonton. It was a chance to travel.
“Clarence stressed miles and miles of training, and that’s one of the reasons I chose to be a distance skater. The other was that I worked for my dad in plastering, where I carried mortar and scaffolding, and that was just like the weight training people go through today. I had endurance to go the distance.”
Mackay was well known for his work ethic — “He was a ‘hard work never killed a man, thinking about it does’ sort of guy. He was a driving force,” Cam says — and that carried
into his life outside the oval.
“They used to call him the job-father with his road-building crew,” Heather says. “Parents would come to him that were having trouble with their teenage boys; they’d say, ‘Craig, hire him, and I’ll pay him out of my own pocket.’ But dad would take them on, he’d pay them, and he straightened out many a youth there, too — taught them a hard work ethic and what you had to do to get on with life.”
Mackay skated long into his life, worked as a builder, official and executive, and he went with buddy Johnny Sands — also a Saskatoonbased Olympic speedskater — to the Vancouver Games in 2010, where they had a blast.
“The time of their life,” Heather says, noting that Mackay maintained a keen interest in the Olympics, and speedskating, right to the end of his life.
When Cam stopped at a facility in Lloydminster one day many years ago with his young kids, he remarked on the high quality of the ice. Somebody there told him they received help from a man in Saskatoon, and when Cam asked who that was, the reply was “Craig Mackay.”
He died in the wee hours of Friday morning, surrounded by family.