Moyse, Lumsden fitting first recipients of honour
Before she won a pair Olympic bobsleigh golds for Canada, Heather Moyse studied to become a different kind of champion.
As a university student in a workplacement program more than a decade ago, she spent her days helping people overcome obstacles. On track for a career as an occupational therapist, her clients were relearning the skills most of us take for granted — walking, for instance, or picking up a toothbrush. Moyse remembers, in particular, a woman who’d lost the ability to move her fingers.
“The more I tried saying, ‘Move your fingers. Move your fingers,’ the more that neural pathway from the brain to the fingers seemed like it had been damaged,” Moyse, 35, was saying this week. “We could not move her fingers.”
It was around that moment that Moyse learned a lesson in the value of perseverance and perspective. Suddenly, she had an idea.
“I said to her, ‘I don’t want you to move your fingers. Just poke my hand,’ ” Moyse said. “All of a sudden, her fingers moved. She was just thinking about it in a different way — thinking about reaching for something instead of moving something. She started crying. I started crying. Physically, it was something so small. But it was just such a huge moment for her. It gave her a renewed sense of what’s possible.”
Moyse’s passion for embracing the struggle — both her own and that of others — is among the reasons she’s one of the inaugural recipients of the Randy Starkman Olympian Humanitarian Award. The honour, named after the Star’s late Olympic sports writer, is designed to acknowledge Canadian Olympians who are examples to their community on and off the field of play. Handed out at Friday night’s Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame induction gala in Calgary, it will be awarded biennially to a male and a female. Jesse Lumsden, the former CFL all-star who’s been a member of the Canadian bobsleigh team the past two Winter Games, is the first male recipient.
“There’s a lot of unthanked champions out there,” said Adam van Koeverden, the four-time Olympic medallist who was a member of the award’s selection committee. “This award is just meant to put a spotlight on the efforts of a couple of them, and make a bit of a spectacle out of them. Because we think it’s a great thing, what they’re doing.”
Just as Moyse owns a diverse athletic background — she was a university track champion and a Cana- dian international in rugby — she has spread her kindness globally. It was about 14 years ago, during a threeyear stint in Trinidad and Tobago, that she helped found a leadership camp for deaf and hearing impaired children. More recently, she has worked with Right to Play, the international humanitarian organization to which Lumsden has also donated time. Lumsden, 31, has twice shaved off his hair to raise money for cancer awareness. In the wake of the floods in Calgary, which he now calls home, he organized a group of athletes who spent time helping their fellow citizens to clean up the mess. “I’m not trying to paint myself out as a saint. Hey, I’ve got free time and someone asks for a little bit of help — why not?” Lumsden said. “There’s so many athletes that could be winning this award instead of me. I feel very honoured.” Both Moyse and Lumsden said the award was particularly special because it is named after Starkman, who died of pneumonia-related causes in 2012 at age 51in the midst of a stellar career as Canada’s chief chronicler of all matters Olympic. “Randy gave so much to the Olympic and amateur athlete community to help us get our stories out into the community so we could be recognized,” Lumsden said. “It should be a priority for us to give back to that community.” The award comes attached to a financial prize, at least half of which is to be gifted to a Canadian charity. Moyse said she will be directing hers to Camp Triumph, which serves children who have a family member with a disability or chronic illness. “In a lot of these families, the money goes towards equipment and wheelchairs and travelling and all of these different things,” Moyse said. “And often these families don’t have time to take holidays or vacations because they’re too busy travelling and going to hospitals. Often these are kids who are — I don’t want to say they’re forgotten, but if they’re not given the right kind of attention and support they could be the kids who seek any kind of attention. And it could be negative in terms of rebellion. If they’re given the right kind of attention and support, those will be the kids that change the world.” Lumsden, who said he is commit- ted to being a part of Canada’s contingent at the 2018 Winter Olympics, pledged his bounty to Right to Play, in part because he’s supportive of the global organization’s push to reach out to Canadian children in need.
“Right to Play is working with over a million kids right now. And the fact that some of those kids are Canadian is fantastic,” Lumsden said. “My biggest thing is you can’t fix the world if your backyard’s a mess.”
In a world full of hard choices, Moyse has made her share. She once considered attending graduate school to further her career as a therapist in the wake of missing a bronze medal at the 2006 Olympics by 5/ 100ths of a second; she ultimately opted for a few more years of gruelling training in the lead-up to the Vancouver Olympics. She and running mate Kaillie Humphries won gold there; they repeated in Sochi. And while Moyse has yet to decide on the course of her future, athletic or otherwise, all these years after her stint as a work-placement student she is still sharing lessons of perseverance and perspective as a motivational speaker.
“Right now I realize that instead of doing (occupational therapy) for one person at a time I can now stand in front of a room of people and do the exact same thing. I can inspire people to see their lives from a different perspective,” she said. “I can give people that ‘aha’ moment, and then motivate them to pursue the goals they’ve always wanted to achieve, or to discover what they see as their authentic success.”
As gifts go, it’s the kind that keeps on giving.