An Inspiring Champion
In the summer of 1990, Clara Hughes went for a walk around Mount Royal. Hughes, then a teenage cyclist with Olympic dreams who was training in Hamilton, came to Montreal to watch the World Cup cycling race. Before the competition, she went out to stroll the course – and found herself in a spot that looked eerily familiar, even though she had only seen it on television before.
BY JACK TODD, SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTEDECEMBER 5, 2009
“I realized that I was going up Polytechnique hill,” she said. “Then it hit me: This is where that happened. I remember sitting there crying, feeling sick inside.
“Now I’m a female athlete and it has meant a lot to me to be able to create an example for young girls – especially in Canada, a country that supports women and young girls.
“I want to show girls that you can be big and strong. You can set your sights really high and dream really big dreams. You can do anything.” Today, 20 years after that appalling assault on women shattered this city, 19 years after the moment when she walked up the hill past the École Polytechnique, Clara Hughes has become everything a woman can be. Everything a human can be. She is an iconic Canadian figure, her mane of flaming red hair as she stood on the gold-medal podium in Turin appearing on giant scoreboards across the country when the Canadian anthem is sung before National Hockey League games.
She has won the Order of Canada and the prestigious Sport and Community Award from the IOC. She has had what is arguably the greatest career of any Canadian Olympian, winning five medals as a cyclist and long-track speedskater.
At the top of the list of her achievements as an athlete, there is this: Clara Hughes is the only athlete in Olympic history, male or female, to win multiple medals in both a summer and a winter games, with two bronze medals in cycling in the heat of Atlanta in 1996 and a gold and a silver in speedskating in Turin in 2006.
With most other athletes, that would be it. The effort and concentration required to win an Olympic medal in one sport is so all-consuming that there is little left for anything else. But Hughes is the true renaissance woman, an activist, public speaker, traveller, reader, friend.
A couple of weeks after Hughes won her gold medal in Turin, I received a postcard from Arizona. Hughes and her husband, long-distance cyclist Peter Guzman, were biking through the desert, her idea of the way to rest after the stress of the Olympics. They had been camping out when they were caught in a flash flood and soaked to the bone.
I sent her a note: “You’re an Olympic gold medalist. Get a hotel room and get out of the rain.” But if she did, Hughes wouldn’t be the woman she is. After the Salt Lake Olympics, she and Guzman biked across the Northwest Territories. She thinks that biking through the tortuous passes in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California is wonderful fun.
And she believes in giving back as much as she can. Most famously, in the giddy moments after her victory in Turin, Hughes (who is not a wealthy woman) decided to commit $10,000 to her favourite charity, Right to Play – an organization devoted to helping African children through sport.
Through it all, she has never let up on a level of training that would break most people. As a young cyclist, she once told me, if she went out for a four-hour ride and found when she returned home that she had only been out for three hours and 55 minutes, she would fly around the block until the final five minutes were up.
Today (as chronicled in these pages earlier this week) Hughes trains 11 months a year, six days a week, twice a day. Over the years she has refined her diet, learned what works for her and what doesn’t, but she has never stopped driving herself until, as a cyclist friend of hers once put it, “You go out and ride until you see Elvis.” That will to train has propelled Hughes to an international Olympic career that will come to an end in Vancouver in February. Knowing this will be the end of the line, Hughes has been saying a long goodbye this autumn.
Goodbye to Berlin, where she skated the most perfect five laps of her life – in training. Goodbye to the Viking Ship in Lillehammer, where her friend and mentor Johann Olav Koss won three gold medals in 1994.
Goodbye to Heerenveen in the Netherlands, the Mecca for speedskaters in a country where the sport is as popular as soccer, where American Olympic legend Eric Heiden had been giving her some skating tips the day we spoke by telephone in November.
She will say goodbye to the speedskating oval in Calgary, and the one in Salt Lake City where she won an astonishing bronze medal in the 5,000-metre event only two years after she went back to competitive skating after concentrating on cycling for more than a decade.
Her final farewell as an athlete will come in Vancouver Feb. 24, when Hughes will skate the 5,000-metre women’s long track event as the reigning Olympic gold medalist.
That event will be the culmination of everything in her career. The special meaning of it came home to her in Beijing in the summer of 2008, when for the first time she saw Olympic events other than those in which she was competing. As a cycling analyst for the CBC, Hughes was able to step back and think about what it means to be an Olympic athlete.
“It’s something very special,” she said. “When I compete, I’ve always been able to be in the moment, but this time I want to really take time to appreciate the chance I have had.
“Maybe I’m too idealistic but when I wear that Canadian maple leaf on my back, I feel like I have millions of people inside me, helping to push me on. It means so much to me.” Idealism, of course, is a big part of what Hughes is. Within the world of sport, she has been one of the most active voices for drug-free competition. It was her distaste for the drug-riddled sport of cycling that led her to give up on the sport before Athens in order to concentrate on speed-skating.
She is known, however, more for her charitable work outside her sports. Her friend and mentor, the Norwegian speedskater Koss founded Right to Play after watching African children playing soccer. One of them was the most popular because he had a long-sleeved shirt and the sleeves could be used to tie the shirt into a ball so that they had something to play with.
After visiting Africa herself, Hughes came away with an overwhelming sense of human potential, of what those children were capable of doing despite their poverty and suffering.
“It blows me away,” she said, “what the mind and body are capable of if you let yourself believe that good things are possible.” Nor does Hughes confine her tireless efforts to the other side of the planet. Long before she became one of the most famous Canadians, Hughes would visit First Peoples tribes in Northern Manitoba to help aboriginal children learn to ski. In Vancouver, she has offered to help the Four Hosts First Nations Society, a collective of aboriginal groups working with the Vancouver organizing committee.
Hughes believes profoundly in the power of sport for young people. “I never want to get so caught up in everything,” she said, “that I can’t connect with what it’s like to be a kid. I still remember when my mother first took me skating in Winnipeg. It would be cold, so cold that we had to bundle up from head to toe. I really didn’t know how to skate at all. She had to hold me up while I shuffled along on my skates, but I have never forgotten that.” With her apparently limitless talents, Hughes could do almost anything she wants when she gives up competitive skating. She will not, however, speculate at all about what the future might bring.
“I’ve told myself 800 times, this is really, really hard. I have to give it all the attention I have. As soon as I start to think one breath past that finish line on Feb. 24, I’m in trouble. Right now I’m totally concentrated on Vancouver.” She has absolutely no doubt, however, that this will be her final Olympics. At 37 and with such an extraordinary reserve of cardiovascular power that she would dominate at 10,000 metres if women skated that event, Hughes could almost certainly compete as far as the Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia in 2014.
But Vancouver will be the end of the line for her Olympic experience. “I’ve always had pretty good instincts,” she said. “I know when it’s time for me to get into something and when it’s time to get out, and it’s time. This is really it. I’m at peace with myself. There won’t be any comebacks. That’s why I want to do so well. It doesn’t matter whether I finish first or 15th – I just want to skate what for me is the perfect race.” Because she was out of speedskating for so long, technique has always been a struggle for Hughes. “When I won in Turin,” she said, “that was sheer will. I did everything wrong but I just didn’t quit pushing.” Indeed, with four laps to go, it appeared that Hughes would finish off the podium in that race in Turin. But her mighty will took over, coupled with the strength in her lungs and in thighs that would be the envy of a male body-builder.
She does, however, admit to one possibility. She’s intrigued by the people who run ultramarathons, races like the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 215-kilometre race that begins 85 metres below sea level in the Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley and ends 2,548 metres up in the mountains at Whitney Portal, the trailhead to Mount Whitney.
“That really amazes me,” she said, “to be able to run 100 miles across mountainous terrain or in the desert, with nothing to propel you but your own legs and lungs. I might have to try that.” Having conquered two of the most difficult endurance sports humans have ever attempted, in other words, she might go for a third.
She is a strong woman, Clara Hughes. An example and inspiration for all, male or female, but especially young girls who might feel, on this most dismaying and disheartening of anniversaries, that the forces arrayed against women in our society are too much to overcome.
jacktodd46@ yahoo.com
