It's Clara's Flag to Bear
Among Canadian Olympians, Clara Hughes stands alone. She is our only athlete to ever win medals at both the Summer and Winter Olympics; for that matter, she is the only athlete in Olympic history to win multiple medals at both versions of the Games. She is a singular talent, possessed of a singular achievement. There’s nobody like her, here or anywhere.
But on Feb. 12, under the stretched white sky of BC Place in Vancouver, Clara Hughes will not stand alone so much as she will stand apart. Hughes was announced as Canada’s flagbearer for the Opening Ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games yesterday. And she was the right choice.
“This is our time, and this is without a doubt the greatest honour of my sporting life,” Hughes said at a ceremony in Richmond, B.C., reading from a prepared statement and fairly vibrating with joy and pride. “For 20 years I’ve had the privilege to represent Canada … I am so honoured to lead this Canadian Olympic team. With glowing hearts we will march into BC Place on the 12th of February as Canada, and for Canada.”
Hughes was not the only choice; we are not so bereft a sporting nation as that. The Canadian Olympic Committee could have chosen Cindy Klassen, Canada’s most decorated Olympian, who is skating her last lap on surgically repaired knees. They could have chosen Brian McKeever, the legally blind cross-country skier who will participate in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, smashing the barrier between them. There were choices.
But Hughes was the one, and that’s the way it should be. Only Klassen has won more medals among Canadian Olympians than the five owned by Hughes — two bronze medals in cycling in Atlanta, a bronze in speed skating in Salt Lake City, and a silver and gold in speed skating in Turin. And this will be her fifth Games, after 20 years of athletic effort. She has represented us since Atlanta, and she has done so unimpeachably.
Then there is Hughes the humanitarian, the difference-maker. There was the $10,000 of her own money that she donated to the charity Right To Play after winning the 5,000 metres in Torino. She challenged others, whether individuals or corporations, to donate as well. Hundreds of thousands of dollars later, she had inspired us.
She declined the chance to carry the flag in Turin, trying to save herself for competition. But the eternally youthful redhead is 37 now, and this opportunity won’t pass by her again.
“This is my last Olympics,” Hughes said. “I really didn’t feel I had a choice. This was something I’ve really thought about for a few years now that I might be asked, and I wondered what my answer would be. And deep inside, instinctively, I just knew that if I was asked, I would say yes. Because this is really the chance of a lifetime.”
Not just for her, but for every CanadianOlympian. It requires luck and timing and dedication to peak at the right point of a four-year cycle, so to compete in one Games is a blessing. But to peak when the Olympics are at home for the first time in 22 years? Chance of a lifetime, indeed. Hughes promised that Canadians would deliver “the races of our life.”
Easy for her to say. Many a flag-bearer has found the maple leaf to be heavier than it looks. Adam van Koeverden, the supremely confident and nearly unbeatable kayaker, fell apart under the weight of expectations in Beijing. He was not the first.
But Hughes may be different. Her first cycling coach, Mirek Mazur, says that right from the beginning, Hughes was the rare breed who could be better under pressure. It’s what got her here.
But as much as anything, Clara Hughes is a walking example of the redemptive power of sport. Hughes revealed this week that at 16 she was a lost girl, still consumed by her parents’ divorce, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, dabbling in recreational drugs, running away from her mom to party. And then one day she tuned on the 1988 Olympics, and saw Gaeten Boucher, fighting to skate late in his career, not even at his best.
“What I saw was someone who was really, really living,” she said last night. “I just connected to it … something inside of me just knew that that was what I wanted to do, and it literally shifted the direction of my life. The transformation, when I look back, was remarkable. I’m just so grateful that I flipped to the right channel that day in my mom’s living room in Winnipeg.”
So by 17, when she was introduced to Mazur, she was so in love with sports, with competition, that he was surprised to learn this week the kid had ever smoked at all.
“She was so disciplined, right from the start,” Mazur said. “She was just natural, destined to be a top-class athlete. It’s very hard to find.
“She is a great person. That’s what you see; that’s what she is.”
That’s what she is, all right. And she’s ours.
“For 20 years I’ve pursued sport, and I’ve had this gift of opportunity,” Hughes said. “And the thought of walking into BC Place, the thought of just that moment where all of Canada is watching, and being a part of the team, carrying the glorious maple leaf flying high in the sky above my head—it is living a dream, the thought of that, and I can’t wait for that moment.”
In Beijing, the Opening Ceremony were a statement of grand intent. And when the 7-foot-6 Yao Ming strode into the stadium brandishing China’s flag, towering above every other athlete in the Bird’s Nest Stadium, he was even bigger than life, bigger than himself. He was, for a moment, the symbol of a nation ascendant, of a colossus being revealed, of China’s Games.
In Vancouver, Clara Hughes will really be living, and she, too, will be bigger than herself. It will be Canada’s Games. And she will be us.
