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Steve Podborski - another 'easterner' moves west

"How tough can life be when you live on Easy Street next to the River of Golden Dreams and your kids' kindergarten teachers have names like Ms. Friend and Ms. Hart?" Crazy Canuck Steve Podborski on living at Whistler The future looked bright.
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"How tough can life be when you live on Easy Street next to the River of Golden Dreams and your kids' kindergarten teachers have names like Ms. Friend and Ms. Hart?"

Crazy Canuck Steve Podborski on living at Whistler

 

The future looked bright. Summit lifts were in position, big-name hotels were in place and the buzz was quickly spreading. Whistler was a happening town. By 1990, it was almost official. The Baby Huey of Canadian ski resorts was finally coming into its own...

It hadn't been easy. And there'd been some sizeable speed bumps along the way. Still, most of Whistler's big issues had been addressed successfully. When once it was almost mandatory for Whistler officials to travel south to see how the Colorado guys managed their business, now the reverse was happening. Increasingly, the resort was playing host to American managers looking to get their heads around this industry game-changer.

Critical mass is a funny thing - particularly when it comes to tourism. It often seems impossibly out of reach - until you hit it. And then it seems impossibly fragile. Stray under or above the magical ratio of guests-to-residents and the experience subtly changes. Know what I mean? Whistler's current malaise perfectly illustrates how quickly a resort town's affairs can go sideways.

It was exactly the reverse a generation ago. For whatever reason - economics, planning, serendipity - the early 1990's was a time of great optimism at Whistler. The Canadian dollar was low, Americans were feisty and rich, and everything "West Coast" was hip. As for lifestyle, conditions couldn't have been better for local residents. As one wag put it at the time: "We have the infrastructure of a big-time global resort and the midweek visitor-numbers of a much smaller place. The result: Whistlerites are spoiled, spoiled, spoiled."

Is it any wonder then that skiing parents from across the country were beginning to identify this place as a viable community to raise young kids? "I'd always fantasized about moving to Whistler," admits former World Cup star, Steve Podborski. "After all, I spent some magical summers in my youth skiing up on the glacier with the Griffin Camps. But living here full-time? It always seemed a bit too whimsical for me... but that all changed when I became a dad."

It's hard to appreciate today just how much Podborski and his Crazy Canuck teammates were game-changers on the World Cup circuit themselves. Under funded, under-coached and under-appreciated, the young Canadians stormed into the Euro-centric atmosphere of international ski racing in the early 1970's and proceeded to tear its assumption to bits.

From the moment Ken Read shocked the pundits by leaping to victory in Val D'Isere in 1975, the word was out: those Canadian downhill boys are crazy. And very, very competitive: they'll do whatever they need to do to win! By the time Podborski captured the overall World Cup downhill title in 1982, the sport had changed forever. For better or worse, ski racing was now a bona fide international phenomenon.

It's also hard to appreciate just how young these Canadian skiers were at the height of their powers. Podborski, for example, was only 22 when he won Olympic bronze in 1980. By the time he was 26, he'd already retired from the sport. Funny that - seems in today's world that's the age when skiers finally break through...

But I digress. A Toronto resident all his life - Pod loved to introduce himself as "the dork from Don Mills" - the retired downhiller soon found himself living in a posh, urban neighbourhood with a growing family and an itch to change his life. The year was 1991. Steve was 33 years old.

"It was all about the kids," he explains. "We wanted to raise them in a 'real' community - a place where we could participate in life's day-to-day happenings." He stops speaking. Let's a long beat pass. "And that's when Whistler first came under consideration. It's not like I knew there was a job waiting for me there or anything." Another beat. "I figured I'd work that out when we got there." He laughs. "If only I'd known..."

To call Pod "unflappable" is like calling Hank Sedin "a good playmaker." The guy's got ice water running through his veins. "I'm not a very excitable guy," he admits. And that near-magical ability to keep his cool under stress served him well during his downhill racing years. But would it help him in the work world?

"I wanted to work in a large, publicly-traded company," he explains. "But I had zero experience in that environment." Fortunately, Blackcomb Mountain was looking for new corporate recruits for its burgeoning enterprise. And what Pod may have lacked in terms of business experience, he more than made up for in the eyes of his prospective employer with name-recognition, passion for the sport and a well-honed competitive instinct.

He laughs: "So I became manager of PR and events for Blackcomb Mountain. And my world turned completely upside down!" Another long burst of merriment. "I had to learn so much so quickly... I was totally overwhelmed. " He shrugs. "People kept telling me how lucky I was, how cushy my job must be. But it wasn't! It's not like you're just hanging out on the ski slopes schmoozing with your friends. It's 10-12 hours a day, six or seven days a week - at least during the winter season."

As for actual working conditions, they were awful. "At first my office was in a closet," he says, a wry grin twisting his features. "I have to admit it set me back a little. Here I was - this global sporting icon - working out of this tiny space. I mean, normally you don't have sport icons working out of a closet..."

But Pod's drive for success was too strong to get hung up on the trivial things in life. Besides, he was having too much fun doing his job to dwell on the negatives. "Remember," he says, "this was the heyday of the Whistler Blackcomb rivalry." Another big smile. "It's what I like to call 'coopetition.' And it probably contributed to the resort's rise to prominence like nothing else back then. Why?" He stops. Chuckles. "Because it offered us so many opportunities to get creative."

Indeed - the early 1990's were amazing that way. It was the ultimate corporate "keeping up with the Joneses" scenario. If one mountain put a lift into the alpine, for example, then the other mountain had to go there too. Explains Podborski: "Working at Blackcomb in those days was all about being 'better' than Whistler Mountain - in everything! When we opened the lifts, when our avalanche control was done, what kind of food we offered."

He pauses again. Takes another long breath. "And though there was little money in the kitty for new initiatives," he adds, "it seemed that people were willing to do incredible stuff back then, and all on a volunteer basis - just to be involved."

Take Pod's Blackcomb TV initiative. "I thought doing a daily show would be a slam dunk," he says. And laughs. "But producing a television show every morning, seven days a week with zero budget takes a lot of energy. We had to beg, borrow and steal - literally - to even get our studio together." Nevertheless, he says those were really great times. "I think of Chris Quinlan acting as my co-host or Kristen Robinson as our weather 'girl' - and I still marvel. Frankly, I'm amazed at what we accomplished with that program..."

The early 1990's was also an important "branding" time for Whistler. And both mountains' signature ski contests were huge draws back then. Remember the Saudan Couloir race? An insane giant slalom event that launched racers off the very lip of Blackcomb's legendary summit couloir (and ended halfway down the mountain), the Couloir race stamped Whistler as a mountain iconoclast's dream-come-true. No rules. No limits. Just point your skis down the hill and go!

 

"It was a tough race to manage," admits Podborski. "We'd try and put a few control gates in the couloir proper to slow some of the keeners down a bit, but they'd still hit the main slope going very, very fast..." Invariably there were casualties. He says the only time he ever got an earful from Nancy Greene Raine was the year her son, Willie Raine, got a little too amped up for the race and blew his knee out halfway down the course. "I still remember Nancy's phone call to me that day," he says. "My ears felt blistered for a week..."

Or what about the new program he was assigned to develop to compete with Whistler Mountain's hugely popular First Tracks breakfast? "Everybody was really excited about the concept," he explains. "But I warned them, they might not be so pleased when people started using the program's initials instead of the full name..."  The new program's moniker? First Up...

But all good things must come to an end. "Despite the fact that I was working for a big corporation," says Pod, "I didn't feel that the pay was commensurate with the hours I was putting in. So I was constantly looking for more income..." He'd already moved on to broadcast work in the U.S. when Canadian IOC member Charmaine Crooks contacted him in 1998 with an intriguing proposal for a brand new bid concept, Pod was all ears. Little did he know how much the new project would change his life.

Next Week: Pod's crazy, amazing, incredible Olympic adventure