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Passing the Torch

Will 2010 Olympic legacies level the playing field for First Nations kids?
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When Hugh Fisher stepped off the podium at the 1984 Games, a freshly minted Olympic kayak champion, he was immediately squirreled away by doping control. Excitement and dehydration conspired against him - it took him three hours to produce a urine sample and by the time he was released, the collapsible paddling venue on Southern California's Lake Casitas had been entirely deconstructed and packed away. His teammates were gone. Alone, still in his paddling shorts, a gold medal in his bag, the 28-year-old champion headed out to the road by the Los Padres National Forest and stuck out his thumb.

"A guy finally drove up and leaned out the window and said, 'Hey, do you have a joint?'" recalls Fisher.

"No. I don't have a joint. But I need a ride to Ventura," he replied.

"Hop in."

Fisher's ride had been watching the paddling events and he commented on the success of the Canadians, who had snagged a total of two gold, two silver and two bronze medals. Fisher and his paddling partner, Alwyn Morris, had not only won the K-2 1000 metre sprint, but they'd also posted the fastest qualifying times in the heat and semi-finals of the K-2 500 metre sprint, eventually winning the bronze medal in that event.

"Actually, I'm on the Canadian team," Fisher admitted.

"I suppose you're going to tell me you just won a gold medal."

"Well, actually, I did win a gold medal."

The driver did a cartoon-character double-take. "My family are not going to believe this." And he drove Fisher off to meet the parents.

"So that was my minute and a half of fame, up on the podium, and then out hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere," says Fisher, 25 years later and Whistler/Pemberton's most understated Olympic celebrity, with his characteristic dry humour.

For Fisher's partner in the two-man kayak, Alwyn Morris, those 90 seconds atop the podium were a different experience.

Where Hugh Fisher had grown up with the Burnaby Lake Canoe Club out his backdoor, Alywn Morris had had to come a long way to train there, leaving his home in Quebec's Kahnawake reserve straight out of high school.

Hungarian immigrants exiled by the Soviet invasion built the foundation for Canada's paddling success and Hugh Fisher, having started racing at the Burnaby Lake Canoe Club in 1970 at the age of 15, learned enough from the exiled champions to earn himself a spot on the Canadian Olympic squad in 1976. "They showed me how it was done in Hungary, where the training was very, very hard, and where they have a very big base of athletes in canoeing and the ones that survived moved up to the next level, guaranteeing that the top athletes would be world champions. In Canada you don't have that big base in sports, except maybe in hockey, so you can't afford to burn through your athletes like that."

But their rigour and intensity worked for Fisher. For the most part, he didn't take it very seriously. "Those guys were fun and it was always sort of a game for me. Paddling allowed me to not have a summer job, to have my school paid for, to go to Europe with 10 bucks in my pocket."

Morris had grown up in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, in a reserve on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, across from Montreal. A full-blooded Mohawk, Morris turned his attention to paddling as a teenager, after being told he was too small to play lacrosse. By 1977, Morris was the national junior champion in the K-1 500 metre and 1,000 metre events. He made his way out to British Columbia to train with Fisher and his teammates in a program they had put together after their '76 Games results clued them in to the fact that they could be contenders on the world stage. "Alwyn was just out of high school, and the Junior National World Champion," recalls Fisher. "He was grooming himself to be the singles champion."

They didn't paddle as a team, initially, but a series of injuries created a musical-chairs situation and eventually Fisher and Morris stepped into a boat together, forming the fastest combination yet. Explains Fisher, "There's a synergy, as much as I hate that word, that happens that makes some boats better than their component paddlers and we just had that magic. It didn't hurt that Alwyn was one of the strongest paddlers in the world."

In 1982 at the World Championships, the pair placed second and things suddenly got serious. Two years later, they would stand atop the podium and Alywn Morris would hold aloft an eagle feather to honour his grandparents and his Mohawk heritage - the first and only Canadian First Nations athlete to win a gold medal.

Later, a Hungarian teammate from the Burnaby Canoe Club would say, "He's a Mohawk? Huh. I always thought Alywn was Portguese."

"That's sort of what it was like," says Fisher. "We'd just get on the water and train as hard as we could. And try and beat each other. It didn't occur to us that there was some sort of difference like that going on."

• • •

 

In a house on a hill perched between downtown Pemberton and the Mount Currie Reserve, 10-year-old Claudia Thevarge shows off her fancy dancing regalia - a shimmery princess dress made up of mermaid-blue sequins and black mesh panels, topped with a fringed shawl that her baby sister loves to grab at.

Claudia's best friend, Brianna Turchinetz, models her regalia too. With its red vest and appliquéd horses, Brie's powwow dancing outfit looks more cowgirl than "Indian princess" as she is sometimes called by Claudia's aunties and uncles.

When the pair demonstrate their dancing in the living room, the traditional "berry-picking song" morphs quickly into a dance they invented themselves, "the Never-ending Dance," a hip-hop rockabilly giggle-fest performance that is pretty much what you would expect from any nine- and 10-year-old best girlfriends who call each other sister and keep a drawer full of clothes at each other's houses.

What makes this pair of buddies unusual is that Claudia is Lil'wat and Brianna is not. And that no one really notices.

Mavis Pascal, Claudia's mother, shrugs: "Everyone in the community just accepts Brie. No one has ever said, how come she's here? How come she's around all the time? My family loves her just as much as I do. They want her to come to all our family events."

Brianna's mother, Carrie Turchinetz first met Mavis Pascal when she was working as a paramedic. "I was working crazy ambulance hours. We were two single parents trying to make a go of things." One night, Turchinetz had pulled a nightshift and was stuck for childcare. Pascal offered to help. Within minutes, their daughters, then aged five and six, had bonded. Four years later, Claudia and Brianna finish each other's sentences and anticipate growing old together. "Oh yeah," says Brianna. "When we're 90, we'll have our own apartment. We'll live in the same care home."

Their friendship is not just a private matter - the pair pull entire communities into the orbit of their relationship. Dressed in their regalia, Brianna "Little Butterfly" and Claudia "Coyote in Hand" are regular attendees at powwows, dancing up a storm at the Lil'wat Nation community celebrations. Their sleep-over schedules are so fluid that friends of both families have become accustomed to setting an extra plate.

Mavis Pascal, who grew up in Mount Currie, nods: "I do believe their friendship is unique. I lived here all my life, but I didn't really have any non-native friends."

Carrie Turchinetz has wondered aloud, as she and Mavis sit together: "If we were in high school together, would we have been friends?"

But it didn't work that way at Pemberton Secondary School when Mavis Pascal was a student there. The native kids hung out, the non-native kids hung out and no one crossed the line. "It might only take two little girls to change the minds of two communities," says Pascal.

"I think it might already have begun," echoes Turchinetz.

Claudia interrupts, "Can Brianna sleep over tonight?"

 

• • •

 

Hugh Fisher keeps his gold medal in the sideboard drawer. Were it not for the 2010 Games passing through his backyard, it's likely that most of the Sea to Sky community would know him simply as a local physician and dragonboat coach and his resume of accomplishments - three-time Olympian, member of the Order of Canada and the Canada Sports Hall of Fame - would remain obscure.

What has never been obscure with Fisher is his tangible passion for paddling. After he took over the medical practice in Pemberton, from the ailing resident doctor, Fisher was approached by a local parent: would he teach her daughter to row?

"I don't actually row," said Fisher. "I paddle." But he sourced a couple of Voyageur canoes, and 14 years later, had founded a local canoe club, spearheaded the construction of a boathouse on Pemberton's diminutive One Mile Lake and coached the high school Laoyam Eagles dragonboat team to 11 consecutive victories at the Rio Tinto Alcan Dragonboat Festival.

Fisher attributes the success of the dragonboat program partly to the cachet it has earned amongst the kids. Grade 7 and 8 students arrive at school having heard about paddling from older brothers and sisters. By the time they graduate from Pemberton Secondary School, some local students have five years of paddling under their belts, enough expertise to pick up lucrative coaching jobs in Vancouver that nicely supplement university life.

"Plus," says Fisher, "it's a lot of fun. I try to make the workouts make their spirits fly out there. And then they go down and strut around Alcan with 100,000 people watching, and everyone knows who they are."

For Fisher, sport has always been a chance to transcend your own backyard. "It's alright to stay in this valley if you want to. But there's so much more going on in the world. These beautiful mountains around us can become big barriers, and one way to get away from here as a kid is to be involved in sports that take you away."

On the field of play, distinctions like colour and culture fall away. All that counts is performance. Success can be related simply to merit and the purity of your effort. And that really can make the spirit fly, which is why when Hugh Fisher started coaching dragonboating he hoped there would be as many kids from the Mount Currie reserve on his crew as from Pemberton. But it hasn't worked out that way. "This is the great shame and my great concern," Fisher admits. "The first year we started out, the crew was an even mix of big, strong native boys and big, strong farm girls and it was a great, strong crew with a lot of spirit."

Fisher gave the inaugural dragonboat crew the chance to name themselves and they chose "The Half Breeds."

"Well, there are some pretty heavy duty connotations with that," Fisher told them.

"We don't care," retorted the kids. "It's who we are. We're half native, half white."

Fisher suggested they take it to the Mount Currie Band Chief and Council for permission.

Chief and Council refused permission, but relented when the kids explained their rationale: "We're proud that we're half white, half First Nations and we like the connotation of wildness." But even a letter of support from the Mount Currie Band Chief and Council wasn't enough to get the "Pemberton Half-Breeds" registered at the Dragonboat Festival. So, the team took the name of a nasty underwater dragon and became the Laoyam Eagles instead.

The "Laoyam Eagles" name stuck. What didn't stick over the next 13 years was the level of First Nations participation. Once funding for a school bus between One Mile Lake and Mount Currie dried up, the dragonboat team began to lose its First Nations members.

Fisher has seen it as a coach, and as a parent: "So much of being involved in sport is being available. There's nothing to stop a kid from Mount Currie taking part in sports if there's a will to get them there. The kids from Mount Currie are as fit and agile and knowledgeable and capable in sport as kids I've seen everywhere. They can be really good. It's a matter for someone to figure that out, to put a value on making that happen. My hope is that the legacy of the facilities that have been built here for the Games will be combined with a legacy of vehicles, so they can get there."

While metaphorical vehicles have been put in place over the past six years to provide more sporting opportunities for young First Nations athletes, including funding through the Aboriginal Youth Sport Legacy Fund and the growing First Nations Snowboard Team, Fisher is thinking literally of actual vehicles. Cars and buses. He's thinking longer-term and larger scale. "It can't just be one or two kids. It has to be 100, 200 kids."

For an Olympic medallist who will be one of the last handful of people to carry the torch on Feb. 12, that's how sporting excellence develops. A bunch of Hungarians arrive in B.C. and build a critical mass of paddling talent. Local kids get a chance to train in world-class facilities, surrounded by elite level athletes and coaches.

"We need some sliders to come and live here, who are excited by the sport and passionate about being involved. And we need them to start kids' clubs, to work out a strategy to get kids to participate and to be aware of the barriers facing participants from Pemberton and Mount Currie and D'Arcy, so the legacy doesn't end up only being something for Whistler local kids."

For Hugh Fisher, sporting excellence starts with someone passing the torch, it continues with teammates aspiring for perfect synergy, and it ends on top of the world.

 

 



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