Even to this day Silken Laumann can sense the double takes. Something as mundane as a shopping trip to stock the kitchen shelves elicits sideways glances and curious scrutiny.
“I still can’t go to a grocery store and not be recognized and not have people look at what food I’m putting in my shopping cart,” says the one-time rowing star in a telephone interview from Victoria where she lives.
“You kind of feel like, if you have potato chips in there, you’ve got to hide them under the carrots and the celery. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know Olympic athletes had potato chips.’ Yes, sometimes. I’m essentially weak.”
That Laumann is remembered, mostly for a bronze medal performance twenty years ago, underlines an essential truth about our Olympic medallists. Those who created memories that endure aren’t necessarily champions.
To keep shining, the glitter doesn’t have to be gold.
For years, one of the last images many Canadians saw before they clicked off their TVs was that of Greg Joy, arms raised in celebration. He was exulting over a silver medal. Most sports fans of a certain age in this country have never forgotten figure skater Liz Manley, at the Calgary Olympics, playfully biting on her medal for photographers. It too was silver. For Canadians, one of the most uplifting images from Beijing four years ago was Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, joyously leaping around the track with a red-and-white flag draped over her shoulders. She’d just earned an unlikely bronze in the hurdles.
Sure, we revel in the dominance of a Donovan Bailey or an Adam van Koeverden but we also love an overachieving underdog or a glorious surprise.
“That’s the interesting thing about the Olympics. It’s not necessarily the medal but the moment,” says Joy, who won silver in the high jump for Canada in 1976 and then became a fixture on the small screen. The highlight of him standing arms raised, smiling beneath his floppy blond hair in the Montreal rain, was a staple of the CBC’s anthem-backed sign off each night.
At Montreal, Canada became the first Olympic host nation not to win a gold medal but the jumper upstaged mouthy American Dwight Stones and salvaged some national pride on the second-last day of the Games. It really was Canada’s “moment” that summer.
“I get someone mentioning it every day,” says Joy, who now works an adjudicator with the Landlord and Tenant Board in Ottawa.
“It just seems to keep going on and on and on. I guess when we all die off — people our age — it’ll go away.”
“I’ve always said there are silver medals and there are silver medals that are blown out of proportion like Liz and mine and ones that are fantastic that are seen as failures like (that of figure skater) Brian Orser. The colour of the medal doesn’t necessarily reflect the impact of the event. I know a lot of people who have gold medals and no one knows who the hell they are.”
Both Manley and Orser earned their silvers at the Calgary Olympics. Manley crashed the Battle of the Carmens — the anticipated gold medal showdown between East Germany’s Katarina Witt and American Debi Thomas, both skating to music from Carmen — while Orser skated beautifully but was edged by Brian Boitano in the Battle of the Brians. Same sport, same result but it is Manley, Canada’s darling of those Games, who created the indelible memories.
At Beijing in the last Summer Games, Lopes-Schliep produced one of our best chest-thumping moments, thanks to her surprise bronze and a readily accessible prop.
“I definitely was a dark horse,” Lopes-Schliep recalls of that race that ended in a blanket finish.
“I didn’t know where I was, even after I crossed the finished line. When I was standing there waiting to see if my name would come up on the (results) screen, I was saying ‘Please God. Please. Please. Please. Please.’ When it came up third, I was so excited. I was jumping around. I made a B-line for that Canadian flag. I’d had a dream the night before about running around a stadium with a flag on my back. When it came true, it was like, ‘Wow.’”
That “wow” factor was felt on the other side of the planet.
“I think the excitement back home was because we got a medal. It didn’t matter what it was. We hadn’t got a (track) medal since ’96,” she said.
Getting any medal, and the circumstances surrounding it, also pushed the name Nicolas Gill into the public consciousness in a sport that most Canadians rarely acknowledge. Gill, a judoka from Montreal, won a bronze in the 86-kilogram weight class in 1992
A judo medal would normally earn little more than a yawn in this country. And frankly, Gill admits, that’s what he expected. The difference was that his out-of-the-blue bronze came late on the sixth day of the Barcelona Olympics in ‘92 and Canada had yet to make a podium.
In Gill, anxious Canadians at home had their first medallist and the shy 20-year-old was suddenly thrust into the spotlight.
“I wasn’t ready for the impact that medal had. I wasn’t really aware of what was going in the medal count. I figured someone else (from Canada) would have won a medal by then,” Gill says now.
So, blissfully ignorant of the huge news he’d created, Gill toddled off to drug testing and — luckily for two van loads of Canadian journalists screeching through the Barcelona streets to catch up the story — that took a little while.
“If I’d got my medal after (other Canadians), it would have been lost; it would have been one of those medals that everyone forgets,” he says.
Instead, the judoka, who figures he’d done maybe five previous interviews in his entire life, got more exposure than he could have imagined.
“A few of the interviews, I was hoping nobody ever saw them,” said Gill, recalling one in particular, a live TV hit, that he did speaking directly into a camera with the questions relayed via an earpiece.
“I couldn’t understand the questions so I kept asking them to repeat the questions. I felt bad so I just started guessing what the questions might be. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, that had to be the worst interview ever.’”
Laumann readily agrees that the circumstances of her bronze medal performance makes it resonate today, perhaps even more than if she’d won the gold in 1992.
She was the fastest single sculler in the world but in training, 10 weeks before the Games, a German boat collided with hers, breaking her right leg, ripping the muscle and causing nerve damage. The muscle was hanging out, she recounted later, and she could see the bone.
But with bravery that captured the imagination of Canadians, she went through five operations and was back on the water 23 days later. Though doctors counted her out more than once in the countdown to the Olympics, she ultimately rowed with incredible determination to finish third. It certainly provides her with a wealth of material when she gives motivational speeches these days.
“So many people heard about the accident and were following the recovery so they got emotionally invested in that recovery and hoping beyond, sort of, rational thinking that I would be able to get to the Olympics,” recalls Laumann, who would win a silver medal four years later at Atlanta.
“I think that the story itself and probably my ability to tell it and to bring people behind the scenes a little bit really has resonated with Canadians because everybody has gone through something. Everybody knows what it’s like when the chips are down so it really transcended a sports story and became a story of optimism, personal courage, overcoming the odds and I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s continued to be a touchstone for people.”
It’s not unlike the story of Joannie Rochette, the figure skater, who captured a bronze medal in 2010 a few days following the death of her mother who had arrived in Vancouver to watch her compete. The images of her crying after her brilliant long program will not quickly be forgotten.
It didn’t take a gold medal. It took a golden moment. Laumann believes those types of stories “resonate” for Canadians and become a collective memory for a nation.
“What I hear from people is that they identify with the experience of overcoming something and being up against the odds and still believing against all hope,” she said. “I think that’s something almost everybody has had in their life in some way.”
So what about the extra scrutiny, like at the grocery store, that comes from providing Canada with one of those lasting, heart-tugging moments? She said it can either cause you to cringe from the attention or you can embrace it. She’s opted for the latter.
“I guess there are worse moments in time to be associated with,” said Laumann, who still limps to this day. “If you’re going to be associated with something, it’s a pretty uplifting and positive thing to be associated with.”
MORE
FULL LONDON 2012 COVERAGE
“I still can’t go to a grocery store and not be recognized and not have people look at what food I’m putting in my shopping cart,” says the one-time rowing star in a telephone interview from Victoria where she lives.
“You kind of feel like, if you have potato chips in there, you’ve got to hide them under the carrots and the celery. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know Olympic athletes had potato chips.’ Yes, sometimes. I’m essentially weak.”
That Laumann is remembered, mostly for a bronze medal performance twenty years ago, underlines an essential truth about our Olympic medallists. Those who created memories that endure aren’t necessarily champions.
To keep shining, the glitter doesn’t have to be gold.
For years, one of the last images many Canadians saw before they clicked off their TVs was that of Greg Joy, arms raised in celebration. He was exulting over a silver medal. Most sports fans of a certain age in this country have never forgotten figure skater Liz Manley, at the Calgary Olympics, playfully biting on her medal for photographers. It too was silver. For Canadians, one of the most uplifting images from Beijing four years ago was Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, joyously leaping around the track with a red-and-white flag draped over her shoulders. She’d just earned an unlikely bronze in the hurdles.
Sure, we revel in the dominance of a Donovan Bailey or an Adam van Koeverden but we also love an overachieving underdog or a glorious surprise.
“That’s the interesting thing about the Olympics. It’s not necessarily the medal but the moment,” says Joy, who won silver in the high jump for Canada in 1976 and then became a fixture on the small screen. The highlight of him standing arms raised, smiling beneath his floppy blond hair in the Montreal rain, was a staple of the CBC’s anthem-backed sign off each night.
At Montreal, Canada became the first Olympic host nation not to win a gold medal but the jumper upstaged mouthy American Dwight Stones and salvaged some national pride on the second-last day of the Games. It really was Canada’s “moment” that summer.
“I get someone mentioning it every day,” says Joy, who now works an adjudicator with the Landlord and Tenant Board in Ottawa.
“It just seems to keep going on and on and on. I guess when we all die off — people our age — it’ll go away.”
“I’ve always said there are silver medals and there are silver medals that are blown out of proportion like Liz and mine and ones that are fantastic that are seen as failures like (that of figure skater) Brian Orser. The colour of the medal doesn’t necessarily reflect the impact of the event. I know a lot of people who have gold medals and no one knows who the hell they are.”
Both Manley and Orser earned their silvers at the Calgary Olympics. Manley crashed the Battle of the Carmens — the anticipated gold medal showdown between East Germany’s Katarina Witt and American Debi Thomas, both skating to music from Carmen — while Orser skated beautifully but was edged by Brian Boitano in the Battle of the Brians. Same sport, same result but it is Manley, Canada’s darling of those Games, who created the indelible memories.
At Beijing in the last Summer Games, Lopes-Schliep produced one of our best chest-thumping moments, thanks to her surprise bronze and a readily accessible prop.
“I definitely was a dark horse,” Lopes-Schliep recalls of that race that ended in a blanket finish.
“I didn’t know where I was, even after I crossed the finished line. When I was standing there waiting to see if my name would come up on the (results) screen, I was saying ‘Please God. Please. Please. Please. Please.’ When it came up third, I was so excited. I was jumping around. I made a B-line for that Canadian flag. I’d had a dream the night before about running around a stadium with a flag on my back. When it came true, it was like, ‘Wow.’”
That “wow” factor was felt on the other side of the planet.
“I think the excitement back home was because we got a medal. It didn’t matter what it was. We hadn’t got a (track) medal since ’96,” she said.
Getting any medal, and the circumstances surrounding it, also pushed the name Nicolas Gill into the public consciousness in a sport that most Canadians rarely acknowledge. Gill, a judoka from Montreal, won a bronze in the 86-kilogram weight class in 1992
A judo medal would normally earn little more than a yawn in this country. And frankly, Gill admits, that’s what he expected. The difference was that his out-of-the-blue bronze came late on the sixth day of the Barcelona Olympics in ‘92 and Canada had yet to make a podium.
In Gill, anxious Canadians at home had their first medallist and the shy 20-year-old was suddenly thrust into the spotlight.
“I wasn’t ready for the impact that medal had. I wasn’t really aware of what was going in the medal count. I figured someone else (from Canada) would have won a medal by then,” Gill says now.
So, blissfully ignorant of the huge news he’d created, Gill toddled off to drug testing and — luckily for two van loads of Canadian journalists screeching through the Barcelona streets to catch up the story — that took a little while.
“If I’d got my medal after (other Canadians), it would have been lost; it would have been one of those medals that everyone forgets,” he says.
Instead, the judoka, who figures he’d done maybe five previous interviews in his entire life, got more exposure than he could have imagined.
“A few of the interviews, I was hoping nobody ever saw them,” said Gill, recalling one in particular, a live TV hit, that he did speaking directly into a camera with the questions relayed via an earpiece.
“I couldn’t understand the questions so I kept asking them to repeat the questions. I felt bad so I just started guessing what the questions might be. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, that had to be the worst interview ever.’”
Laumann readily agrees that the circumstances of her bronze medal performance makes it resonate today, perhaps even more than if she’d won the gold in 1992.
She was the fastest single sculler in the world but in training, 10 weeks before the Games, a German boat collided with hers, breaking her right leg, ripping the muscle and causing nerve damage. The muscle was hanging out, she recounted later, and she could see the bone.
But with bravery that captured the imagination of Canadians, she went through five operations and was back on the water 23 days later. Though doctors counted her out more than once in the countdown to the Olympics, she ultimately rowed with incredible determination to finish third. It certainly provides her with a wealth of material when she gives motivational speeches these days.
“So many people heard about the accident and were following the recovery so they got emotionally invested in that recovery and hoping beyond, sort of, rational thinking that I would be able to get to the Olympics,” recalls Laumann, who would win a silver medal four years later at Atlanta.
“I think that the story itself and probably my ability to tell it and to bring people behind the scenes a little bit really has resonated with Canadians because everybody has gone through something. Everybody knows what it’s like when the chips are down so it really transcended a sports story and became a story of optimism, personal courage, overcoming the odds and I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s continued to be a touchstone for people.”
It’s not unlike the story of Joannie Rochette, the figure skater, who captured a bronze medal in 2010 a few days following the death of her mother who had arrived in Vancouver to watch her compete. The images of her crying after her brilliant long program will not quickly be forgotten.
It didn’t take a gold medal. It took a golden moment. Laumann believes those types of stories “resonate” for Canadians and become a collective memory for a nation.
“What I hear from people is that they identify with the experience of overcoming something and being up against the odds and still believing against all hope,” she said. “I think that’s something almost everybody has had in their life in some way.”
So what about the extra scrutiny, like at the grocery store, that comes from providing Canada with one of those lasting, heart-tugging moments? She said it can either cause you to cringe from the attention or you can embrace it. She’s opted for the latter.
“I guess there are worse moments in time to be associated with,” said Laumann, who still limps to this day. “If you’re going to be associated with something, it’s a pretty uplifting and positive thing to be associated with.”
MORE
FULL LONDON 2012 COVERAGE
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Bio
In May 1992, just 10 weeks before the Olympic Games, Silken Laumann was injured in a brutal rowing accident that left her right leg shattered and useless. Reigning world champion in Single Sculls rowing, Silken was told by doctors she might never row again.
Twenty-seven days, five operations, and countless hours of gruelling rehabilitation later, Silken was back in her shell, ready to pursue her Olympic dream. When the starter's pistol rang out on August 2, 1992, Silken made the greatest comeback in Canadian sports history, winning the bronze medal for Canada, and capturing the hearts of a nation.
Silken retired from rowing in 1999 with three Olympic medals, and since then has continued to inspire, encouraging people to dream, live in the moment and embrace failure as a stepping stone to success.
“In ten weeks she made the greatest comeback in Canadian sports history, becoming a symbol of hope to all.”
The Montreal Gazette
Outstanding Achievements
1996 Silver Medal – Atlanta Olympics1992 Bronze Medal – Barcelona Olympics
1991 World Champion – Single Sculls Rowing
1984 Bronze Medal – Los Angeles Olympics
Honorary Doctorates: University of Victoria, McMaster University, University of Windsor, Laurentian University,
2006 & 2007 CAAWS Most Influential Women in Sport and Physical Activity
2006 Globe and Mail list of most influential women in Canada
2006 Women's Executive Network - Most powerful women
2003 National Child Day Award
1998 Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame
1997 Wilma Rudolph Courage Award (first non-American to receive the award)
1991 and 1992 Canadian Press Female Athlete of the Year
1991 Lou Marsh Award - Canada's Outstanding Athlete
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