by Ron MacLean
They rushed in, happy and excited, but very low-key. I think they were in a state of shock. We went live immediately. We talked for about five minutes, reviewing the race, and then I pointed to my ear. I said, “I’m having a really tough time doing the interview. There’s a constant distraction in my earpiece. I don’t know … Terry, Jane, can you hear? Ron MacLean?”
We heard Kerrin’s dad, Terry, respond. “Yes, I can.”
Kerrin’s eyes widened and she slapped her leg. “No way!”
Terry and Jane congratulated their daughter, and then Terry said, “Kerrin, you may have done the skiing, but I think you and Max won this race. I’m so, so proud of both of you.”
Kerrin took Max’s hand. “Oh, thank you. We’re pretty proud at the moment too.”
I said, “Well, you should be. Canada has a hero. Thank you so much for joining us in Tsawwassen, and I know you’ll be at the Canadians. Keep up the good work. You’ve obviously done well for Kerrin to be the great gal and skier that she is.”
Jane said, “We couldn’t be more proud of her. Love you, Kerrin.”
Kerrin replied, “I love you too.”
We were ready to sign off when Terry said, “I need to throw this in there, Ron. I think that guy sitting beside her, looking so great on my TV right now, has an awful lot to do with how things turned out today.” Kerrin took Max’s hand and gave him a thousand-megawatt smile. Max looked down at his lap, trying to hold it together.
We said goodbye to Terry and Jane, and then I asked Max about them. “How did you become part of this clan?”
“I’m very proud to be part of the clan,” Max started out. “I think the Lee family is an unbelievable family, and they stick together really nice, and …” His resolve gave way and he began to cry. Kerrin reached for him.
I told him, “You know what? I sat down with my wife, Cari, and we were reading the bio about how you two got along together so well and had these great times together.”
Max was sobbing, and now Kerrin was near tears. My eyes were a little wet as well. Trying to release some tension, I leaned forward, slapping the desk and chuckling. “Now I’m going to make you cry, Kerrin! I’ve done it to Max and I’m going to make you cry!”
I admitted I got choked up over their fairy-tale ending, too. “But in this community you really need each other, and you put your life on the line every time you go down the hill.”
Kerrin was wiping her eyes, and with tears threatening, her voice broke. “Yeah, we obviously stick together through thick and thin … Max is here supporting me, and obviously he’s been a nervous wreck all day. It will be good to have a few moments where we can just settle down and actually believe that this has happened.”
I said, “There can’t be two better people alive as ambassadors, both for skiing and a life in sport. You richly deserve this moment, and the great news is that you get to share it the rest of your lives with all of us. Thanks. It was emotional for all of us.”
Kerrin says that, to this day, people still come up to her and talk about the day Max cried on TV.
29
YOU’RE TELLING ME THAT’S A GUY?
Beginning with the CBC’s coverage of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, I covered the daytime shift and Brian Williams hosted in prime time.
Behind the scenes, the Olympics are a mishmash of commentators flying by the seat of their research. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, for example, Bruce Rainnie, another former radio guy (from CJLS in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia), was scheduled to cover rowing in the first week, then canoeing and kayaking, but he suffered from kidney stones and had to back out. Trevor Pilling, our executive producer, decided we had to have a key commentator at that venue. He pulled Scott Oake from track and field and swimming and gave him a crash course on rowing. Canada was expected to do well in these events, and they did, winning gold, silver and two bronze. Scott had only thirty-six hours to prepare, while Elliotte Friedman scrambled to replace him in track and field and swimming. Whoever the network sends has to have an overall good knowledge of sports because that’s how it goes at the Olympics.
I have many great memories of my years covering the Olympics. One of my favourites was the incredible accomplishment of Donovan Bailey in 1996, when he won a gold medal in the 100 metres in Atlanta. Donovan was an incredible athlete. For three years—1995, ‘96 and ‘97—he was the Gretzky of sprinting. He ran faster than any man alive. His top-end speed was close to 43 kilometres per hour. He was superhuman, indestructible, until he popped his Achilles heel in a pickup basketball game, and that was the end of his career. But in 1996, it was a joy to watch him sprint.
Another highlight for me was when Leah Pells, a Canadian 1,500-metre runner, performed really well in Atlanta. She just barely qualified through heats, and then she ran a terrific semifinal and ended up fourth in the final. To be the fourth-fastest 1,500-metre runner in the world is amazing.
The biggest thrill of the ‘96 Games was the silver-medal swim by Fredericton’s Marianne Limpert. I had been impressed with her at the Commonwealth Games in Victoria in 1994. She and I were both from small towns, and she was an only child too. I felt an affinity. I secretly hoped she would win. She ended up in the 200-metre individual medley, but got nipped at the finish by a woman named Michelle Smith of Ireland, who was over in lane number one. Marianne didn’t know that Michelle was coming on. She thought she had won the race.
Watching Marianne during that race is as close as I’ve ever come to being overcome with emotion while covering a sporting event. Normally, I’m very detached, thinking ahead about what to say in the upcoming interview. But not that day. It was truly electric to see her swim the final 50 metres, knowing she might win the thing. It was incredible.
It was a thrill to watch, and so was the 4 × 200m freestyle relay. One of Marianne’s colleagues on the team was a woman named Shannon Shakespeare. I interviewed both of them live after they finished fifth in the event. I said to Shannon, “I noticed that you guys had a little huddle before the race, and I wondered what it was you talked about. What kinds of things were said?” Shannon said, “Well, Marianne was saying Ron’s ass is looking pretty good today.” I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. For once, I had no snappy reply.
Ireland’s Michelle Smith was subsequently proven to have cheated over a drug test. In 1998, she received a four-year suspension after an out-of-competition drug sample was found to have been spiked with alcohol, of all things. She denied there was proof she had been responsible, but to no avail. She continued to deny that she had used performance-enhancing drugs, which the use of alcohol in a sample could mask. Her coach and husband, Erik de Bruin, was a former Dutch shot putter and discus thrower. He was suspended from the 1996 Olympics after having tested positive in 1993 for excessive levels of the male sex hormone testosterone. Banned from swimming when she was twenty-eight, Michelle went back to school in Ireland and in 2005 she graduated with a law degree.
In 1998, I headed over to Nagano, Japan, for the Winter Games. Grapes and Cari flew over a few days after me. When Grapes is not covering hockey, he is like a fish out of water. The Olympics are a prime example—they are not his thing. He worked the Olympic Games only because the NHLers were there.
Don and Cari flew first class on Japan Airlines. Cari was carrying bags and souvenirs made by Roots. Canada’s figure skating champion Elvis Stojko was heralded as a potential gold medal winner that year, so his picture was on the front of all the Roots bags.
Cari got all settled in and was dropping off to sleep when Don nudged her. He was holding up one of the Roots bags. “Who is this woman?” he asked.
Cari said, “What are you talking about?”
Don pointed at the bag and said, “This woman on the bag.
Who is it?”
Cari said, “That’s not a woman, Don, that’s Elvis Stojko.” Don’s eyes went wide and he said, “You’re telling me that’s a guy?”
Leading up to Japan, I’d been keeping an eye on Brian Stemmle. I knew
his sister, Karen, a member of the national alpine skiing team. I’d run into Karen and another team member, Lisa Savijarvi, at Brad Richards’ charity golf event in Prince Edward Island. They were a fun couple of girls. Meeting them prompted me to take an interest in Brian’s career.
Brian had suffered a horrific crash during an alpine ski race in 1986 at the Hahnenkamm, a legendary course in Kitzbühel, Austria. He broke apart at the seams. It hurts to even say this, but he split his perineum—that’s the line between your testicles and your anus. It was a horrible, horrible accident.
Remarkably, he made it all the way back to ski in the Olympics again. That’s just amazing to me. And he damn near won the downhill. He had the top time until he caught an edge near the bottom. It took him outside one of the flags, and he stopped. He stood, looking back uphill and at the sky behind him, which was blue as blue could be. As I watched, I thought, “Wow, what an image.” I didn’t mind that he didn’t win. His recovery and determination were what made him a hero.
When the Games were over, we stayed at a friend of Cari’s named Shoichi, who lived in Neyagawa, Japan, Oakville’s sister city. I got up one morning and was surprised by a bath they had poured for me. It was filled with rose petals and bath salts and smelled really good. I got in, splashed around, unplugged the drain, and that was that. But when I emerged from the bathroom, the family seemed panic-stricken. The bath had been meant for everybody. Water was such a precious and expensive commodity that I was supposed to shower first and then step into the tub for a soak. They explained in their broken English that I had been invited to go first because I was the guest of honour.
Sydney in 2000 nearly broke me. I was forty years old, and I found the nine-hour hosting job very difficult. Each evening, I would host live from 6 p.m. until 3 a.m., but that wasn’t the hard part. CBC Radio had asked us to do a one-to-two-minute show each day. I recorded it at 4 p.m., and that really, really messed me up. It sounds silly, but I spent a lot of time working on it, which prevented me from having a nap. I’d get off the air at 3 a.m., arrive back at my hotel at about 4 a.m. and listen to the revellers outside my window. Sydney was alive at that hour, just crawling with people. It was cool, but loud. I’d set my alarm for six hours later and drop dead asleep, then get up at 11 a.m. and prepare for the show. Thank God we had computers and VHS machines. If I was covering swimming that day, I’d cue up the national swimming championships. It helped in two ways: it gave me stories and results and helped me pronounce names correctly.
I’d work all day, and then shower and go over to do that damn radio bit. The mental strain of having to think about it was irritating, too. I wanted to look ahead and focus on hosting each night, but the radio bit was forcing me to look back and put together a story based on the previous day. I was struggling with having to look ahead and back at the same time.
Toward the end, I had to talk myself into hanging on. “Five days to go. Just get through it!”
I had learned how to better deal with the anxiety that still surfaced once in a while. Five years earlier, in 1995, I’d been backstage at the NHL Awards when I heard the words I’ve heard maybe a million times, “Here’s your host, Ron MacLean.” My mind started to weigh the consequences of a bad performance, and immediately I became too self-aware. It ignited a terrible anxiety attack within me. I learned to deal with it through a story I’d heard, a story about the brilliant figure skating pair (and real-life couple) Sergei Grinkov and Ekaterina Gordeeva. At the 1994 Olympics, just ahead of their second Olympic gold medal, their choreographer, Marina Zueva, said to them, “Don’t worry about the judges. They are just happy for a day out of the office.”
So, on the night of the NHL Awards, I told myself, “Get out of yourself and think about the other folks. The people sitting at the dinner tables. If you were in their shoes, what would you want? A laugh and an interesting thought. Somebody not to bore me or to preach at me.”
In Sydney, we learned that the CBC’s crew was a little too bare-bones. That Olympics nearly killed everybody who went over from the network, and it made us realize we couldn’t have people stretched that thinly again. It was tough, because a couple of times I was close to incapacitating exhaustion. I was not having fun.
Before the Games began in 2000, we did a preview show. Crocodile Dundee’s Paul Hogan is Australian, of course. In an interview, he said something that has become one of my favourite lines: “You don’t go back to someone’s house because you like the furniture.” It’s a profound statement that stuck with me, so I wanted to incorporate that into my on-camera introduction. I thought it would be a good idea to say it while wearing a Crocodile Dundee hat, which looks like a Tilley hat made out of leather. I found one at a hat store and tried it on. I looked in the mirror, and the saleslady said, “Is it the rat’s ass?”
I turned it over in my head. “Rat’s ass? That’s funny, in Canada we say ‘cat’s ass.’” I looked in the mirror again and decided it was the rat’s ass. I smiled at the compliment and, feeling fairly Crocodile Dundee-ish, I paid for it and wore it out onto the street. I was about halfway down the block before it dawned on me that, with an Australian accent, “rat’s ass” means “right size.”
Don, Cari and I were together again at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. Unlike Sydney, those Games were a joy to do. I would anchor in the afternoon and then host a hockey game while Brian Williams did the evening shift. On the nights when there was no hockey, we would go back to the hotel room—except, instead of me and Don with the bucket of ice and the clicker, it was me and Don and Cari. Don has a code of behaviour around women. He’s very gentlemanly, never swears, minds his manners and all that. About eight days into the Games, Don pulled me aside and said, “When’s Cari going home? Can’t you get rid of her?”
Of course, Cari wasn’t going anywhere, so we’d sit in front of the TV, watching all the events. Don, the big, tough guy that he is, absolutely cringes while watching figure skating. Especially pairs. Every time the skaters attempt a jump, he turns away from the screen. There are two things he can’t look at—pigs on their way to slaughter and figure skaters doing their jumps.
Grapes has an expression about hurting something helpless. “To make someone suffer is to pick the wings off a fly, and then watch it spin and spin aimlessly.” He knows figure skaters are under immense pressure and may fail, and he doesn’t want to see that moment. He has hated pork trucks since the movie Babe came out in 1995. You know what they say about the British—they love animals, it’s mankind they can’t stand. Grapes has got a deep-seated love of dogs.
I do the driving when we go on location. And if I spot a pork truck ahead on the road, I’ll look at my watch and say, “Geez, I’m hungry. Are you peckish? I’m starting to get a little peckish.” And he’ll say, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind stopping for something to eat.” I’ll start talking about bacon and eggs and sausages and build the story up before we pull alongside the pork truck. When he sees the pigs, with their snouts pressed up against the holes in the crates, he’ll look at me and go, “Awww, geez, Ron, why’d you have to say all that?”
We were watching the figure skating at the Salt Lake Olympics, and something happened that was one of the greatest things I’ve seen in my life. During the pairs competition, just before the long program, Jamie Salé, who was going to have to do side-by-side triple-toe loops thirty seconds into the routine, was warming up. Jamie’s routine was that, just before the announcer gave the one-minute warning, she would do one good double. Her partner, David Pelletier, was down at the far end of the arena. Their Russian archrivals, Anton Sikharulidze and Elena Berezhnaya, were at the other end of the ice. Jamie started her steps and saw the Russians’ pattern. She thought they were setting up for a lift and moved her pattern to one side to avoid them. But rather than go diagonal, they were doing an “S” pattern and preparing for a throw. Jamie’s back was to them as they came flying around the corner at full speed. Berezhnaya was out front, arms extended behind her, looking like a figureh
ead on the bow of a ship. Anton was holding her hands. Jamie spun around in time to collide with Anton in the middle of the rink. His leg hit her hard in the sternum. Down they went, Salé and Sikharulidze.
Anton managed to push Elena out of danger. She spun away unharmed, and he wasn’t hurt, either. His legs are as thick as hundred-year-old oak trees, and he has guns like Georges Laraque, but Salé is tiny. The first thing Anton did was skate over to Jamie. They were both in shock. He said, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” She understood it was a totally honest mistake and no one was to blame, but she couldn’t answer because she had been badly winded. He graciously leaned over and helped her up. He basically dusted her off, and the program got underway.
That night, both couples skated beautifully, with the Russian pair winning gold. The crowd was stunned. Jamie and David had skated the performance of their lives, and everyone watching thought they had won. It turned out they should have won. An investigation revealed a scoring scandal. It was alleged that the French judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne, had agreed to vote for the Russians, no matter how the skating unfolded, in a trade for raising the scores of some French skaters in the ice dance competition. The IOC got involved, and six days later, Jamie and David’s silver medals were elevated to gold.
It’s funny how, as a society, we’ve gone from having saints and royalty as our heroes to choosing entertainment and sports stars as the people we look up to. Before the Industrial Revolution, most people were serfs, uneducated and too busy working to worry about creating their own moral compasses. Religious people were virtuous, and kings and queens inherited divinity. But the Industrial Revolution came along, and people had more time because of the way work got done. So they started to participate in sports.