An old farmer living in southern Saskatchewan thought he had seen it all.
From monster dust storms that blotted out the sun and turned day to night during the Great Depression.
To Aurora Borealis that lit up the winter’s night sky.
But this was a first.
He was shocked to see a pickup truck, going at least 100 kilometres per hour with something on top of it that baffled him.
A young man crouched down, holding onto ski poles and strapped to two large skis.
He would tell friends what he saw but few would believe him… until that man on skis made history.
I’m Craig Baird and this is Canadian History Ehx.
And today as part of my series on Olympic stories, I share how a group of skiers defied the odds by barrelling down mountains faster than anyone else.
These are…The Crazy Canucks.
Before skiing was a sport, it was survival.
No crowds.
No gates.
No finish lines.
Just wooden boards, leather straps, and the need to get home before dark.
Long before Olympic medals, skiing belonged to hunters, messengers, and soldiers.
The oldest ski fragments ever found come from what is now Russia and Scandinavia and date back 9,000 years.
The word ski comes from the Norse, meaning “split piece of wood”.
Skiing wasn’t graceful or symmetrical.
Sometimes one ski was long for gliding, the other short for pushing.
Speed was dangerous.
Controlled descent mattered more.
The goal was to stay upright and get down alive.
That mindset would remain and would travel across the ocean as immigrants from Scandinavia began to arrive at our shores.
By 1871, there were 1,623 Scandinavians living in Canada, in just 30 years that would grow to over 30,000 and they would bring with them cultural traditions and norms…. including skis.
At the time, skiing was so foreign to Canadians that we didn’t even know what to call the long, strange things the Scandinavians were strapping to their feet, so they called them snow skates.
The use of snow skates, sorry… slowly spread across Canada.
Meanwhile, Norway had already hosted one of the first documented ski competitions in Tromsø on March 19, 1843, and over the next few decades the sport would evolve as skiing spread into the Alps.
The first international competition took place between Montgenevre (France) and Claviere (Italy) in 1907.
In Canada, the first “Dominion of Canada” ski championships were held in 1898 in Rossland, as part of the first Winter Carnival.
Olaus Jeldness won both the downhill and the jumping events.
By 1904 ski clubs began to sprout, first in Montreal, followed by Quebec and Toronto in 1908 and then Ottawa in 1910.
Seven years later, the first Canadian ski resort, Chalet Cochand, near Ste-Marguerite, Quebec, opened.
However, for the most part, Canadians mostly cross-country skied.
More daring folks took part in ski jumping but downhill skiing as a sport was almost non-existent.
Throughout the 1920s, Canada lagged far behind Europe when it came to downhill skiing.
But a few skiers wanted to change that.
In 1932, an English ski team from Oxford, invited by the McGill University ski team, to Chalet Cochand to compete at the first major Canadian slalom race.
The British team easily won.
This was the first exposure for Canadians to European skiing.
The slalom race introduced steel edges and turning techniques developed in Austria.
A year later, the McGill ski team took what they had learned to Europe where they won Canada’s first international intercollegiate relay championship.
That team included George Jost, who was the first Canadian to win an individual title overseas.
After World War II, everything accelerated.
Skiing exploded in popularity with the arrival of buckle boots, metal skis and stretch pants.
As more Canadians hit the slopes, a new generation of skiers developed that could make waves or I guess snow drifts? On the international stage.
(BEAT)
Lucile Wheeler was one of them.
In 1958, the skier from Quebec became the first North American to win a world title in the downhill event at the World Championships.
Anne Heggtveit followed with a gold medal at the 1960 Winter Olympics in the Giant Slalom and added a World Championship that same year.
Nancy Greene had an incredible year in 1968 when she won Olympic gold and silver, along with two World Championships on her way to becoming the Greatest Female Canadian Athlete of the 20th Century.
That isn’t just my opinion. It was made official in 1999.
In 1970, Betsy Clifford won the World Championships, followed by Kathy Kreiner who captured the title in 1976.
Women took the skiing world which had been historically dominated by Europeans by storm.
Just as the men dragged behind.
From 1956 to 1976, Canadians women won three gold, a silver and a bronze at the Olympics.
They also captured four gold and two silvers at the World Championships.
The men?
Zilch.
They didn’t see a single podium.
But things were about to change.
Canada hadn’t inherited an Alpine tradition.
It inherited terrain.
Long, icy runs.
Variable snow in places where the weather changed by the minute.
But the story of how men made Canadian ski history began somewhere even more challenging and completely unexpected.
The Prairies.
In the small community of Shaunavon, Saskatchewan to be exact.
Where Jim Hunter was born on May 30, 1953.
When Jim was 10, he was jumping on his bed with his brother Lorne.
During the horseplay, he jumped too high and his head hit the low ceiling.
Knocked off balance, he fell off the bed and hit the back of his head on the cement floor.
For three days, he was in a coma at the Shaunavon Hospital.
When he finally woke up, he had no memory of the incident or who he was.
Thankfully, his memory returned within a few weeks and as he recovered from the accident he was forced to wear a helmet.
It made him a target for school bullies and teachers.
He said,
“Living in a small town, it wasn’t long before everyone said, ‘Look at that idiot’. I don’t remember any teacher that cared.”
To build Jim’s confidence, his father, bought second-hand skis from a neighbour.
With no mountains or slopes in southern Saskatchewan, Jim learned to ski by holding on to a rope that was tied to a horse.
His father would watch Jim be pulled for hours as he had the time of his life.
It inspired him to book a family Easter vacation to Whitefish, Montana500 kilometres southwest of the wide-open plains of Shaunavon.
Whitefish is a charming ski town at the base of Big Mountain, and when Jim arrived, he was overwhelmed by the terrain.
He had never been on a true ski hill, and he didn’t know exactly how to ski.
Jim said,
“My idea of skiing was going as fast as I could go, feed wide apart, balanced between two skis.”
On the third day, the Whitefish ski patroller took Jim’s ticket away and said he was too dangerous.
As Jim pleaded for his ticket the head instructor from the ski school approached them and offered Jim a deal.
If he could beat him in a race to the bottom of the run, he could have his lift ticket back and go as fast as he wanted.
Jim beat him.
The instructor found Jim’s father and said,
“I’ve never seen a kid feel so comfortable skiing so fast.”
When the family returned to Shaunavon, they had a decision to make because Jim had two loves.
On one hand he had been playing hockey for years and was good at it.
On the other, Jim showed promise as a skier.
To continue with either would require a move to a larger city for better training.
Saskatoon and Regina were in the mix, but in the end the mountains of Calgary beckoned, and the family made the move.
Jim’s older sister Marilyn stayed in Saskatchewan and every weekend; the rest of the family drove 966 kilometres from Calgary to Shaunavon to help on the farm.
They did this for three years while Jim learned to ski properly.
He was 12 years old when he started and late to the program, but what he lacked in experience he had in determination. In the summers, he practiced the racing tuck position, by building a rack on top of a pick-up truck that his father drove 100 km/h.
For his balance, he would use the wheel of a moving tractor and jump from it.
He already had what others lacked…. Fearlessness.
And with the help of his unorthodox training methods, he was ready for competition.
By 1968, he was competing on the Can-Am skiing circuit and while traveling around the continent.
He had also earned the nickname Jungle Jim because of his aggressive racing style.
Whenever he arrived at competitions he thought he was hot stuff on the slopes.
Al Raine, the husband of skier Nancy Greene and the director of Canada’s National Ski Team, took notice.
He decided Jim needed more motivation and invited three French skiers and a Swiss skier, who were not the best those countries had to offer to race Jim. quote
“They just destroyed us in every race. These guys would beat us by eight to ten seconds. No one was close to them…I remember all of us looking at each other. We thought we were hot stuff. We realized that we were nothing. It inspired me.”
And Jim was determined to get better and win.
By the time he was 16 years old he had only been skiing for four years.
He was about to get his chance to make his mark internationally when he was named to the 1970 Canadian Men’s Alpine Ski Team.
And when he made it to the starting gate he may not have skied correctly.
But he skied honestly.
Fast when it mattered.
Straight when others turned.
And just as Jim was getting ready to strike… other Canadians would be there to join him.
Much like Jungle Jim Hunter, in the prairies Dave Murray, came late to skiing.
Born on Sept. 5, 1953, in Vancouver, he was 11 years old when he started to ski and by the time he was 15 Whistler Mountain Ski Club president Sonny O’Sullivan took him to his first race where he crossed paths with a hero.
Quote said,
“Jungle came to stay with us too. In the morning, Jungle went for a five-mile run. Well, Dave had never been for a five-mile run but if Jungle did it, he was going too. After the run David was pooped and didn’t make it to the second gate in his race. He was never pooped again; he progressed from there.”
By 1971, Dave had only been competing for four years, but he was about to follow in Jungle Jim’s footsteps and join the Canadian National Ski Team.
Where they were going to be joined by another Dave that would help them conquer the podium.
Unlike Jungle Jim and Dave Murray, Dave Irwin was born into skiing.
By the time he was three years old he was on the slopes of his father Bill’s Loch Lomond ski resort in Thunder Bay, Ont.
Skiing was in his blood.
His grandfather Bert Irwin Sr had been a carpenter by trade and in 1929 gave his two sons Bert Jr and Bill, Dave’s father skis for Christmas.
Two years later he formed the Amber Ski Hill outside Princeton, British Columbia.
Meanwhile, both Bert Jr. and Bill were already proficient skiers.
Bill won several Canadian championships in ski jumping, cross-country skiing and downhill skiing.
In 1948, Bill and Bert competed at the Winter Olympics and although they didn’t win a medal they made a mark.
Their efforts put Canada on the map in the skiing world.
Two years after the Olympics, Bill moved to Thunder Bay with his wife to develop a ski resort.
That’s where Dave was born on July 12, 1954.
Six years later, Dave was already competing in his first race.
In 1967, the Canadian Junior Alpine Championship was held in Thunder Bay, where Dave Irwin, now 13, took part and finished 14th and 17th in his races.
He continued to pursue the sport he was born into and two years later at the Pontiac Cup in Mount Tremblant, Quebec something strange happened.
He was preparing for the 1969 slalom when someone stole his skis.
He had two choices, pull out of the race or put on his downhill skis and prove to whoever had robbed him that no matter what skis he wore, he could win.
Dave finished second in the giant slalom and two years later he joined Jungle Jim and Dave Murray on the Canadian National Ski Team. He said,
“My career may have been more successful had I continued training slalom. However, once I joined the national team, we all switched focus to the downhill. Luckly, I was successful at downhill too.”
At his first national team training camp he met Dave Murray who didn’t make a great first impression “Everyone had to chip in because it was a huge job to ski pack the fresh snow. Then along came Dave Murray. He would make some turns in the powder snow, stop, pack ten-twenty feet and then go back into the powder. Dave was a great guy, but that first impression wasn’t good.”
Dave Irwin was only 17 years old, and he had joined the team, the same age as Jungle Jim while Dave Murray was only a year older.
These young skiers with a devil may care attitude on the slopes were about two be joined by two more and together they would take on the world.
Ken Read, also had skiing in his blood.
His mother had won the Canadian downhill and combined championships in 1948 and seven years later had Ken.
He was born on Nov. 6, 1955, and from an early age skiing was a way of life.
By he was three, Ken was on the slopes outside Vancouver.
In 1962, the family moved to Kingston, Ontario where Ken joined the Ottawa Ski Club He said,
“I got to know a bunch of kids who loved to bomb down the hill. We built bumps and executed spread eagles.”
That daredevil attitude came at a cost.
In December 1967, Ken skied over a homemade ski jump and broke his leg in two places.
The next year, the Reads were living in Calgary and Ken wasted no time in joining the Lake Louise Ski Club.
Much like the other skiers in this story Ken had a need for speed.
But unlike the others he seemed more accident prone when he broke his leg again.
Serious injuries never kept him far from the slopes and as soon as he recovered, he was again speeding down the hill chasing the freedom that came with skiing.
In 1972, the family moved to in Switzerland when his father took a position with the World Health Organization.
Ken suffered from culture shock.
Surrounded by the Alps, Ken discovered that while skiing was often for fun in Canada, in Europe it was serious business.
“To be exposed to European competition, to participate in intense year-round racer development and to watch how the best racers skied, had also given me the impetus to make ski racing my life.”
When the family returned to Canada in 1973, Ken was asked to join a preliminary national team ski camp in Banff He said,
“There was a whole whack of us from all over the country trying to learn. Having these camps for individual like us brought us together.”
Within a year, Ken was on the national team, and he would be joined by a friend he made in Banff who would help make Olympic history… his name?
Steve Podborski.
Steve Podborski was born on July 25, 1957, to Jacquie and Mike Podborski.
By the time he was four years old his parents had invested into the new Craigleith Ski Club east of Owen Sound, Ontario.
They purchased a plot of land from the club and built a cabin. From then on, the ski hill became Steve’s backyard and second home.
The ski club started a junior racing program, which remained relatively unorganized until 1968 when they hosted Nancy Greene Ski League.
For only $20 for the season, his parents enrolled both their sons into the school.
After all, it was cheaper than a babysitter.
Before long, Steve was winning races and soon advanced into the Southern Ontario Ski Zone division.
By the time he was 13, he was an A-level skier.
From 1970 to 1973, he raced throughout Ontario and Quebec where he turned heads and soon, he was invited to a training camp at Whistler Mountain in British Columbia.
During camp the young skiers were put through their paces and then would race twice.
The winner would be invited to the national ski team.
The camp wasn’t glamourous, they slept in tents on the snow near the top of the mountain without showers and got up every day at 3 am to hike up to the top of the lift which was a big rope dragged by an old Volkswagen engine Despite the rough conditions, Steve won the giant slalom and finished second in the combined. Steve didn’t make the team but got a new pair of skis.
It seemed he would have to wait to join the team but then… he received an unexpected letter in the mail a few weeks after camp.
A mistake had been made.
The winners of both the giant slalom and the combined were supposed to be invited to the national team.
And so… Steve Podborski joined, Dave Murray, Dave Irwin, Ken Read and Jungle Jim to become what would soon be known as….
The Crazy Canucks.
The Canadian men’s alpine team in the early 1970s didn’t look intimidating.
They didn’t come from famous academies.
They didn’t ski with textbook precision.
They trained on inconsistent snow, icy pitches, and terrain that punished hesitation.
That gave them a tolerance for instability.
Jungle Jim had been the first to burst through at the international stage.
And he was the first to show a pattern that became synonymous with Canadian skiers.
They were slower in technical sections.
Faster in straightaways and faster through terrain others treated as survival zones.
The Canadians weren’t choosing safer lines.
They were choosing faster ones.
In his first two World Cup races in February and December of 1971, Jungle Jim finished ninth in both races. A year later the Winter Olympics were held in Sapporo, Japan, with the alpine events taking place at Mount Eniwa.
Jim came in 20th in the downhill race. He said,
“I blasted out of the start and rushed into the turns. I rocketed through the finish, and I was sure I had won. It was a cruel shock when I hadn’t.”
In the giant slalom he finished 11th, and in the slalom 12th.
During the closing ceremonies, he found out that in the combined results of the alpine event, he had finished third and won a bronze.
This wasn’t an Olympic bronze, but a Federation Internationale de ski bronze because in 1972 the Olympics doubled as the World Championships.
After decades of competing, a Canadian man had finally won a medal at the World Championship r.
The next season in December 1972, at Val d’Isere, France when he placed fourth.
It was the best finish for a Canadian male skier at a World Cup event thus far.
Jungle Jim had opened the door for Canadian skiers in Europe because he was fearless.
That attitude became infectious when Dave Irwin and Dave Murray moved up to the World Cup circuit during the 1973/74 season.
Dave Irwin said,
“That first trip to race in the European World Cup races left me a little numb.”
But the two Daves quickly got their bearings as they proved to be as good on the slopes of Europe as they were in Canada.
Dave Murray started the season in 86th spot but by the time of the World Championship in St. Moritz, rolled around at the end of the season he was 16th.
He finished eighth in his final race, ahead of the entire Swiss team.
Ken Read and Steve Podborski joined Jungle Jim, and the Daves for the 1974-75 ski season, where the Canadians had accumulated an impressive 46 World Cup points.
At a competition in Megeve, France, Read, Murray, Hunter and Podborski all finished in the top 15.
The Canadians had served notice to the Europeans that change was coming.
Ken Read said,
“We were a very disparate group ranging from 17 to 22, a fairly wide range of ages and experience. By the end of the season, it was an experienced world-wise group that had distilled.”
He would become a problem for European skiers.
And he showed the first signs of that on January 11, 1975, in Wengen, Switzerland
The Lauberhorn downhill was already legendary:
Nearly 4.5 kilometers long with a vertical drop over 1,000 meters.
It had sections like the Hundschopf jump that punished fear.
Ken Read attacked the course with a directness that unsettled spectators.
Where others scrubbed speed before compressions, Read stayed flat.
Where others feathered edges, he trusted absorption.
He may not have won that day, but he served notice.
Europe assumed the Canadians were flukes.
They weren’t.
The next season saw Dave Irwin have six top ten finishes.
He even won the downhill race at the Schladming, Austria World Cup event on Dec. 20, 1975, by defeating the second-place challenger by nearly two seconds.
He said,
“I came through the finish line, and I just knew I didn’t make any mistakes. It was just one of those days when everything went well in life.”
Not to be outdone, Ken Read had six top ten finishes during the 75/76 season.
The shining moment for Read came on Dec. 12, 1975, at the legendary Val d’Isère resort in the French Alps
The downhill would be contested on a steep, icy, and unforgiving course that had features demanding bravery and ball-to-the-wall speed.
Ken Read had both and won.
Rounding out the season were Steve Podborski, who had four top ten finishes, while Dave Murray had seven.
At the Canadian Alpine Ski Championships, Ken Read continued his dominance by winning the downhill, while Jungle Jim won the Giant Slalom, Slalom and Combined.
Ken would go on to win the downhill every year until 1980, The Canadian skiers seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate both in Canada and abroad.
European skiers had seen nothing like it before.
While they skied with precision and focus, the Canadians skied with abandon.
They became known as the “Crazy Canucks”, but the term wasn’t a marketing slogan.
It was shorthand because they were unpredictable, dangerously fast and difficult to coach against.
Because what made them “crazy” was that they skied fall lines that weren’t considered optimal yet.
And that made them terrifying.
They also…. crashed more often and on Jan. 9, 1976, at Wengen, Switzerland, Ken Read took a bad corner and did not make it down the course.
Unharmed, he walked away.
A few minutes later, his teammate Dave Irwin was cruising at 120 km/h, he came to the same curve and lost control.
As he fell, his body flew through the air, and he landed hard on his back.
His limp body rolled down into the protective netting.
Read went up to his friend expecting him to be okay but instead saw blood everywhere.
Irwin was starting to turn blue.
quote
“I actually turned away and almost got sick. And then the officials were on top of him. I ended up carrying his helmet full of blood to the finish.”
Irwin had suffered a severe concussion, several broken ribs and facial cuts from his glasses smashing.
His skis, helmet and poles were all destroyed.
Irwin spent a week in the hospital and didn’t remember much of the accident. Today, the spot where Irwin and Read wiped out is called Canadian Corner.
Meanwhile the team continued to prepare for the 1976Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.
They would be starting in February and Dave Irwin had just crashed in Switzerland.
Many feared he would not be ready in time.
He had other plans.
The event in t Wengen had solidified the team’s nickname, especially after Jungle Jim took an S curve that was iced over, and journalist Patrick Lang said,
“Those Canucks ski like they are crazy!”.
Dave Murray said they weren’t crazy; they just liked the sheer ice course.
Quote
“On a soft course, you have to follow the route everyone takes, but on ice you ski your own race. You pick your route and take shortcuts to save time.”
As Dave Irwin healed, the rest of the Canadian team prepared for the Olympics.
And then tragedy struck again when Steve Podborski crashed e on a training run and ruptured his ACL and MCL in his right knee.
He wouldn’t be going to the Olympics and instead would be watching his teammates from a Toronto hospital bed.
As he recovered, he watched Canada’s flag be carried into the Opening Ceremonies.
Dave Irwin had been given the honours but turned it down worried that the strain of standing with the flag through the ceremony could aggravate his healing body.
He said,
“I couldn’t do it. I didn’t even go in the parade. I just slept a lot. Walking 200 metres for a meal caused me to break out in a sweat. I was exhausted.”
Irwin now believes he should have never been allowed to race in his condition but in 1976 the rest of the remaining Crazy Canucks competed hard and had respectable finishes.
In the downhill, Ken Read took fifth place, only .4 seconds away from the podium. He said,
“I made a technical change and paid dearly for it. The error I took was taking a more direct line, the conservative line.”
Dave Irwin finished eighth, in what Dave Murray called the gutsiest thing he ever saw. After the Olympics, Jungle Jim competed at the Nations Cup at Mount St. Anne in Quebec on March 20, 1976.
He took third place and then retired from competition.
In his career, he had two podium finishes, a World Championship medal and competed in two Olympics.
However, the rest Crazy Canucks, were still getting started but they would have some bumps along the way.
Dave Irwin suffered another head injury at the start of the 76/77 season at Val Gardena on a course that was slicker than expected.
Dave was unable to stop quickly enough and hit the hay bales at the end of the course headfirst.
He suffered concussion but raced the following day.
It was a brutal start to a horrible season for the Canadians.
They weren’t placing as high in the standings as before, and many in the European media questioned whether they were just a flash in the pan.
There were no podium finishes that season and Steve Podborski said, the 1976-77 season was the worst time of his life.”
Dave Irwin took time to fully recover from his injuries, while the team worried about losing sponsorships and questioned their confidence.
Once it was over, they returned to Canada.
In their off season they tried to figure out what happened.
The had horrible results but were still skiing fast so they wanted to find out what had changed.
Was it technique or something else?
They did wind tunnel tests on European ski suits at the National Research Council in Ottawa and discovered those suits had 15 percent less wind resistance.
The Europeans had put everything into figuring out how to beat the Canadians and had succeeded with better technology.
But the Crazy Canucks had one advantage over the Europeans.
Sheer grit and careless abandon… plus new suits
Ken Read was ready to take on the mantle as the top male skier in Canada and quite possibly the world.
After having three top ten finishes in December 1977, he won the downhill World Cup race at Les Houches, France on Feb. 11, 1978.
He followed that with two more top 10 finishes.
For these heroics, he was awarded the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s top athlete that year.
He was the first male skier to receive the award.
During the 1978-79 season, if there was a Ski World Cup podium, a Canadian was on it.
Dave Murray came in second in the downhill on Dec. 10, 1978, in Schladming, Austria, and third t a few months later in March 1979 in Lake Placid.
Steve Podborski won the downhill World Cup race at Morzine, France on Jan. 6, 1979, and Ken Read continued his dominance on the slopes by winning the downhill race at Schladming, Austria on Dec. 10, 1978.
He added two third place finishes in Italy and Switzerland over the next month.
The next season would see the Crazy Canucks prepare for another Olympics, this time at Lake Placid in February 1980
By then they were known for two things:
Winning the most dangerous races
Retiring earlier than expected
Dave Irwin, Ken Read, Steve Podborski and Dave Murray had five podium finishes leading up to the games.
Ken Read won back-to-back downhill races at Wengen, Switzerland only six days apart, followed by a second-place finish.
He was considered a favourite for a gold medal at Lake Placid and was the flag bearer for Canada at the Opening Ceremonies.
Afterall, he was the first North American man to win a World Cup downhill in 1975 and was a dominant force in the sport.
But tragedy would strike 15 seconds into his downhill run when a binding issue forced him to exit the race and did not finish.
He was robbed of a likely top of the podium finish.
Dave Murray finished 10th and Dave Irwin came in 11th in the downhill.
But Steve Podborki was also on the hill on that Valentines Day 1980, and he would make history by capturing Olympic bronze.
He was the first Canadian man to medal in the downhill at the Winter Olympics, and the last until Ed Podivinsky in 1994.
Despite his accomplishment, The Ottawa Citizen even ran a headline saying that he had salvaged the bronze as it seemed the media was hellbent on downplaying his efforts.
He said quote.
“It was probably the most anti-climatic Olympic bronze in the history of ski racing as far as I was concerned because everybody was sure Ken would have gotten the gold. I was disappointed, not so much for myself, but disappointed at the attitude of the press.”
Over the next two ski seasons, Dave Murray slowly began to wind down and after a seventh-place finish on Dec. 7, 1980, in Val d’Isere, he failed to crack the top ten and retired at the end of the 82 seasons.
Dave Irwin came in third place in Whistler on Feb. 27, 1982, and retired from skiing as well.
Only two Crazy Canucks remained.
Steve Podborski and Ken Read who continued to give it their all on the slopes.
And after the Olympics and through to the end of the 1982-83 season, Ken had 18 top ten finishes, including two second and four third place finishes.
In 1983, he retired, leaving Steve Podborski, as the last of the Crazy Canucks on the ski slopes.
And he was dominating with almost 24 top ten finishes.
In one incredible stretch from Dec. 12, 1980, to Jan. 17, 1981, he had three consecutive first place finishes in World Cup downhill events. He added two more first place finishes in the 1981-82 and 1982-83 seasons.
After one more first place finish on Jan. 28, 1984, he retired from competitive skiing.
The Crazy Canuck era had faded the way high-speed eras usually do.
Through injury.
Through burnout.
Through evolution.
By the mid-1980s:
Course safety had also improved, the equipment stabilized and coaching had caught up to the Canadian speed.
The advantage the Canucks had, that comfort at the edge of madness had become methodology.
The Crazy Canucks did not invent speed, but they left a legacy that normalized commitment to the sport and proved that a straight line could win races, aggression could be strained and downhill was more than technique.
They taught skiers to be bold.
Because fortune favours the brave.
And just because they were done competing didn’t mean they were done with the sport.
After all Jungle Jim continued to compete after his retirement in 1976 on the World Pro Ski Tour and won the first downhill event.
Leading up to the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, he managed the 88-day torch relay from St. John’s to Calgary which at the time was the longest torch relay in Olympic history.
He later hosted The Jungle Jim Hunter Show on The Fan 960, a radio station out of Calgary.
Today, he works as a motivational speaker while coaching future skiers in Calgary.
Dave Irwin continued to ski on the mountains near Canmore Alberta.
During a training run at the Export A Skier-Cross on March 23, 2001, he suffered a traumatic brain injury in a serious crash that left him in a coma for three days.
He recovered, but he suffered significant memory loss.
The accident inspired the creation of the Dave Irwin Foundation for Brain Injury, which operated until 2016.
Steve Podborski was awarded the Order of Canada in 1982, while he was still competing.
After retirement, he worked as a broadcaster with NBC and CBS.
In the early-2000s, he was part of the team that helped Vancouver win the 2010 Winter Olympics.
He continues to ski around his home in Whistler.
Ken Read joined CBC as a broadcaster and columnist.
He also launched the Breath of Life Ski Challenge, which raised $3.8 million for cystic fibrosis research.
From 1985 to 1998, he sat as a member of the International Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission.
In 2002, he was awarded the Order of Canada.
From 2002 to 2008, he was the President and CEO of Alpine Canada, and in 2010, he was named the director of Winter Sport for the Own the Podium movement.
Under his leadership, Canada became one of the top winter sport nations in the world. He resigned in 2013. Today, he can be found on the slopes around Calgary where he lives.
Dave Murray founded what became the Atomic Dave Murray Summer Ski Camp in 1984.
He hoped to share his passion for skiing with new generations, while encouraging safety and fun.
With his friend Don McQuaid, he also created the Canadian Masters Alpine Series, which focused on teaching adults to improve their techniques.
Sadly, on Oct. 23, 1990, at the age of only 37, he died of skin cancer.
Today, a downhill course at Whistler Creekside was named for him.
The Crazy Canucks weren’t perfect athletes, but they became legends and continue to inspire skiers today.
In 2006, they were inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame and along with Nancy Greene are the only skiers to have that honour.
Their era didn’t last long but they collectively had 41 podium finishes, 14 World Cup victories, and two World Championship bronze.
They arrived at the exact moment when Canadian skiing needed them to show what the sport was becoming and, in the process, inspired the world.
They bravely showed Europe and any naysayers that Canucks have teeth and crazy or not the old nickname still fits.
[OUTRO]
