Campbell adapts to HNIC hot seat, eEmergency call-up opens eyes at CBC
CHRIS ZELKOVICH

When Cassie Campbell showed up for her second Hockey Night In Canada assignment Saturday morning she was certain she was the target of some rookie hazing.

Chief producer Joel Darling, at the urging of senior producer Sherali Najak, told her analyst Harry Neale was trapped in snowbound Buffalo and wondered if she could fill in for him.“At first I thought it was a joke,” the former national women’s hockey team captain said yesterday. “But then I realized they were serious.”

After a quick call to her husband in Calgary, who urged her to go for it, Campbell became the first woman to do game analysis on a nationally televised NHL broadcast during Saturday night’s Leafs-Flames game. Her former coach, Danielle Sauvageau, has done studio work for French-language RDS but no woman has gone where Campbell boldly went Saturday.

Despite a lack of experience, Campbell performed remarkably well in her historic game. Like a backup goaltender thrust into the starting role, she looked a little wobbly at times but didn’t give up any soft goals.“Sherali felt she could do it and he was right,” said Darling. “I think she performed admirably well.”

At times she performed remarkably well, though Neale’s job is safe for now. On the Leafs’ first power play she told viewers to watch for “the two-on-one down low with (Kyle) Wellwood and (Darcy) Tucker.” Seconds later, the Leafs scored with Wellwood setting up Tucker exactly as she had said.

She showed some spunk later by criticizing Tucker for embellishing a penalty and pointed out Calgary’s Jarome Iginla was the goat on the Leafs’ third goal. She was a bit wordy and managed to state the obvious a couple of times, but she wasn’t the first analyst to commit those sins. She and play-by-play man Bob Cole managed to mess up a double penalty to Calgary, but that was more of a behind-the-scenes problem.

Campbell said she wouldn’t have minded a one do-over on one comment. After a promo for a CBC crime show, Campbell told viewers, “I like crime shows,” and then proceeded to list them. “In future I’ll be more professional,” she said.

Darling said he considered other options, including flying in analyst Drew Remenda from Montreal, but Najak persuaded him Campbell had the right stuff. It was a seat-of-the-pants experiment that has opened some doors for Campbell and women. “This adds a different dimension to what we do,” said Darling, noting Campbell will get consideration when spots open up on CBC’s triple-headers. Campbell will welcome that.

“Maybe the day will come in a few years when women are doing play-by-play and analysis,” she said. “It wasn’t that long ago that people wondered if we’d ever see women playing hockey. “We’ve shown them we understand the game, so anything’s possible.” Who can argue with that?

Canadian men reach finals at gymnastics worlds.
The Canadian Press

With a surprising fifth-place showing in the qualifying round, the Canadian men’s team will end up with its best result at a world gymnastics championships, regardless of how it does in the finals Tuesday.

Eight teams advanced, and Canada’s best previous result in the men’s team event was ninth in 2003.“This takes us to another level internationally,” said elated Gymnastics Canada CEO Jean-Paul Caron.“To place fifth in the world is just a phenomenal result, and it’s really going to make people stand up and take notice of our program and our gymnasts.”

The team consists of Calgarians Kyle Shewfelt, Adam Wong and Nathan Gafuik, Ken Ikeda of Abbotsford, B.C., David Kikuchi of Halifax and Brandon O’Neill of Edmonton. Canada competed Saturday and had to wait until the end of competition Sunday, when remaining countries in the field took turns on the six apparatus, to see if its performance held up.

Olympian shares anti-smoking message: Gold medalist Duff Gibson recently toured through central Alberta.
Town & Country - Westlock

One of Canada’s gold medallists from the 2006 Torino Olympics, Duff Gibson, recently toured through Athabasca, Barrhead and Westlock to talk to students about the risks of smoking.

Earlier this year, Gibson marked his retirement from the sport of skeleton by winning a gold medal at the 2006 Olympic Games in Torino. At 41, he became the oldest individual athlete to win an Olympic gold medal. Similar to luge, skeleton involves moving down an icy track at speeds of more than 100 kilometres per hour using a man-sized sled. Skeleton is generally more risky because the sled offers little protection to the rider, who hurtles down the track headfirst.

Gibson has toured through local schools as part of Sport For Life, a program aimed at the prevention of tobacco use in Alberta’s youth. The two major partners in the program are CODA and the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission.

On Sept. 28, he visited Westlock Elementary School to give a presentation to Grade 4-6 students. Gibson talked about the sport of skeleton and how he got involved in it. He said he had tried his hand at a lot of different sports—judo, hockey, wrestling, rowing, speed skating and bobsleigh—before finally settling on to skeleton.“Sometimes you have to try a bunch of different things before you find what’s best for you,” says Gibson.

Gibson used his experiences as an athlete to demonstrate why he stayed away from cigarettes. He said that because the sleds in skeleton offer little protection, Gibson says he every bump on the track is absorbed by the racer’s body. That puts an enormous demand on his health.

To stay healthy and compete, Gibson said he needed to stay away from smoking. However, he stressed to the kids that smoking represented a loss of control. Gibson talked about tackling a particularly difficult run in Altenberg, Germany, considered to be the most difficult skeleton course in the world. The day he tried it, three racers had crashed and had to go to hospital, he said. One of those racers was a teammate. He felt stressed out but countered the stress with breathing exercises. When it came to his turn, “I was nervous but I was in control,” he said.
Gibson then pointed out that smoking was addictive, which led to a loss of control. Once you start, he said, it’s very hard to quit.

Gibson dedicated another portion of his presentation to overcoming challenges, noting that his toughest challenge in 2006 was not competing in the Olympics, but “getting to the Olympics.” Leading up to the Games, Gibson had suffered two charleyhorses and broken a rib three weeks before on a race. The injuries threatened to take him out of competition at Torino. He had only a short time to heal leading up to the Olympics. "You can imagine how stressful that would be,” he said.

Nevertheless, he found ways to deal with the stress, just as he done in Germany. He asked the students if smoking was good way to deal with personal problems, adding that cigarettes only “create another problem.” He reminded the students that there were three younger grades in the school looking up to them, adding that “saying no is a very important thing” in many ways

Things are looking up for jumpers: OPTIMISM: Pending vote, women may join men on the hill for Vancouver’s Games.
The Vancouver Province

People won’t be mistaking them for Finns or Norwegians any time soon. But led by 19-year-old Stefan Read and a competitive women’s program, Canada’s constantly struggling national ski jumping team enters the 2006-07 season with more optimism than it’s had in years.

“We were just starting to get some good results last year and that has been very helpful,” said Ron Read, Stefan’s dad and the high performance director for Ski Jumping Canada. “Things are much more encouraging than they were a year ago.”

In fact, on Saturday, 14-year-old Trevor Morrice landed a silver medal in an FIS (Federation Internationale du Ski) Cup event in Switzerland to become the first Canadian to podium in the event for more than 10 years.

That must be good news for anyone expecting Canada to own the podium and lead all nations in medals standings at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver/Whistler. Ski jumping, nordic combined and biathlon—historically a snowy version of the Bermuda Triangle for Canadian Olympians—offered 48 medals at the 2006 Olympics in Turin. Canada, of course, went 0-for-48.

But that snowjob could change come 2010. Last May the FIS voted to include women’s jumping in the 2009 world championships. On Wednesday the International Olympic Committee will vote on making women’s ski jumping a full medal sport in 2010.“All the indications we’re getting [from the IOC] is that this [a yes vote] is a no brainer,” said Calgary’s Brent Morrice, (Trevor’s father) chairman of Ski Jumping Canada.“One of the IOC’s main criteria is gender equity. There’s nothing there that should stand in the way of this. The people we talk to at the IOC are saying this is more than likely going to pass.”

VANOC would have to approve the inclusion of women’s jumping in the 2010 Olympics. But that should also be a no brainer. Including women in the 2010 Olympics would be good for Canada. Canada has a young and improving men’s team but it’s a stretch to consider any of them a medal contender. On the women’s side, Calgary’s Katie Willis, 15, had eight top-10 results against the world’s best on the Continental Cup circuit last season. Women will compete on the World Cup this season.

“We’re optimistic that the IOC is going to add the women’s event,” said Ron Read, who’s hopeful that a yes vote would convince the bankrollers of Canadian Olympic sport—Sport Canada and VANOC’s $110 million Own the Podium program—to send a few more cheques his way.

Read would like to see a little more enthusiasm within Canada for the women’s program.“I find it a little frustrating that we have to go through hoops to get the women’s program recognized,” he said. “They’re only supporting things that have the Olympic rings behind it. It’s kind of a chicken and the egg situation. If you had a couple of nations really supporting it, women’s jumping would be in the Olympics.”

Besides Willis, Calgary’s Atsuko Tanaka, 16, won a silver medal in the individual jump at the 2006 world junior championships. Stefan Read, nephew of former Crazy Canuck downhiller Ken Read, made a significant—in ski jumping terms—breakthough at the 2006 Olympics. Read placed 30th on the large hill after a 23rd-place finish on the large hill at a World Cup in Poland. Teammate Graeme Gorham also reached the large hill final and placed 50th.

Those breakthroughs brought a $170,000 windfall from Own the Podium. This summer, ski jumping got its first ever sponsor from outside the ski industry. Hayworth Furniture is kicking in a minimum $50,000 this year.“It’s been really good, all the way around,” said Morrice. “We’re looking forward to a promising season. We got great results last year and we’re asking these guys [athletes] for a little bit better.”

Nordic combined, which is a combination of ski jumping and cross-country skiing, has even more work. Calgary’s Jason Myslicki, was Canada’s top finisher in Turin with a 41st place finish in the individual Gunderson event (two normal hill jumps and a 15-km race) but he has retired. Max Thompson, 22, who placed 44th in Turin, is taking a break from competition this season and will coach for a year before competing again in 2007-08.

Nordic combined is demanding. Myslicki worked in a Calgary sushi restaurant to save enough money to pay his own pre-Turin training costs in the U.S.“We’re in a rebuilding phase,” said national team assistant coach Damian Carson. “We’ll have no presence on the World Cup circuit this year. We’re focusing on our young athletes.” And he means young. Team Canada consists of a group of 16 Calgarians aged 13 to 19.

Laumann wants 2010 Olympics to inspire kids to play
From Monday’s Globe and Mail

The coming Vancouver-Whistler Olympics should serve as a catalyst for reversing the troubling decline in the health and fitness of Canadian children, one of Canada’s most celebrated athletes says. “The Olympic Games are a tremendous opportunity to capture kids’ imaginations,” Silken Laumann said in an interview. “We can use the 2010 Olympic Games as a launching pad for a new health promotion strategy and we can use these Olympics as a deadline for action,” she said.

Ms. Laumann, who now heads the health promotion group Silken’s Active Kids, will make that pitch Monday when she testifies at the Commons standing committee on health in Ottawa. She will tell the all-party committee of MPs that the most important legacy of the Winter Games should not be the number of medals Canadians win, but the number of Canadian children inspired to be more active and healthy.

“I went to four Olympics and I’m really proud of that,” Ms. Laumann said. “But I realize that the Olympics can be so much more than a showcase for elite athletes.
“They can inspire children. They can change their lives.”

Ms. Laumann founded her group in 2003 because she was troubled by the state of children’s health. Children need to be moderately or vigorously active for at least 90 minutes a day for healthy growth and development, according to Canada’s physical activity guidelines. But only 43 per cent of children meet that minimum standard. Not surprisingly, children today are fatter than they have ever been: 26 per cent of children are either overweight or obese, according to Statistics Canada.

Ms. Laumann believes those dismal numbers can be turned around. She vividly recalls, as an 11-year-old, being awestruck by the performance of gymnast Nadia Comaneci at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. (The Romanian pixie won five medals, including three gold.) “That’s what made me want to be an Olympic athlete,” Ms. Laumann said. “But, more importantly, it made me want to jump and play and be active.”

In her submission to the Commons committee Monday, Ms. Laumann will call on politicians and policy-makers to make a commitment — financial and otherwise — to creating an on-going, coast-to-coast “backyard Olympics” — one where “what matters is not how fast you run or how strong you are, but how many minutes you spend skipping or playing kick-the-can.”

She said this can be achieved by finding a way to propagate successful programs that already exist in a number of communities in Canada.

Ms. Laumann, author of the well-received book Child’s Play: Rediscovering the Joy of Play in Our Families and Communities, said this can be done by hiring co-ordinators in various regions who provide basic information, and backing it with a marketing campaign pegged to the 2010 Olympics.

Wickenheiser may hit Europe again: Olympic goal drives Canuck to next level.
The Calgary Herald

Training for the Olympic Games was gruelling and stressful, and Hayley Wickenheiser misses it terribly. The 28-year-old forward on the Canadian women’s hockey team is casting about for ways to make herself an even better player than the one who was named MVP of the Olympic women’s tournament in February, despite playing with a broken bone in her right wrist.

Wickenheiser has pushed the envelope in the past by playing men’s pro hockey in Finland and she’s considering returning to the European men’s leagues before the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.“If I was to challenge myself to the next level, I’d probably have to go back to Europe,” Wickenheiser said Tuesday at the Olympic Oval. “It’s something we looked into this year. Nothing really panned out. I think the next two summers, I’d probably still look into it.”

Wickenheiser and the rest of the Canadian women’s team spent last winter centralized in Calgary. They played more than 40 games while competing for a spot on an Olympic team that dominated play in Turin, Italy, and defended the gold medal.

It was a hockey hothouse environment that happens every three years, but Wickenheiser wishes it was every year.“If we could be centralized for the rest of my entire hockey career, that would be a perfect situation for me,” she said. “There wouldn’t be any other reason to look for anything else I thrive under pressure and stress. It seems to take my game to another level.”

The five-foot-10, 170-pound forward from Shaunavon, Sask., led the Canadian team in Turin with five goals and 12 assists and is the national team’s all-time leading scorer with 110 goals and 131 assists in 169 games.

She spent parts of two seasons playing for Kirkkonummi Salamat in the Finnish men’s pro league and had three goals and 16 assists in 40 games. She was the first woman other than a goalie to play men’s pro hockey.

This season, Wickenheiser will be busy with the Canadian team, which will play in the Four Nations Cup in Kitchener, Ont., from Nov. 7 to 11. She is also eager to play for the Oval X-Treme this season because the Western Women’s Hockey League team could vie for the Clarkson Cup in March.

The Western Women’s Hockey League, which includes the X-Treme, and National Women’s Hockey League have mended their relationship and the top two teams from each league will play for a national title and the trophy, donated by former Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson.

Salamat earned promotion from the second division to the first—one below the Finnish Elite League—during Wickenheiser’s tenure, but her ice time was reduced after the club’s promotion. She also found it difficult to be separated from her boyfriend Tomas Pacina, who coaches the Calgary Oval X-Treme women’s team, and her son Noah, and Wickenheiser returned to Canada in November of that year.
Wickenheiser said Pacina and Noah would have to be where she is in any future relocation.

And she says she has enough in Calgary right now to keep her competitive juices flowing post-Olympics. The Canadian women’s team will play the U.S., Sweden and Finland in the Four Nations Cup in Kitchener, Ont., from Nov. 7 to 11. Wickenheiser is also excited to play for the Oval X-Treme this season because she could be playing for the Clarkson Cup next March.

“To me, this is the most exciting year outside of the Olympics in the last four because now we have more competition across the country, which we didn’t have,” she said.

Wickenheiser wanted out of the gym this past summer, so she did most of her training outdoors with (Jungle) Jim Hunter, a former national team alpine skier from the Crazy Canuck era. She ran hills and launched herself off picnic tables in Fish Creek Provincial Park, moved boulders and rode her bike the 724 kilometres from Calgary to Osoyoos, B.C., in four days.“I did crazy things and I had the best fitness results I’ve ever had in my career,” Wickenheiser said.

She still requires surgery on the wrist she broke in Turin, but has opted to wait until next year to have it done.

Sporting equivalent of an arms race: TECHNOLOGY I Innovations should give Canadians competitive edge.
The Vancouver Sun

Link the words sport and science these days and too often it conjures up an image of unscrupulous chemists concocting designer drugs to keep elite athletes a step ahead of the field—and doping control.

Unfortunately, those “mad scientists” overshadow some of the legitimate lab and field science work being done, remarkable innovation and performance enhancement that has taken Olympic sport far beyond the old coach-instructs, athlete-reacts model.

The Top Secret component of the Canadian Olympic Committee’s Own the Podium 2010 aims to give Canadian athletes a competitive edge at Vancouver-Whistler. The sporting equivalent of an arms race, it involves research into everything from the best high-tech material for bobsleigh runners, snowboards and skis to biomechanical studies of athletes’ techniques to the latest advances in nutrition and training.

Naturally, the COC wants to keep the most significant findings close to its vest. But to illustrate the depth of research that can be talked about, here are a few of the diverse presentation titles from a three-day sport technology/sport performance conference put on by PacificSport in Victoria earlier this month:

- Analysis of electrodermal responses in elite athletes to anxiety and stress;
- Exploring GPS (global positioning systems) to enhance training and performance;
- Virtual coaching: A new approach to athlete development through collecting, storing, retrieving and effective utilization of visual databases.

If that all sends a little Greek to you, or just too much techno-babble, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Even some coaches and athletes are struggling to come to grips with the increasingly high-tech environment they find themselves in, one in which impediment body composition analyzers are on every trainer’s wish list and iPods and e-z vision goggle systems are maximizing immediate visual feedback.

For the computer illiterate or less technical savvy coaches, some of the advances in video technology can be particularly challenging. “There are a lot of coaches out there that checking e-mails is about as technical as they get and some don’t even do that,” says Kristin Collins, performance technology advisor for the COC’s Own the Podium 2010 program.

Collins, a resident of Bend, Ore. and one-time high performance specialist with the U.S. Olympic Committee, was one of the COC’s most significant hires in 2005. She is one of the world’s leading experts on a video analysis software called Dartfish, that is far more advanced than basic video recording. Developed in the late ‘90s in Switzerland, the SimulCam technology can, for example, overlay images of two downhill skiers on the same run, instantly giving an athlete a read on the line of a faster competitor.

The StroMotion technology can break down the revolutions of a skater’s triple lutz or a freestyle skier’s double back full full into detailed frame-by-frame images. It also can reveal key positions in tactical plays in team sports and highlight the trajectory of moving objects such as balls.“It makes the invisible visible,” says Collins.

The Americans, Germans and Australians were first to recognize the full value of the technology, with 90 per cent of U.S. teams using it at Salt Lake City in 2002 and Athens in 2004. The COC used it on a full team basis for the first time in Turin in 2006.

GPS technology is increasingly finding its way into the training of elite level athletes such as rowers and speed skaters. In rowing for instance, information gathered from an onboard transceiver and inertial sensing device can be analyzed by specific computer software to provide detailed data on position, acceleration and speed. An athlete can then determine which parts of his or her workout are strongest and which parts need the most work.

The rapid introduction of technical innovations doesn’t come without some problems, however. Sleivert brought a number of newly designed cooling vests to Athens in 2004.“The technology was great, the research behind whether that could enhance performance in the heat was also good . . . but in actual fact it wasn’t a good move to bring them. The athletes weren’t ready for them. They hadn’t had enough experience with them prior to the Games.

“One of the the things that really encourages me about how the COC is operating now is that they’re looking at these things farther and farther out from the Games rather than just throwing solutions and money at athletes in the last few months. We’re talking about 2010 at this conference and it’s 2006. That’s revolutionary.”

The COC will also soon name its first national director of sport science. Sleivert says Canada is a world leader in athlete tracking systems, aerodynamics and clothing and textiles. And the number of “experts” working in sport is up 300 per cent over three years ago.“That has probably been, from my perspective, one of the greatest evolutions we’ve had in our sport system in the last 20 years. We have to have people power along with the technology.”

While new technology was a key component of the conference, a large part of the discussion surrounded the establishment of performance enhancement teams (PET) in individual sports and a co-ordinated interdisciplinary approach between physiologists, psychologists, athletic therapists, nutritionists and sport administrators.

Noted Canadian sport psychologists Hap Davis, Cal Botterill and Penny Werthner delivered compelling presentations to the conference on athlete preparation. Botterill and Karen MacNeill of UBC talked about the work to be done to mentally optimize the “home field advantage” at the 2010 Olympics.

Botterill noted expectations are going to be extremely high given the oft-stated goal to top the medal standings.“You’ve been around sport, when you move from underdog to contender and favorite, the psychological demands change dramatically and you have to learn to be able to handle that in order to perform optimally.