Intercollegiate Racing a Generation Apart
By: Tony Blair
One of the star racers on the Laval University ski team in the early 1960s was Pierre Bédard. Cheering him on was his girlfriend, Andrée Labrie. One of the star racers on the McGill University ski team in the early 1990s was Éric Bédard, Pierre and Andrée's youngest child.
We though it'd be fun to see how things changed on the collegiate ski racing circuit, at least for male racers in Eastern Canada, over those thirty years. So we talked to Pierre and Éric about it, and here is the report of their recollections.
Getting onto the ski team was pretty informal in Pierre's day. There were no organized racing leagues or teams in the 1950s. Kids competed as individuals in weekly races organized by the local Zones of the Québec Division of the Canadian Amateur Ski Association. As a high school student Pierre was a top junior racer in the Québec City area, well known to the Laval coach, the great Canadian Olympian André Bertrand. André grabbed Pierre for the ski team when he enrolled at Laval.
By Éric 's time, things were a bit more formalized. Éric had to take part in dry land training in the fall and try out at a yearly Christmas training camp where the coach, former Czech national team member Pavel Pochobradsky, selected the race squad. Éric had raced on the Zone de l’Outaouais ski team for two years while in high school and the year before university he coached a Nancy Greene ski team at Mont Cascades ski area.
Another difference was the events they raced in. In Pierre's day, at least one member of each school's team had to compete for the four-way "Skimeister" title. Pierre raced in slalom, downhill (more like a Super-G than today's downhills), jumping and cross-country. A weekend meet would mean a downhill race on Saturday morning followed by a 15-km. cross-country in the afternoon, then two runs of a slalom race Sunday morning and ending with the jumping on a 30- or 40-metre hill Sunday afternoon. Thirty years later specialization was well entrenched. Éric raced just in slalom and GS—two runs of slalom one weekend, two of GS the next.
Equipment was different too. Safety bindings were just coming in when Pierre raced. He had early Marker safety bindings on his Kästle downhill skis, but lanière "bear trap" bindings on his Kneissl slalom skis. Skis were wood or fiberglass, boots leather with laces. No helmets or racing suits. Pierre used borrowed cross-country skis and jumpers. By Éric's day, racers had plastic, buckle boots, and helmets were coming in for slalom (but not for GS!). They wore racing suits for GS and "a few guys used them in slalom." Pierre's slalom skis were 210 cm, Éric 's were 195 cm (he's a bit shorter than his Dad, but not that much). Both say how much better they could have skied on today's equipment.
Pierre's slalom gates were bamboo or sapling poles with red or blue flags on them, with die on the snow at their base so they could be jammed back in the same place in case a racer knocked one over. Eric's Slalom gates were, like today's, red of blue-painted knock-down poles. So the slalom technique was entirely different: body around the gates vs. body through the gates.
Training regimen? "What training?" says Pierre. "There was no pre-season conditioning, no workouts—we didn't know the importance of it. Each person looked after himself." As for practicing, a bunch of friends would get together on weekends and set up a slalom course, using as gates poles from saplings cut and trimmed in the fall. And downhill? "We just never practised it!" "It was different for us," says Éric. "We had dryland training together a few times a week in the fall, and even if it was partly a social type thing to get to know people and have fun, we did real training. To be sure, we often ended up at the local “brasserie” for beers afterwards! Then we had a Christmas camp and we trained two nights a week in the Laurentians."
As Éric reports, in his day intercollegiate racing in Quebec was well-organized. "We competed mostly against Laval, Concordia, Université de Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Université de Sherbrooke and Bishop's University. We had races every other weekend during January, February and early March. The last race of the year was always a bigger, sort of championship type of race." Back in his dad's day, the intercollegiate racing schedule consisted of one or two meets a year, and included both Québec and Ontario schools. Says Pierre, "We competed once a year in the Ontario-Quebec Intercollegiate Athletic Association meet. The teams were from University of Toronto, Queen's, Ottawa, McGill, Université de Montréal and Laval." The rest of the winter Pierre raced as an individual, mostly in the Québec City area. One thing that didn't change over the 30 years: Laval and McGill were each other's biggest rival for both Bédards, père et fils.
The Bédard boys were good skiers, by the way. Pierre won the slalom and the downhill one year, and only a broken cross-country ski kept him from a Skimeister win. He was Athlete of the Year at Laval in 1962. Éric was often in the top five or ten in slalom and he was awarded the McGill Ski Team MVP in 1993. They were good racers, but going to university meant abandoning any dreams of the national team. At the same time, racing became more fun. Here's how Éric put it: "I remember feeling as if my skiing was better while in university than it was in previous years when I was training and racing much more intensively. I think the mood was much more relaxed and thus so was I. I wasn’t so hung up on results and instead had a great time."
Today they ski when then can, but both are busy surgeons, and neither gets to the slopes as often as he'd like. They've managed a couple of skiing holidays together, at Panorama and Fernie. Pierre says of his son, "I can't follow Éric: he's much stronger and better than me." Éric says, diplomatically, of his dad, "We ski very differently. I think I gained the most appreciation for his ability as a skier when we were heli-skiing; he made it seem very smooth and effortless."