Blaze of Glory

Sit down for a beer with a couple of Olympic athletes from Team USA and ask them what’s new. You will probably hear all about their training, their diet and their goals for all the upcoming competitions. Sit down for a beer with a Canadian Olympian, and the topics will range from neuroscience to philosophy to politics.

This is not all rah-rah Canadiana; our athletes are not inherently more intelligent or interesting people. It is just that most, if not all, Canadian athletes do not have the system or the support of their global counterparts. Most need jobs and university educations to make it in life. This “support gap” may not make us the most successful Olympic country in the world, but the men and women who don the Maple Leaf every two years end up as more well-rounded human beings.

Sometimes they beat the odds and win, and when they do they can look back on the achievement with amazing insight. Luckily for the reader of Off the Chain: An Insider’s History of Snowboarding, the author is one of the most well-known and successful Canadian Olympians, Ross Rebagliati. He started out making his own boards in shop class, and paid for most of his training through appearances in snowboarding videos and with whatever prize money he could get. Against the odds he won a gold medal, and kept it.

Is Ross Rebagliati interesting? Canadian? Definitely on both counts, and so is the book.

From a biographical perspective, the book lays out some unexpected facts, such as Rebagliati’s long personal history in the sport. He was at the forefront of the sport’s explosion in Canada, appearing in movies, magazine articles and documentaries for years before he fell under the glare of the public eye.

Rebagliati is also able to give a very quick and entertaining tour of the history of his sport, without giving in to self-promotion or cheerleading. He is able to tie the history of snowboarding to larger political trends:

Rebellion is a universal theme in sporting innovation, of course, but Rebagliati does not get lost in the romantic myth that has offered snowboarding its wild and crazy image (although there is a nice photo montage of a bunch of U.S. team members trashing a hotel room). Instead, he very clearly lays out the economic realities that have changed his sport over the past 30 years. Jake Burton, the man who really created the modern snowboard in the 1970s (based on a kids’ toy called the Snurfer), also made sure there were sponsorships and competitions to drive the sales numbers. Competitive snowboarding is not an aberration or perversion of the “pure sport”; it was there right from the start. The explosion of video and the zine culture in the 1980s drove both the image and the business.

This is a reality of organized sports that is often ignored or glossed over, usually to promote the idea that true sport is somehow more pure when money is kept in the background. Well, sports at the global level is business, and it is dangerous to see it otherwise. That is how expensive Olympic Games get foisted on unquestioning sports fans. So it is refreshing to see someone within the world of sports so clearly recognize and name its benefits and its faults. Of course, Rebagliati’s vision may have been honed by his own experience.

To many Canadians, Rebagliati is also one of this country’s most infamous athletes—testing positive for a miniscule trace amount of marijuana right after winning the first Olympic snowboarding medal in Nagano in 1998. He makes no effort to hide this from the reader. On page two he writes: “I have gone down in history as that pot-smoking snowboarder who somehow managed to win the Olympics. This did not, in any way, help my career.”

No kidding. Rebagliati insists now, as he did then, that he had only been at a party where others were smoking. He eventually won his appeal (pot was not a banned substance at the time) and retained his gold medal. Rebagliati may be recognized, but he has never been celebrated the way Canadians have celebrated Donovan Bailey, say, or Simon Whitfield. Rebagliati burned out, and quit his sport within two years. He poignantly reveals his “lost” year spent not answering the phone at his home in Whistler.

Perhaps because he tasted both the sweet and bitter fruits of the Olympics, Rebagliati is not afraid to include many pointed criticisms in the book, some aimed at himself, but most aimed at the sports leaders of the world. Snowboarding was not welcomed with open arms into the Olympic family of sports. There was a battle at the top, as the International Olympic Committee demanded that the athlete-run International Snowboard Federation yield control to the more staid, old-school and “respectable” International Ski Federation. Many of the more hard-core freestyle boarders publicly criticized the decision. But the IOC was adamant.

Rebagliati finds the irony rich.

A number of snowboarders simply decided to ditch the Olympics for the more boarder-friendly X Games. In the media this was often portrayed superficially as the rebels saying no to the staid Olympic officials. It was not that simple. Most of the boycotters were freestyle boarders, the ones who do the flips and stunts, and who got paid big appearance fees and prize money in non-Olympic events. Rebagliati is a course racer, and those boarders did not have the same financial payoff outside the Olympics. So he and the racers swallowed their objections and made the switch.

Rebagliati, as mentioned, won that very first snowboarding gold medal, and then was very publicly vilified for testing positive for pot. Rebagliati sees a larger story hidden in the whole affair, and lays it out in Chapter 10, entitled “DOPE!” It turns out that Rebagliati had been testing positive for dope in the months heading into the 1998 Winter Olympic Games, but had never been sanctioned. Why not? He has a theory.

Rebagliati suggests he was not the only athlete testing positive in the lead-up to the games and, no matter who won, the story would have played out along pretty much the same lines. It is an intriguing way of looking at things, and anyone who thinks it might be incredible should check out The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics, that great exploration into the Olympics by Vyv Simson and Andrew Jennings.

All in all, some honest criticism is found in Off the Chain from a guy who has worn the Maple Leaf, carried the Olympic torch, lobbied for Canada to host the 2010 Olympics and now plans to run for Parliament. Let’s hope he keeps it up. I, for one, would gladly have a beer with him. Since he’s a Canadian athlete, I’ll even pay.