(This is my sixth post related to the Sochi 2014 Olympics. This story originally appeared at http://foreveryoungnews.com/)
Those games were a breakthrough of sorts as for the first time events
were held throughout surrounding areas that is not a just one location. This change pushed spectator attendance to
over 1 million spectators. The only problem was snow, there wasn’t any. The Austrian Army was required to carve out
huge bricks of the white stuff from the mountains and transport it to luge and
bobsled runs and ski slopes.
Fifty-five Canadians competed in eight sports in Innsbruck very different
from the two hundred plus Canucks who will contest 14 of 15 Olympic sports in
Sochi this month.
The highlight for Canadians in these Austrian games was the surprise victory
of Vic Emery in the four-man bobsled event.
Surprising, as fifty years ago there was no bobsled facility in
Canada. Emery his brother John, Peter Kirby and Doug Anakin practiced in a
Montreal gym and apparently got in a few runs at the 1932 Olympic bobsled run in
lake Placid New York.
Petra Burka captured bronze in women’s figure skating. Seventeen-year-old Burka was coached by her
mother Ellen who later went on to coach Toller Cranston and many others. Petra won the world championship the next
year in Colorado.
The pairs team of Debbie Wilkes and Guy Revell took the bronze, then
later were awarded silver medals when it was decided that the second place finishers
were professionals. That ruling was
later reversed. Wilkes, who became a
broadcaster, retired as a skater later that year at the age of 17.
Another controversy occurred in men’s hockey. Our amateur team finished fourth after the
criteria for breaking ties in the standings was changed during the competition.
In 1976, the Winter Olympics came back to this west Austrian city when
Denver withdrew as a host.
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