Let the Games begin

Athletes born or living in Nova Scotia who will compete at the Tokyo Olympics are top row, left to right: kayaker Michelle Russell (Fall River), kayaker Mark de Jonge (Halifax), boxer Wyatt Sanford (Kennetcook); middle row: gymnast Ellie Black (Halifax), shot putter Sarah Mitton (Brooklyn), sailors Jacob Saunders (Chester) and Oliver Bone (Halifax); bottom row: basketball Shay Colley (East Preston), paddler Connor Fitzpatrick (Dartmouth), equestrian Brittany Fraser-beaulieu (New Glasgow).

I run as if in sand now, like I am climbing a steep incline while shouldering an immense load.

When the hound and I make an intemperate dash across the street, drivers come to a complete halt, unnerved by the spectacle.

Yet, there was a time when a Nova Scotian man bearing my name outran racehorses and was swift enough in the outfield in the old colliery baseball league, where he once made 17 putouts in a single game, that no batted ball seemed beyond his reach.

I used to have a picture of a longago road race in Glace Bay. In it the runners are in a pack, halfway down the street, except for Clarence “Flash” Demont — somewhere along the line, my side of the clan began to capitalize the M — who is so far ahead that he almost disappears from the picture frame.

In my memory his legs are a blur, which was probably just a function of the photography of the day, but I have always chosen to believe it was because they were simply moving so fast.

According to his obituary in the Toronto Star, in 1913 my grandfather ran the hundred yard dash in 9.6 seconds, which, at that time, would have tied the world record in the planet's marquee track event.

If this were so, it is fully foreseeable that he would have been part of the team that represented Canada in the 1916 Olympic Games, which would have been held in Berlin, were they not cancelled because of the Great War.

Family lore has it that he would have been part of the 1920 games, except it would have meant losing his job as a pressman for the Glace Bay Labour Gazette, something no one would contemplate in the harsh Cape Breton economy in the early part of the last century.

By all accounts, Flash Demont's ensuing life was a good one: a happy marriage, a trio of sporty sons. His own athletic feats did not end with that long-ago road race.

As his entry in the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame reads, he was a rugged defenceman in the Cape Breton Hockey League and was also the local amateur welterweight wrestling champion.

At one point, Flash wrestled Don Macdonald, the world middleweight champion, to a draw at the Cape Breton Exhibition Grounds, a testament, my dad always contended, to those incredible legs he used to trap Macdonald in an unescapable legscissor hold.

I see him as a pillar of the community, rising to be production supervisor at the paper, acting as the local boxing commissioner, reading the Boston Globe as he strolled home to York Street from the old newsstand on Senator's Corner, though a Baptist, surreptitiously arranging the bingo with the local Catholic priest. (“Be's there bingo tonight,” callers would ask my puzzled grandmother when she sometimes answered the phone.)

From everything I've heard, he was happy with his small-town life. Even so, I wonder if there was a pang of regret, a fleeting glimpse of what might have been, reading about the Summer Olympics that took place 101 years ago, in a time also haunted by pandemic.

I thought about Flash on Friday as the small contingent of mask-wearing Canadian athletes paraded into Olympic stadium in Tokyo.

Ten of our representatives are from Nova Scotia: veterans like three-time Olympians Ellie Black, the gymnast, and Mark de Jonge, the kayaker, and Jacob Saunders, the sailor making his second appearance, but also canoe/kayakers Michelle Russell, and Connor Fitzpatrick, Oliver Bone, the sailor, shot putter Sarah Mitton, hoopster Shay Colley, boxer Wyatt Sanford and Brittany Fraser-beaulieu, who competes as an equestrian.

When I asked Karen Furneaux, who competed in sprint kayaking for Canada in three Olympics, what the 10 Nova Scotians would be thinking at the start of the competition, she said, lots of things.

For those involved in the opening ceremony, as Furneaux has been three times, “a feeling of arrival and of new potential.” This year, she suspects, that feeling is deeper than ever before, as the athletes, like everyone during the pandemic, have had to show such resilience to get to this point.

There is always the nervousness that comes from knowing that all of your efforts — everything that you've done for all those years while sacrificing so much — comes down to this “showcase piece,” when “you must bring everything into alignment to be at your absolute personal best in this moment in time.”

You can see it on their faces, when they march into the Olympic stadium, she said: the first-timers, in sports where a few thousand is a large crowd, suddenly surrounded by 60,000 as she was in 2008, at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games.

But for so many athletes, competing in sports where it is impossible to go professional, the Olympics is the absolute pinnacle. Sport for sport's sake.

What is more, the postponement of the 2020 games meant that a lot of athletes who were contemplating retirement were pushed to extend their careers for another year, culminating in 12 more months away from family, friends and getting on with the next stage of their lives.

All of this makes it hard to truly “enjoy” your Olympic moment, while in the moment.

“The intention there is to perform and compete and be part of that team,” Furneaux told me from Tokyo.

Afterwards, though, being an Olympian stays with you always.

Furneaux, who has gone on to be a motivational speaker and performance coach, says that she carries the “Olympic ideals” — doing your best in whatever you do, being resilient in tough times — "with her everyday.”

It is nice to think that my grandfather, if he did indeed almost run for Olympic glory, would have felt the same way.

It is nicer still to think that our own Olympians of 2021 will always remember that in a challenging moment they stood on the world's athletic stage, giving us all something to cheer about.