Forever Olympians, Class of '56 takes up torch

The great thing about going to an Olympics, Doug Kyle says, is you never stop being an Olympian.

"It's like climbing Mount Everest," he says. "You may be a champion of something, and then someone else wins and you're the ex-champion. But you can never be an ex-Olympian. You are an Olympian forever."

Forever Olympians, forever teammates, most of Canada's track-and-field team from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics are reuniting this weekend in Trail to carry the torch towards the 2010 Games in Vancouver.

All are in their 70s, most nearer to 80. They were little more than grown kids 53 years ago when they met in Melbourne. They never stopped being Olympians. But they have been other things, too, and their accomplishments since 1956 seem at least as remarkable as their Olympic achievements. Their lives appear to have been well-lived.

Kyle, a former distance runner from Calgary who held 10 Canadian records, founded the Calgary Track Club when he wasn't searching for oil as a geologist.

Laird Sloan, a quarter-miler from Montreal, holds five engineering degrees and worked on the Avro Arrow before its termination forced him to the U.S. aerospace industry and something called NASA, for which he helped design and build mission control in Houston.

Maureen Rever DuWors, a sprinter from Regina, became the first woman in the biology faculty at the University of Saskatchewan and has been at the school for 40 years.

Sprinter Diane Clement, who grew up in Moncton and has lived in Vancouver for nearly 50 years, co-founded the Richmond Kajaks Track Club with husband Dr. Doug Clement. She was the first female president of a national track and field organization when she headed Athletics Canada during the 1976 Olympics.

Her husband, a runner, helped coach more than 20 athletes to the Olympics and is world-renowned in the field of sports medicine.

Toronto high-jumper and physiology professor Ken Money merely became an astronaut, acting as operations controller on a spacelab mission.

"We're certainly an over-educated group of people," Sloan laughs.

It was his idea, in 2007, to try to get Canada's 1956 Olympic track team together to carry the torch. Sloan, who in retirement divides his time between Houston and New Brunswick, was a torchbearer for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

For 2010, he handed the baton to Kyle. A letter to the Canadian Olympic Association from Kyle went unanswered, but relay sponsor Coca-Cola loved the idea and assigned 20 relay positions.

Twelve of the 18 athletes who ran, jumped and threw for Canada in Melbourne are in Trail. All but Doug Clement, who will be one of the torchbearers on the relay's final approach to BC Place Stadium on Feb. 12 and isn't allowed to run twice, will carry the Olympic flame about 50 metres on Sunday.

Kyle filled out his group with athletes from earlier and later Olympics and a few family members of Olympians.

"When I first got the call, I thought: I don't know if I want to go all that way out there," Ottawa shot and discus thrower Jackie MacDonald says. "But everyone said: 'Oh, you have to go.' It's a connection with one another from an Olympic Games 53 years ago. It's a tremendous experience in your life. This is such a lovely opportunity to be connected again with the Olympics. It will be great fun at this late stage."

MacDonald -- the "blond bombshell" on the team, according to Diane Clement -- kept up with her class by obtaining a Master's degree in linguistics. She devoted her life to teaching and coaching.

"There were four women on our relay team and we had to if you followed the careers of to-day's make it on our own initiative," DuWors says. "I came from Regina; there wasn't even a track there. There was no support for athletes back then. You had to be pretty determined to do it, and I think that determination spread over the rest of your life.

"Once you have that kind of experience, you feel you can do anything you set your mind to no matter what problems come up. It seems everyone has done some really interesting things."

She says the Olympics were " quite different a half-century "After 50 years, to come together ago, with far less media again to carry the torch coverage. ... we feel like we are representing

"And security consisted mainly Canada again," Kyle says. of keeping the men away from "For two weeks in 1956 in Australia, the women," MacDonald says. we were a family. There

Clearly, there were breaches. were 18 who made the team. Did we mention Diane and And we were a team." Doug Clement met on the Olympic team?

imacintyre@vancouversun.com

Female runners in 1956 were not allowed to race more than 200 metres.

"They thought women could not run farther than that because there would be [medical] problems, they couldn't bear children," Diane says. "We proved them wrong."

Sloan remembers a Canadian official thought it would be great to have athletes march into the stadium like they knew what they were doing.

"So they hired this drill sergeant from the Australian army to teach us to march," he says. "They sent him to the Olympic village and he had our whole team out in front, everyone from a four-foot-11 gymnast to a six-foot-eight basketball player. He had us marching around. After about two hours, he threw up his hands and left. We probably weren't the best soldiers he ever saw."

Doug Clement is the chef-demission in Trail. He solicited biographies and photos from everyone involved and set up a website so members of the '56 team could get to know each other again. Officially, Doug is the team photographer this weekend.

The Melbourne 12 include retired teachers Terry Tobacco of Victoria, Alice (Whitty) Simicak of Vancouver and Margaret Tosh of Saskatoon, as well as Murray Cockburn and Stan Levenson from Toronto.

"I say this with some reserve, but there weren't any lawyers in the group, no business magnates," Doug Clement says. "Every one of these people has made major contributions to their communities. And it has nothing necessarily to do with wealth. There was a lot of giving to life in general.

"There has been such a gradual transition from pure amateurism to pure professionalism, I would be shocked if this sort of thing occurred today -- that

Olympians for the next 53 years, that the accomplishments would be the same."

Diane Clement figures there will be "more tears than snowflakes falling" when the group reunites tonight and tomorrow.

"[Going to the Olympics] is a little like going to war in terms of the heightened emotions and intensity," Doug says. "It draws people together, and only those who were there know what it was like. In some ways, it's life-changing.