As revellers gather on Mont Tremblant this weekend for some retro fun at Red Bull 1976, we track down Ken Read, one of the Crazy Canucks, four skiers who changed the sport in Canada in the mid-70s.
Dave Irwin, Dave Murray, Steve Podborski and Ken Read — The Crazy Canucks — burst onto the international ski scene in the mid-1970s and almost immediately changed the sport in their home country.
The first to find success was Read, who won Canada's maiden World Cup downhill gold in Val-d'Isère, France, late in 1975. The victory was the first by a North American on the circuit. He went on to win five career races and score 14 podiums in 44 starts. In that time, he finished out of the top-10 only five times.
There’s no doubt that Read and his teammates groomed the slopes for the coming generations of Canadian skiers and inspired many to take up the sport.
But lots has changed in the past 35 years and today’s World Cup circuit is much different from the 1970s. So, for those really wanting to relive the experience of 1976, Read agreed to explain what it was really like.
The equipment:
“The shaped ski that came in around the Year 2000 or a little before, has completely and totally changed the sport. It’s more broadly known as the parabolic ski. So, in fact the equipment they ski on today is not the same at all as when I was racing. It’s easier today. Almost every sport has had some kind of transformation over the years, whether obvious or not, but skiing definitely had quite a change. Helmets were quite lightweight at the time and we had some that were not used by the general population. The helmet for downhill skiers was made a rule around 1970 and it was our generation where it started to be extended into giant slalom. Ski racing was actually at the front of that.”
Good grooming is always important:
“The courses are much, much better prepared today than they were when we were racing. We would have holes that would develop or roughness in the course that we had to manage, but then again the speeds we skied at were quite different than they do today. And that’s one of the reasons that there’s so much more extensive safety because the speeds they attain today are quite a bit higher and the ability to accelerate out of a turn is much more accentuated thanks to the equipment.”
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Ken Read takes his first WC win © Ken Read
No mobiles, no Internet, no e-mail:
“You had the International Herald Tribune and Time Magazine. The big difference was that it was rare to have a television in your room — there might be one in the whole hotel. I described to my boys how I used to get telegrams. I show them and they kind of look at them and then say it’s kind of like an e-mail. But then I explained somebody actually went down to the telegraph office, they listed it out, it got send and you had to go to the post office to pick it up and it took three days, and they kind of looked at me and said: ‘excuse me?’ And I distinctly remember that it used to be about $10 per minute [to call Canada] on the phone.”
Youth wasted on the young:
“I think you never really realize what you are doing at the time: You know you’ve accomplished things and clearly whenever there’s a first, you know you’ve crossed a threshold but I think it’s only when you reflect afterwards that you become aware of it. At the time, we knew that there was a following and that people were interested, but in many respects you only realize in the decades after how pervasive what the team accomplished really was.”
Being ahead of your time is not all it’s cracked up to be:
“Today in Europe you just whip down the autobahn and pass by these border buildings that are vacant now and they have one currency where we used to have little bags of different currencies: Swiss francs, German marks, Italian liras, French francs. Now you only need Swiss francs and Euros. We also got ABBA sooner as well, so we had to be a bit discerning — I guess it depends what your taste is.”
Fame game:
“Gilles Villeneuve was probably the best known Canadian in the world and certainly people close to motorsport would know that. He was an icon. Hockey is a big sport here and growing internationally, but Donovan Bailey was probably the best known Canadian internationally in the 1990s, not Wayne Gretzky, and I think that sometimes shocks people.”
The racer’s race:
“Kitzbühel [a race he won in 1980 and scored podiums four times] is the same today as it was back then, because it’s to ski racing what Wimbledon is to tennis and the Masters is to golf. It’s the iconic race. It and Wengen stand out as the two most iconic, although there is a collection of others that would like to feel they are of that stature. But every season revolves around the Hahnenkamm at Kitzbühel and the Lauberhorn of Wengen.
Not-so-Crazy Canucks
We were pushing to the edge but not to the point where it was either win or crash because if you were there, you didn’t ski race for very long. You can’t afford to live like that. We were aggressive but you always had to ski inside your boundaries. The history of Crazy Canucks is that that’s what the Europeans thought we were doing and it just became a nickname.
Want more?
- Check out the gallery from last year's Red Bull 1976
- Your guide to the 1970s
- Go to RedBull.com's Winter Sports section
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