Calgary Connections to Vancouver 2010

1. The Ice Specialist
Speed skaters will race on the ice that Mark Messer made.

When the long track speed skaters take to the ice at Richmond’s Olympic Oval, they will be rocketing over Mark Messer’s work. Messer is the ice specialist in charge of creating the chilly one-inch surface that skaters will bolt over at speeds of up to 60 kilometres per hour. One small spec of debris, hint of frost or fluctuation in temperature and all hope of setting records is lost.

As the top icemaker in the world, Messer is no stranger to the pressures of maintaining high-performance sports venues. After four years creating the hockey surface at the Pengrowth Saddledome, the heavy-duty mechanic moved to Calgary’s Olympic Oval in 1987, six months before the venue officially opened and began its reign as “the fastest ice in the world.”

Since then, he has trained the icemakers for the 1994 and 1998 Winter Olympics. For the 2002 and 2006 Games, he also personally oversaw the seven-day ice-making process. The Vancouver Games are the fourth time he has been in charge of creating an Olympic ice surface.

Calgary’s high altitude and dry air give it ideal ice-making conditions. Duplicating Calgary’s record-breaking ice will be a challenge, but Messer is going to give it a try.

“We’ve got our hands full at sea level because the air is so thick and the humidity is high, but we’ll do what we can and hopefully challenge some Olympic records,” he says. —J.M.

2. The Skipper
Neil Houston is in charge of all things curling at the Olympics.

No pressure, but Neil Houston is in charge of an event almost guaranteed to net Canada a medal or two. He’s the curling sports manager, which means it’s his job to make sure the shuffleboard-on-ice game runs smoothly.

Monitoring optimal ice conditions, ensuring fair scheduling for all 20 teams, training volunteers and chatting with the media are all part of his job description. It’s a heady task that Houston approaches with the Zen-like, slow and steady attitude of a seasoned curler.

“Every sport has its own culture,” says Houston, whose own curling achievements include a World Junior Championship, a World Championship, a Briar title, a bronze medal from the 1988 Winter Olympics, as well as a gig with the Canadian Curling Club, which he left to oversee the 2010 Olympic curling.

During the Games, Houston’s day will start with a 6 a.m. meeting and end when the last athlete leaves the Vancouver Olympic Centre after 11 p.m. Nine years of planning that began with budget input during the bid phase in 2001 and continued with his appointment as sports manager in 2007 has Houston ultra-prepared for the 12-day tournament.

“I’m just waiting for this show to happen,” he says. —J.M.

3. The Performance Scientists
Racing suits designed by the Human Performance Lab in Calgary will give Canadian athletes an extra edge.

In the high-pressure environment of elite competitive sports, where a fraction of a second can separate the winners from the losers, it does matter what you wear.

That’s why Canada’s cross-country skiers and bobsled teams will once again don the Clima TechFit Suit, a sleek, space-age bodysuit developed by Adidas and the University of Calgary’s Human Performance Lab (HPL).

First unveiled in Torino in 2006, these Lycra and polyeurathane suits feature stretchy silver bands that criss-cross the back and sides of an athlete’s body. This design acts “almost like a second set of muscles,” says Darren Stefanyshyn, a world-leading sports gear researcher at the HPL who helped develop the design. He says the suit compresses the muscles around the joints, which allows them to operate more efficiently.
Lab tests with national team athletes showed the suits improved sprinting by one to two percent and jump heights by four to five percent. Do you need further proof of their effectiveness? The Canadian men’s bobsledding team wore them for the Torino Games and won silver.

But the suit is not the only technological breakthrough coming out of the HPL for the Vancouver Olympics; researchers are also designing better sporting equipment such as hockey sticks and skates for Canada’s Paralympic sledge hockey teams and speed skating athletes. And researchers at the HPL are already busy devising new equipment and gear for the 2012 London Summer Games. —L.S.

4. The Crash Pad Guys
Speed skating crash pads designed by Sean Maw and Clifton Johnston will prevent injuries on the ice. 

Sliding head-first into a wall at 60 km/h is not unusual in long-track speed skating. It is a necessary hazard of participating in the fastest self-propelled sport in the Winter Olympics. What isn’t necessary, according to researchers Sean Maw and Clifton Johnston, is having those collisions result in serious injury.

The Mount Royal University and University of Calgary professors have developed a crash pad system for Vancouver’s short- and long-track speed skating rinks that make wipeouts easier to recover from. Their high-tech system uses different layers of foam, straps and anchoring systems throughout the track
to provide the best combination of absorption and bounce at every turn and straightaway.

“The whole arrangement is like a puzzle, with different kinds of pads fitting together in a very specific way,” explains Maw. Corner pads are designed for high-speed, head-on collisions, while the sides are designed for less-forceful glancing blows.

“Hopefully, skaters hit them and get back up without any broken bones or concussions,” says Maw.

So far, it’s working. The oval in Salt Lake City installed the same system in the fall of 2008 after a string of serious crashes sent skaters to the hospital. Since then, there have been no major injuries as a result of hitting the pads. Johnston and Maw are hoping for similar injury-free results in Vancouver. —J.M

5. The Musical Composer
Dave Pierce wrote all the original music for Olympic opening, closing and nightly victory ceremonies. 

Some childhood dreams take a lifetime to realize. For composer Dave Pierce, it took 22 years.

Pierce grew up in Calgary and was studying at the Mount Royal College Conservatory when the 1988 Olympics were in town. He remembers standing on the sidelines of the closing ceremonies and resolving to be the music director for the next Olympics held in Canada. “I had this overwhelming feeling that if Canada ever got the Games again, I wanted to be the guy overseeing all of the music,” Pierce says.

The musical virtuoso has worked with the likes of Jann Arden, Michael Bublé and acts from Cirque de Soleil, and has composed and conducted for the Stampede Grandstand Show for the last 17 years. As music director for the Vancouver Games, he’s overseeing the composition and arrangements of all original music in the opening, closing and the nightly victory ceremonies.

Come opening night, Pierce will likely be on stage conducting the orchestra while his melodies are performed by famous and emerging artists. Recognizing that audiences expect a grand, epic score common to the ceremonies, Pierce says he wants to inject a new sound into it all.

Throughout his career, Pierce often heard that his work “sounds so Olympic.” Now, with the project and his creative vision in alignment, he’s hitting all the right notes. “This is probably the only time in my career where I come into the office and present it and people go, yep, that sounds right — it sounds Olympic,” he says. —L.S.

6. The Dance Choreographer
Jean Grand-Maître oversaw the spectacular stage show that opens and closes the Olympics. 

He’s known as the visionary artistic director behind the Alberta Ballet, but Jean Grand-Maître’s resume also includes time with ballet companies around the world: La Scala Opera House in Milan, multi-million-dollar productions in Germany, big musicals, circuses and parades.

There’s probably no other contemporary Canadian choreographer who can boast such credentials, and Grand-Maître acknowledges that, as director of choreography for the opening, closing and victory ceremonies, he’s tapping all his skills and past experiences to do the job.

Since February 2008, he has been working 14-hour days, seven days a week in rehearsals. He hired all the assistant choreographers, auditioned more than 8,000 people in order to cast the performance roles and collaborated closely with other designers who crafted the music, sets and costumes.

Grand-Maître describes the ceremonies as “beautiful and avant-garde … representational of Canadian culture and our diversity.” With the choreography, he says his goal was to make the movements beautiful for both the live audience in the stadium and on television for viewers expected to total around four billion worldwide.

“We auditioned martial arts specialists, ballroom, hip hop, urban, ballet and tap dancers,” says Grand-Maître, adding more than 1,000 volunteer and professional dancers will perform. “It was unlike anything I’ve ever done.”

And when it’s all over, you can expect Grand-Maître to bring his wealth of experience working with top industry professionals back to the Alberta Ballet for upcoming projects.

“I’m learning a lot from this, and I’m already thinking of different ways I can design ballets for the company,” he says. —L.S.

7. The Landmark Makers
Calgary manufacturer Heavy Industries built the 58-foot iconic sculpture in front of the world media headquarters.

German-based artists designed it and the City of Vancouver owns it, but it’s Calgarians who built it.

The Drop is a giant public art sculpture that sits on the waterfront plaza of the newly expanded Vancouver Convention Centre — headquarters for the world’s media during the Olympics. It took Heavy Industries, a Calgary-based fabrication company, a year and a half to plan and construct the 58-foot, brilliant blue raindrop. Heavy’s small staff of sculptors, painters, welders, engineers, fabricators and designers spent 1,800 hours crafting the 6,000-pound structure.

“The magnitude of it is awesome,” says Ken Heinbecker, marketing director with Heavy Industries. “We had to send it over to Vancouver in one piece, too.”

In addition to building custom equipment for the construction of the oversized raindrop, Heavy Industries performed high-tech tests to ensure its sturdiness and sanded the surface to flawless perfection so the 40 separate pieces of polystyrene that clad the armature are seamless. When it was installed in August of last year, the sculpture was loaded onto a barge with a crane and floated across the Burrard Inlet.

Already making a splash with Vancouverites, The Drop is one of the most visible landmarks of the new site. “It’s awesome that we can turn on the TV and see it there while the Olympic Games are going on,” says Heinbecker. 

8. The Theatrical Contributions
Four Calgary-bred artistic productions will add an element of flare to the Olympics. 

There are no medals for the Cultural Olympiad. The sideshow of art, theatre, dance and music that runs from January 22 to March 21 is more about celebrating the awesomeness of Canada’s artistic talent than about competing for creative supremacy.

But, if the Cultural Olympiad were a competition, Calgary might be favoured for gold with our four productions, all of which push the boundaries of creativity.

NiX is a chilly fairytale about love, loss and the end of the world that takes place under a 44-foot-high geodesic dome housing a stage made of snow and ice. Alberta Theatre Projects commissioned the play, which made its debut in Calgary last February at Olympic Plaza.

Alberta Ballet’s collaboration with Joni Mitchell, The Fiddle and the Drum, sets the music and art of the Alberta-born folk queen to the choreography of Alberta Ballet artistic director Jean Grande-Maître. The production has had the dance world buzzing since its debut in Calgary in 2007.

Also on stage is the Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan. The melancholy puppet production summons the nefarious seducer from hell to revisit his sexual conquests and deliver a sermon of universal love.

Finally, Theatre Calgary has conjured up the rock musical Beyond Eden, which explores the true-life spiritual journey of anthropologist Wilson Duff and stars Spirit of the West’s John Mann and North of 60’s Tom Jackson.
In the spirit of Olympic friendship and because we have plenty to share, we are happy to lend Vancouver some of our culture. —J.M.