Month: December 2014

“If you get the right angle to float on top of the pressure of the wind you get more distance.” (Clarence Sverold, Canadian Olympian)

The huge metal ski jump at the Stoney Creek Valley in Camrose is an impressive sight. It is the legacy of the daring Norwegian flyers who made Camrose the birth place of ski jumping in Alberta. Adolph and Lars Marland, P. Mikkelson and the Engbretonson brothers formed the Fram Ski Club there in 1911. It was named for the Fram, meaning “forward” in Norwegian, the ship that carried Roald Amundsen on his famous expedition to Antarctica.

The Fram Ski club began construction in the fall of 1911 on a fifty-foot scaffold tower with a long slide in the Stoney Creek valley. Anticipation mounted for the club’s first ski jump tournament held in January 1912. People came from miles around in sleighs and cutters and happily paid the 25 cents entry fee. Adolph Marland soared seventy-four feet through the air to be acclaimed the winner.

The Fram Ski Club soon had competition. Not to be outdone, Edmonton also formed a club in 1911, and built a bigger jump at Connor’s Hill for the 1912 season. Camrose hosted the first tournament between the two clubs on February 17^th 1912. Edmonton’s John Hogan outdistanced the Camrose team with a jump of 87 feet. On the same day the Fram and Edmonton Ski Clubs formed the National Ski Association of Western Canada. Its purpose was to “to create, develop and sustain interest in the sport of ski running and ski jumping.” It set out the rules and scoring system for combining points for length of ski jump, landing, and aspects of style to determine the overall winner. The distance is still measured today from the edge of the take-off to where the jumper touches the landing slope below.

A week later the two clubs held a return competition at Connor’s Hill and John Hogan once again made the longest jump. “The spectator would gasp,” noted The Edmonton Journal, “as a skier came whizzing down the long wooden slide, hit the take off platform, doubled up like a jack-knife and then flew out into space, landing on both feet in the snow, and speeding down the hill.”

Although ski running, soon known as cross country skiing (or Nordic skiing) was becoming popular, it was ski jumping that captured the public’s imagination. In 1913 over 5,000 spectators watched John Hogan set a new Canadian record with a jump of 109 feet at Connors Hill. It was a major event attended by the Lieutenant Governor Bulyea, Mayor McNamara, and the Norwegian consul.

The ski clubs often had to repair or replace the first ski jumps because they were generally built from wood and deteriorated quickly. Although the Connor’s Hill jump survived the 1915 flood on the Saskatchewan River, it gradually weakened. Finally deemed unsafe by the City, it was dismantled in 1926. The Edmonton Ski Club rebuilt it in 1935. When the first jump at Camrose blew down, it was replaced in 1924. This in turn was replaced by a third one in 1930, in time for the western Canadian Championships in 1932.

The Camrose Ski Club Club, as the Fram became known, remained at the heart of ski jumping in Alberta through the 1950s. The Servold brothers, Clarence and Irwin, who represented Canada at the 1956 and 1960 Olympics, continued the tradition of those early Camrose jumpers who mentored them. Nevertheless, despite club ski jumps at Devon and Athabasca, ski jumping fell somewhat out of vogue during the 1960s. The Camrose ski jump was taken down, and Edmonton’s last ski jumping tournament was held on Connor’s Hill in 1975, although the jump remained as a city landmark until 1978.

As a spectator sport ski jumping had less appeal than alpine competition through the 1970s. There was a resurgence of interest during the 1980s when a large concrete ski jump took shape at Calgary Olympic Park as the city prepared to host the Olympic Winter Games in 1988. Clarence Sverold designed a new ski jump constructed from welded pipes with a wooden slide surface for the Alberta Winter Games held in Camrose in1990. Because athletes’ ability and equipment has advanced so much, longer landing lanes are needed than in 1990. The Camrose jump does not meet current standards and is no longer used. The largest jump at Canada Olympic Park is no longer used for the same reason. The national ski jumping team still trains on the smaller ski jumps.

Today, the International Ski Federation holds events in three types of ski jump competitions: normal hill, large hill and ski flying hill on which incrementally longer distances have been achieved. The current Ski Flying World Record of 246.5 metres (809 feet) was set by Johan Remen Evensen of Norway in 2011—well over ten times the distance flown a hundred years earlier by Adolph Marland of Camrose.

Polo became the passion of the ranchers who worked the extensive corporate grazing leases in southwestern foothills of the Rockies by the late 1880s and quickly developed into a sport of daring horsemanship and exploits. Polo Clubs were initially organized by the wealthy owners and managers of the large ranches, former mounted police officers, and remittance men from well-to do landed families in Britain and Ireland. Recreational polo blurred social boundaries. These socially upper class men played on teams alongside small ranch operators, cowboys, and farmer-settlers, and even store clerks. In a time when everyone rode and in a place where ranchers bred thousands of potential mounts, polo offered social and business connections as well as thrills (and spills) for rider and spectators alike.

Polo had ancient origins in Persia. It had only come to the British Isles, via its colonial connection with India in the 1870s. Popular among British military officers, it became an organized sport. A small number of early ranchers in the foothills had some experience or had seen the game before coming to Canada. One of those who participated in informal pickup games in the 1880s was Captain E.M. Wilmot of Chinook Ranch, credited with founding the first polo club at Pincher Creek in 1889.

Mostly, it seems, Alberta’s players found time to learn the rules, then adapted and honed their range land skills to the game played on hay meadows. Alberta’s tough agile little cow ponies, accustomed to herding cattle in quick response to commands, made steadfast partners. As the Fort MacLeod Gazette noted in 1892, “the qualities that go to make a good polo player—dashing horsemanship, courage, quickness and sureness of eye, and strength of wrist and arm, are those which are especially dear to the western heart.”

Overall polo is played in a way reminiscent of hockey. On a 300 yard long ten acre field, mounted competitors, four to a side, galloped up and down using mallets to drive a ball into the opponents’ goal. Polo is a positional game: a designated player number four, or back, plays defense, a designated number one player plays well ahead, and numbers two and three play mid-field. The ponies had to gallop hard: each rested after one or two seven and ½ minute periods called a “chukker.” The player could change ponies several times during a game. The ponies made hard contact shoulder to-shoulder as players attempt to “ride-off” their opponents and take control of the ball.

Two mounted referees, and a third on the sidelines, enforced the rules that mainly pertain to riding infractions and dangerous maneuvers that interfere with flow of the game or can lead to violent collisions. The ball kept in continuous play so the excitement was non-stop during the four, and later six, chukkers that made a game.

The first polo games were played between teams formed within each club, but polo tournaments caught on quickly. Fort McLeod organized the first tournament in June 1892. Four club teams, Calgary, Fort McLeod, Pincher Creek and High River, competed for a cup donated by Colonel James McLeod, former Commissioner of the North West Mounted Police. The Calgary Challenge Cup, presented at the first Calgary tournament in September 1892, has been in continuous play since. The same year a team travelled from Calgary to challenge polo players on the west coast, bringing their ponies described by a Victoria newspaper as “strong close-knit little brutes.”

Organizing and attending tournaments took work: ponies had to be ridden to the rail line, loaded in a box car, and feed arranged. Club finances and skilled teams were sustained by wealthy enthusiasts. Within a few years clubs formed at Cochrane, De Winton, Fish Creek, Millarville, High River, Peisko at the Bar U Ranche, Cowley, and Pine Creek.

As the twentieth century began club rivalry intensified. New trophies, including the Sheep Creek Challenge Cup (awarded to the winner of the annual Millarville tournament beginning in 1903) and the Fish Creek Challenge Cup (first awarded in 1906), were sought after. Most clubs had enough riders to mount several teams. For club play team configurations shifted constantly as senior and junior levels or A and B teams formed, while the best teams played at tournaments. The club allegiance of expert players became uncertain: they moved club as it suited them. A professional aspect became apparent; individuals and teams from Alberta played at tournaments across Canada and were popular at the Coronado Polo Club near San Diego.

It seemed that everyone was passionate about polo and polo players. Games were avidly followed by the press and tournaments were family outings. High River and Calgary hosted dinner dances after tournaments that were major society events. In 1903 a hundred guests attended Calgary’s polo ball. In June 1905 the town of High River shut down and everyone set out to the polo grounds about a mile from town for the day as the Calgary team arrived on the train accompanied by 100 supporters. Polo hit its high as a spectator sport at the Calgary Exhibition of 1907 where 20,000 people watched a game.

Seven years later the flame was extinguished. Polo teams fell apart in Alberta as war took many players to the European front. After World War I the great ranching communities declined and the heyday of the horse drew to a close. Attempts to revive the game with fewer polo teams were on-going and women took up and promoted the game during the 1920s. The downturn of the 1930s and World War II, however, resulted in the Calgary Polo Club being the only club surviving by 1945. The days of the ranch cow pony doubling as polo pony were long over. As polo slowly revived during the 1950s, it was evident that horses and polo playing had become the preserve of the well-to-do. J.B. Cross, son of A. E. Cross (a founding member of the Calgary Polo Club and grandson of Colonel James McLeod), provided new grounds for the Calgary Polo Club east of the Millarville in 1960. From the late 1970s the Fish Creek Challenge Cup was back in play after a decades-long hiatus.

Today, the Calgary Polo Club covers about 300 acres with nine playing fields, about a dozen professional players and numerous amateurs call it home. Two other clubs in Alberta are active, Grande Prairie Polo Club, an established club prior to World War I, and Black Diamond Polo Club founded in 1999. The traditions and rules of play for polo have remained constant in Alberta. From June through early September club matches, local, and interprovincial tournaments are open for spectators to enjoy one of Alberta’s earliest sports.