Champion of Something
By: Terence C. Gannon
Tags: Aviation, Life Lessons, Hobby, Memories, Family

Champion of Something

Dad did his fair share of dreaming big. Particularly when it came to his kids.

On a whim in the summer of 1976—no doubt in part because he wanted to drive his shiny silver Alfa Romeo on the twisty and dangerous road through the mountains—my father suggested I have a stab at the Model Aeronautics Association of Canada National Championships held that year in Calgary, Alberta. This was on the strength of some spotty success at similar local model airplane competitions. Dad did his fair share of dreaming big. Particularly when it came to his kids.

For my part, I thought it was a perfectly fine idea, and duly registered to compete in the ‘Standard Sailplane’ category. These were models of around eight foot wingspan, without any sort of motor, controlled by the pilots located safely on the ground and connected to their plane by radio link. The gliders were towed aloft by a winch which spooled up the towline and the small, graceful aircraft rose into the sky like a kite. Once free of the towline, competitors demonstrated their ability to perform a series of pre-determined maneuvers. The pilot demonstrating the greatest competence in these events won the competition, which typically ran over a series of days.

It’s an obscure skill, by any measure, but I was actually pretty good at it.

From our home in Vancouver, it would have to be a quick turnaround trip shoehorned into a summer already packed with other family holiday obligations. Dad would have to drive for as long and as hard as he dared until fatigue and good sense prevented him from driving any further. I had not yet achieved the parentally-imposed 17 year minimum age to drive, so my father would be on his own as the sole piloto. This would leave me to navigate in those pre-GPS days. That and keep an eye on Dad should he start to nod off, as I promised my mother I would. Even if I had been able to drive, I doubt I would have been able to pry Dad’s hands from the wheel. He really loved that Alfa.

The four lane Coquihalla highway was still nearly a decade in the future, so we were forced to drive the old and treacherous Trans-Canada through the Fraser River Canyon. We still managed to get all the way to Golden, British Columbia, on the first night. We pitched our tent at the KOA campground just east of town. It was after dark by that time which is why we didn’t realize our otherwise idyllic spot backed right onto Highway 1. We were just below the ramp where the semi-trailer trucks have to accelerate the hardest as they press eastward out of town. Their frequency, that night, was timed perfectly with the amount of time it takes a normal human being to drift off to sleep. However, exhausted by the thrilling rally stages earlier in the day, we slept soundly despite the all night truck drag races raging just a few feet above our heads.

From Golden, we were only a couple of Alfa hours away from where the mountains finally tumble down onto the prairies and where the road straightens and stretches out to the eastern horizon. An hour more beyond there, Dad and I were on 16th Avenue in Calgary and I was trying to figure out where to turn right, southward, to a turf farm near Aldersyde where the competition was going to be held. This was early August, which is normally hot and dry on the Canadian prairies. We were instead greeted by a biblical deluge. We arrived at the flying field and the adjacent mowed area designated for competitors to set up camp. We pitched the tent in torrential rain and just tried to keep things dry while we prepared for the first event scheduled for the morning of the next day.

We had just gotten everything squared away and the punctuation mark for virtually any activity for Dad was a cup of tea. Wanting to avoid the continuing downpour outside we fired up the veteran Campingaz Bleuet camp stove right inside the tent to heat up a pan of water. Once it had boiled, Dad filled up the teapot and with both hands now full, he glanced around the floor of the tent — it was strewn with a combination of sleeping and eating accommodations as well as model aircraft parts and related paraphernalia. He eventually chose to carefully place the brimming full teapot on a roll of paper towel which had been placed on end on the spongy canvas-over-wet-grass floor. I can remember we both looked on in silent horror as it stayed upright for maybe a whole second and then luxuriously keeled over in slow motion and dumped the steaming hot, permanently staining contents over — well — everything.

At least the paper towel was close at hand.

We recovered from that catastrophe and somehow made it to the competition flight line on the following day. The rain had let up a little. Given that many of the competitors had come a long way to attend the event, there really was no putting off the competition to wait for better weather as good sense would have dictated. So fly, we did, slightly adjusting the start times of the competition rounds to avoid the worst of the rain and wind. Much to my surprise, I did fairly well in the first couple of flights which consisted of ‘Two Minute Precision’ and ‘Five Minute Duration’ events. I was comfortably in the middle of the pack and advanced a little with each round as the weather gradually improved.

For each competition flight, the pilot is accompanied by a volunteer who keeps time and other details which are subsequently fed into the scoring calculation. Dad did not perform this task for me. I don’t think there was a rule prohibiting it but we wanted to avoid any hint of fudging the score — an unbiased third party was the only way to go. By the last day of the competition, however, it had become increasingly apparent I was actually going to be the outright winner. Not by a huge margin but enough that if the last competition flight was reasonably well flown the result was not really in doubt. As such, Dad chose to be the timekeeper for that last flight and I can still remember the slight nervous tremor in his voice as the flight progressed.

When I landed successfully and the competition was over, all I remember is that Dad was prouder of me at that moment than he was at any other time either before or after that day on that soggy turf farm south of Calgary.

We were so pressed for time we couldn’t stay for the award ceremony which was held later on that last day of the competition. The big, gaudy trophies would somehow have to find their own way to Vancouver. We drove impatiently westward, eventually calling it a night in Big Eddy right across the river from Revelstoke. We pitched the tent, once again long after dark, at the appropriately-named Lamplighter campground. This time, we carefully chose a spot away from the highway but close to the CP Rail tracks which skirted the camp sites.

Because this was a long before cell phones or text messaging or even cheap long distance, no word of our accomplishment in Calgary had yet filtered back to the family left behind in Vancouver. Later that evening we found a phone booth and called home collect. To whoever picked up the phone, Dad simply said “so, do you want to speak the Canadian National Soaring Champion?” and handed me the phone.

It should have felt great. But strangely, I simply felt embarrassed.

Later that night, the prudence we had demonstrated picking out our camping spot backfired on us. It started out quietly at first — the distant sound of the diesel train coming down out of the mountain passes as it approached Revelstoke. The sound got progressively louder and we could eventually see the dim but growing light from the locomotive’s headlight. The train’s horn sounded periodically and it was clear it was going to get really close as it passed by. Exactly how close, we weren’t sure. Eventually, the light from the train clearly illuminated the inside of the tent. Dad and I glanced at each other nervously, wondering if that beautiful flat spot we had picked out was actually an overgrown level crossing. We eventually peered outside to see the locomotive’s light bearing straight down on us. At what seemed like the very last second, the huge black snake of a train slid by just a few feet away with a taunting last blast of the horn. I suspect the engineers enjoyed waking up the campers, seeing them emerge from their tents and running for their lives.

When we arrived home in Vancouver The Courier, the community newspaper, came around to the house, took some pictures and asked me a few questions. They published a nice little article describing the competition in Calgary. I was famous for fourteen-and-a-half minutes, at least on a community newspaper scale. That was enough to impress some kids at high school when I returned in September for Grade 10. They asked me to tell the story which I was only too happy to do. But other than that, the story faded pretty quickly. Except at the Gannon dinner table, of course, where Dad never grew tired of telling the story over and over again as the years went by. Much to the dismay of my older brother and sister, I’m sure. Of course, the story grew a little more spectacular each time Dad told it.

What I omitted in my subsequent retelling of the events of that summer is that model sailplane competitions are notoriously fickle. Winning and losing on any given day is determined by who shows up, the weather, the starting order — in other words factors over which the competitors have absolutely no control. To emerge as the winner really means you made the absolute best of the cards dealt completely at random on the days of the competition. It’s Wheel of Fortune, not Jeopardy. To win a competition is still something, for sure, but no where near as much as others take the accomplishment to be. I was complicit in that even into adulthood, I never volunteered a complete, more pragmatic assessment of what I had actually accomplished, which was way less than how it sounded.

The other thing I omitted was how easily the winning had actually been. Sure, Dad and I had diligently practiced for a month or two prior to the competition. But it was not, in any way, the unrelenting training some might think a national champion would have to endure to finally achieve victory. There weren’t years of obsessive practice. There was no merciless, winner-take-all round of 64 elimination or qualifying events or anything even remotely like that. There were simply a total of six flights comprising 21 minutes of flight time. Anybody who paid the entry fee was welcome.

In retrospect, Dad was a much more resilient competitor than I ever was. When I crashed the elegant white Maestro sailplane I intended to fly in Calgary, Dad and I looked at the scattered, matchstick-sized pieces and came to two totally different conclusions. I was prepared to walk away from the whole endeavour at that point. Dad, on the other hand, was having none of it. He built a replacement Aquila aircraft in record time. The punishing schedule required doing some of that construction while our family of five was crammed into a small sailboat cruising Desolation Sound up the coast from Vancouver. “We are going to fly in Calgary, damn it, no matter what” Dad must have thought.

As time went by afterwards and I gained some adult objectivity, I remember feeling increasingly like a fraud when telling the story. I had tried other subsequent competitions and my performance was ordinary by comparison. The other competitors were all getting better, through hard work, and I was staying the same and being left behind by being lazy. I eventually concluded the win in Calgary was a fluke. A bi-product of random events conspiring in my favour to beat out the only other 22 competitors who had shown up.

There have been long lasting consequences from feeling I had won everything at a very young age and without trying all that hard. I expected everything else in life to be similarly easy. When confronted by weightier matters — school and career mostly — if the results didn’t come as quickly and as easily as they had back in the summer of 1976, I was subconsciously inclined to give up and move on.

Winning something — anything — is transformative. It’s one of life’s indelible punctuation marks. Everything else is categorized as either ‘before’ or ‘after’. I felt the exaltation of victory most intensely at the moment of that final flight. It has decayed with a miserably short half-life even since then. I quickly forgot how it felt on that day, but can never forget it actually happened. Winning something satisfied nothing. It simply made me crave more winning, of which there has been precious little since that day. That, coupled with a lingering doubt that a solitary victory, 43 years ago, was nothing more than dumb luck.

But win I did, and for a brief shining moment, I was the undisputed national champion of something.

©2019 Terence C. Gannon