Bob Richardson; Globe & Mail obit (Olympic skier)
Hyfler/Rosner
Starting with borrowed equipment, Bob Richardson went
on to rack up world-class performances that remained beyond
the reach of other Canadian skiers for 20 years
By JAMES McCREADY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - Page R7
Bob Richardson was a poor kid from a small town who
taught himself to ski on a pair of borrowed skis. He cleared
brush to make ski hills near his boyhood home in Quebec's
Eastern Townships and skied for Canada in the 1952 Oslo
Olympics.
The skier, who has died at the age of 76, held the
Olympic downhill record for a Canadian for 20 years until it
was broken by Jim Hunter, the first of the crazy Canucks who
came to dominate world downhill racing in the 1970s. At the
Olympics he competed in all three events: downhill, slalom
and giant slalom. He won the 1949 Canadian combined
championship and repeated that in 1955, a year before he
retired from racing.
"He was one of the best Canadian skiers of his
generation," said Fraser Pullen, a director of the Canadian
Ski Museum, and a man who raced with Richardson in the 1940s
and 50s. "He was a technically perfect skier."
He won more Kandahar races at Mont Tremblant than any
racer since. He worked setting up World Cup races at Mont
Tremblant and Mont St. Anne outside Quebec City and for a
while worked as a skiing commentator for the CBC.
Both before and after his career as a downhill racer,
Bob Richardson worked at building ski resorts in the
Laurentians north of Montreal and in the Eastern Townships.
He was also the first man to ski Whistler, when the
British Columbia resort was being surveyed.
"In 1960 Bob was asked by Sidney Dawes, president of
the Olympic Committee, to evaluate Whistler Mountain as a
possible Olympic site for Canada," remembers his wife Paule
Richardson. "He was accompanied by Sidney Dawes and W.C.
Bennett, the Premier of B.C., on a helicopter survey of
mountains in the area for a period of one week. On the last
day Bob was dropped on top of Whistler and skied to the
bottom of the mountain where the gondola is now located."
Because he was such a talented skier, he was invited
to ski resorts around North America by people he had met on
the racing circuit. In the 1950s he was skiing at Sun
Valley, Idaho, frequented by the likes of Ernest Hemingway
and other celebrities.
One evening, Mr. Richardson was invited to dinner at
Gary Cooper's house. His striking good looks and rugged
outdoor personality impressed the Hollywood types, who
invited him back to Los Angeles for a screen test. He turned
it down, though he named his first daughter, Rocky, after
Gary Cooper's wife.
"He was a homebody and wouldn't want to live as far
away as California," said his wife. "He always wanted to
come home."
Robert Claude Richardson was born on Dec. 31, 1927, in
Magog, Que., then a working-class textile town 100
kilometres south of Montreal. Bob Richardson had a rough
childhood. His mother abandoned him shortly after he was
born. His father wasn't around much and he was bounced
between an aunt and his grandmother. His wife said scenes of
child abuse on television upset him.
"After one program on television that showed children
being abused, he was sobbing," said Paule Richardson. "I
made sure I never turned on a program like that again."
Growing up, Mr. Richardson soon discovered he had a
natural athletic ability. Many people said he was good
enough at hockey to play in the NHL. And he became so
proficient at fly fishing that in summers he was hired as a
guide, which in fishing parlance is the person who makes
sure the guests at a lodge actually catch some fish, even if
the guide has to hook the trout for them.
Mr. Richardson discovered skiing with the help of Dr.
Marston Adams, a local dentist. He lent Mr. Richardson skis
and he taught himself on nearby Mount Orford. In his last
year of high school, his grandmother died and he left Magog
and moved to the Laurentians, where the owner of Mont
Tremblant, Joe Ryan, took him under his wing.
There he became a ski instructor and was hired to work
with some famous American families, including the
Rockefellers, the Kennedys and their relatives, the Skakels.
At the same time he joined the Nordik Ski Club and started
racing and winning.
After winning the Canadian championship in 1949, he
was chosen for the national team. He raced in the world
championships in Aspen in 1950 and prepared for the 1952
Olympics. Back then there was no financial support for
Olympic skiers. The amateur rule was strictly enforced so he
had to quit teaching skiing to compete in the Olympics. In
the summer he worked as a fishing guide for the Wheeler
resort in Mont Tremblant.
Not only were the amateur rules different at the time,
Norway was not the rich country it is today, since oil
hadn't been discovered. At Olympic breakfasts, his fellow
athletes were shocked that the Canadian skier was pocketing
fruit and other food and leaving with it. It was later
discovered that the sentimental man was giving it to
Norwegian children who were hanging around outside the
Olympic Village.
When he returned to Canada he went back to being a ski
professional, working at Mont Gabriel. During that time he
had a personal tragedy. His first wife, Nancy Holmes, was
killed in a car crash, leaving him with three young
children. He was remarried in 1959, to Paule Cartier, of
Quebec City. They moved to nearby Saint-Sauveur where he
helped set up the Mont Habitant ski resort. The two of them
ran ski shops together. During one transition in the making
of skis, they specialized in adapting old wooden skis,
sending them to an Austrian artisan in nearby Mont Rolland
who put modern metal edges on them.
In the mid 1960s, Mr. Richardson started to find the
Laurentians too commercial. His wife said he didn't like the
music piped in over the loudspeakers at the ski hill in
Saint-Sauveur. So he went back to the Eastern Townships in
southern Quebec, to Owl's Head hill, which at the time had
the second-highest vertical drop in the province.
"He helped us from the start, designing some of the
trails and doing just about everything," said Fred Korman,
who opened Owl's Head in 1965 and who still runs it. "Of
course, he ran the ski school. People looked up to him. He
was such a good skier, people used to copy his style."
From the top of Owl's Head you can see along Lake
Memphremagog, which is still open water in the early ski
season, and down to the United States, just a few kilometres
to the south. On a quiet day you could hear Bob Richardson.
"He always whistled when he skied," said his son Mark.
"You could find him anywhere on the mountain."
Sometimes Mr. Richardson seemed a bit grumpy. One of
his ski instructors remembered that he played cribbage every
morning with his wife before they drove to the hill, where
she ran the ski shop. "If she beat him, he was grumpy for a
little while."
During the summers, Mr. Richardson worked on
construction, sometimes building houses, other times working
for Fred Korman's construction firm, which put up lines and
power stations for Hydro-Québec
He spent one summer in Natashquan, an isolated town on
the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence across from
Anticosti Island, where the only connection to the outside
world is by boat. He loved the isolation, brought his
fly-fishing gear and spent his spare time catching huge
salmon and trout.
Bob Richardson last skied two years ago. He died at
the Brome-Missisquoi Perkins Memorial Hospital of
complications from diabetes on April 12.
He leaves his wife Paule and four children.
