A career of rowing against the current

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This article was published 24/09/2016 (3297 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ask any trailblazer, and their answers are consistent: history, almost by definition, didn’t feel like history while they lived it.

It makes sense. Change comes in bursts, but history’s arc follows a much longer curve. It can take years for the full context of change to emerge. In the middle of that forward push, the people who make history are just doing the work.

So no, if you turned to young Sandra Kirby in 1976 and asked what she thought her legacy would be, she wouldn’t have guessed there’d be interest 2016. At the time, she was just a phys-ed teacher in B.C., and daily life wasn’t covered in glory.

Get this: she had to pay for her own replacement teacher while she worked to make Canada’s first Olympic women’s rowing team. Even that came after butting heads with the school board, which was reluctant to give her time off for the trials.

Pushing for time was “probably my first outward feminist act,” Kirby says. “There was a guy going from the same school district to coach rugby in Japan on full salary. I was asking for a leave of absence for two weeks, three weeks.”

The end of the story is where Kirby made history.

Women made their debut on the Olympic rowing stage at the Montreal Summer Games. Kirby, then 26 and only a year into her rowing career, joined a Canada crew that finished ninth in the coxed quadruple sculls.

Flash forward through 40 years of rowing. Fast-forward past the rise of Canadian stars such as Silken Laumann and Marnie McBean and even the 2016 Rio Games, where Lindsay Jennerich and Patricia Obee claimed double sculls silver.

Over the years, Kirby became a professor emerita at the University of Winnipeg and an international champion of gender equity in sport. She became a high-ranking rowing official, and a well-regarded coach — and yes, she still rows.

That brings us to early September in Copenhagen, at the 2016 World Rowing Masters Regatta. The event features a who’s-who of former elite rowers, but this year — the 40th anniversary of the Montreal Olympics — had something special.

Kirby teamed up with three other alumni of the 1976 Games: her former Canadian teammate Guylaine Bernier, Denmark’s Judith Lyster, and Sweden’s Tone Pahle. They only had a few days to practice, but they clinched a bronze medal at the masters event.

Out on the water, they felt a familiar thrill. “Being in the boat, rowing together, the sun shining, the water glistening, and us rowing in unison,” Kirby says. “That was just pure joy.”

Most of all, the rowing community remembered. The rowing federation published an article on the reunion; people came up to offer congratulations. It matters. “It’s important to shine a light on the successes of women of the past,” Kirby says.

The idea of a reunion boat began two years ago, as Kirby prepared to retire as a rowing official. At a regatta in Australia, one of the last she would work, she started chatting with Pahle.

Too bad, Kirby said, they wouldn’t see each other much anymore.

“Well,” Pahle replied, “You could always race.”

The more Kirby thought about it, the better an idea it became: why not put together a reunion crew for the 2016 Masters, to mark the achievement they’d shared four decades before?

“We were thinking this was really important for us to signal somehow, to say, ‘Don’t forget women haven’t been at this very long. Don’t forget that the sport is not fixed yet. We’re getting there, but the sport is not fixed yet.’”

That question of “fixing” sport has become Kirby’s life’s work. There is much to tackle: it’s not just the matter of gender equity, which is still lurching forward. There is also the festering wounds of harassment, sexual assault and abuse.

On those matters, Kirby has been a tireless advocate. She has helped lead international task forces to tackle the problem; earlier this year, she co-authored an International Olympic Committee consensus statement on harassment and abuse in sport.

The statement, released in March, zeroes in on the ways child athletes, as well as LGBTTQ* athletes and those with disabilities, are at the highest risk of being harmed or exploited.

It’s a hot topic in recent years, in part because the cultural capacity to discuss abuse has been growing. Still, understanding abuse exists throughout society, is there something unique about the way it manifests in sport?

“Sport is different, absolutely,” Kirby says. “The sport world is a world apart. Super things are supposed to happen. Superheroes are built. Those things acquire a meaning beyond what the mundane world would say about sport.”

That separation, she points out, creates an environment where athletes must navigate a constant series of hurdles to keep moving up. Sometimes, it can seem the only road to the dream is through an official or coach who abuses their power.

In a way, the higher up the chain athletes reach, the more vulnerable they can become. By that point, they’ve devoted their whole lives to one goal; often, their families have made enormous sacrifices, too. The pressure to continue is enormous.

(Convicted sexual abuser Graham James used to tell his victims they needed his support if they ever wanted to reach the NHL. Theo Fleury would later say he stayed silent, for fear speaking up would end his hockey career.)

“By the time they get to the Olympics, they’ve overcome a number of barriers,” Kirby says. “They’ve put up with a number of things that they put up with because they want to get to the end goal. The end becomes more important than the means.”

Still, on all the fronts on which Kirby has been a leader — abuse, gender equity — the sport world is moving forward.

In 2020, women’s canoeing will make its Olympic debut in Tokyo; paddling women fought for more than two decades to improve gender equity in the sport. The pushback then, as it is in most cases, was the depth of the women’s field was too thin.

Kirby has little patience for the argument.

“How are they going to get it?” she says. “When I hear that kind of argument it’s like, just get on with it. Get out of the way, let women show what they can do. Give them the opportunity, they will perform.”

Case in point: the Winnipeg Rowing Club is set to host a celebration Wednesday for local Paralympic rower Meghan Montgomery, who came out of retirement to capture Canada’s first para-rowing medal (a bronze) at the Rio Games.

Women such as Montgomery, Kirby says, stand on her generation’s shoulders — the same as Kirby’s Olympics were made possible by those who came before her. It can be easy to let history quietly slip away, if it isn’t remembered.

To illustrate this, Kirby points to a conversation she had with one of the rowers she coaches. The younger rower mentioned the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport, which was launched in 1981.

“I said, ‘Yeah, I know, I’m a founding member,’” Kirby says with a laugh. “You just have to keep reminding them that history is not old. It’s in us. We’re living it.”

In other words, history is built by people such as Kirby, who just did the work. “And people like me,” she says, “aren’t done yet.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca