Hall selection ‘a tremendous honour’

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This article was published 27/04/2018 (2756 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sandra Kirby was at a St. Vital café, enjoying lunch with a friend’s three-year-old daughter, when her phone rang.

Let the record show that the University of Winnipeg professor emerita and 1976 Olympian could never have guessed what would come next. It’s not the kind of call that most people expect, not even after decades of advocacy in sport.

“Can you keep a secret?” the caller asked.

When they told her the secret, Kirby gasped with excitement. The toddler she was having lunch with got excited, too, and spilled her hot chocolate, and that is how Kirby learned she was headed into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.

For five weeks, Kirby kept the news secret, telling only her partner, Marlene Boesch, and her sister. Now, it’s official, and out in the open: she is the lone Manitoban selected to enter the nation’s institutional sports memory this year.

For Kirby, 68, the news seemed to arrive like a bolt from the blue. To be sure, she’s earned it: since the very start of her own pioneering athletic career, Kirby has pushed at barriers, fighting to make sports more equitable and safer.

She wrote books, shining light on the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse in sport. She co-founded organizations to champion female athletes. She challenged injustice when she saw it — and often, she won.

Still, in her mind, she was never the leader. She always saw herself as one of many. Yet in a way, the fact of her induction is also recognition for all who worked alongside her, too. The message, simply: this work has value.

“It’s absolutely a tremendous honour,” she says. “It makes me feel that sport is in a good place. If they put people like me in there — and I’m kind of the bad news person, with the abuse stuff — it means they’re really taking it seriously.”

To this day, five weeks after that surprise call, Kirby isn’t certain who nominated her. She has an inkling, though she won’t say — some folks took a sudden interest in obtaining her biographical material — but she can’t be totally sure.

Right now, this is what she knows. She is one of eight people selected for the class of 2018: six as athletes, two as builders. At the October induction gala in Toronto, she will stand beside a diverse cross-section of sport leaders.

There is CFL legend Damon Allen and Olympic champion cross-country skier Chandra Crawford. There is Wilton Littlechild, a Cree lawyer and former Alberta MP who has long helped to build sport opportunities in Indigenous communities.

The inductees also include Mary Baker, a former pro baseball player and the first female sport broadcaster in Canada; Jeff Adams, a wheelchair racing icon; Maple Leafs legend Dave Keon; and diver Alexandre Despatie.

All of them have left some kind of mark, beyond the boundaries of their chosen field of play. And in an age of #MeToo, Kirby stands as one of the strongest voices for gender equity in sport and confronting sexual abuse.

In a way, that work is inseparable from her own athletic career. When Kirby wore the Maple Leaf to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, she was among the first cohort of women rowers ever to compete at an Olympic Games.

Though Kirby’s path soon took her in more academic directions, the fact of that achievement never left her.

“When you’re an Olympian, you have confidence in your voice,” she says. “I always had equity, I always was concerned about things like that. But going through the Olympic portal gives you confidence to say what you think.”

The biographical notes about her, that will go into the Hall, are nearly endless. In rowing, she is a decorated competitor, a respected coach, and just the second Canadian woman to become an international umpire.

Beyond the water, she helped build some of sports’ most enduring equity efforts. In 1981, she helped co-found the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport; she later sat on a national action committee.

While a sociology professor at the University of Winnipeg, her focus soon turned towards making sports healthier. In 2000, she authored The Dome of Silence, a landmark book exploring the prevalence of sexual abuse in sport.

And she is also one of seven co-founders of Safe Sport International, dedicated to reducing harm in sport. That’s not limited to abuse, it also includes such issues as overtraining, overmedicating and other things that hurt athletes.

Earlier this month, the organization held its first conference in Madrid, Spain. More than 100 people from national federations, sport organizations, the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee came out.

“It was just like all my Christmases at one time,” Kirby says, of seeing it all come together.

And the world is going through a moment when it comes to tackling the intersections of power and abuse. Once, Kirby thought that sports was behind the times. Now, she sees those dialogues rise to the forefront in sport, too.

For instance, she points at the recent case of Larry Nassar — the former United States national gymnastics team doctor who molested hundreds of young athletes — and the surge of support in courts and media for his victims.

“We’ve been working on this for three decades, and the world is sitting up and saying, ‘Me too,’” she says. “There’s a groundswell, and maybe it’s been propelled by sport. The Nassar case got a lot of people outside sport very upset.”

Now, as Kirby looks to the years ahead, she’s already planning what will come next.

Soon, she plans to step back from Safe Sport International — “I’ve done the building,” she says, “I’m not any good at maintaining” — but she will remain busy. She serves on the board of the Manitoba Rowing Club and she coaches.

She’s working on another book, this one exploring women’s experience of abuse in sport and what helped them carry forward.

The part she wants to show, she says, is how sport can bring healing, even after it brings harm.

And her own athletic career is still going strong: she won silver at the world masters last year, gold the year before. This year, she amped up her training: the world regatta is in Florida in September and she plans to make a splash.

“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” she says. “I’ve wanted enough time to train and not just be sort-of ready, but be really ready. So that’s the goal this year.”

After that, there will be the Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame induction gala in October, where she’ll get to rub shoulders with a dazzling array of sport greats, and rest — for one night, anyway — on her hard-earned laurels.

“It’s overused to say you stand on the shoulders of those who come before, but you really do,” she says. “Times like this, I look back and I think of (sports hall of famer) Abby Hoffman, who was my flagbearer in ’76 (Montreal Olympics).

“Or I look at Marion Lay, who was a founding member of the Canadian Association for Advancement for Women in Sport, and significant people along the way who I’ve been so fortunate to work with.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca