Deachman: Local seniors Olympics includes axe throwing, cup stacking—and a walk

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Just before competing in the spelling bee finals on Wednesday morning, Carmen Frappier had her hair done.

It wasn’t to try to look her best for the competition or attending media, or to quell any pre-match butterflies, nor even to spend a few quiet moments in the salon chair running through the spellings of various countries’ names — an area where she felt could use some improvement.

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No, the fact is that Frappier, 81, always gets her hair done on Wednesday mornings, and so, she thought, why upset her normal routine? Besides, it gave her a chance to catch 40 winks. The rest could be crucial.

Frappier was one of about 50 competitors who took part in Wednesday’s inaugural Cogir Venvi Ottawa Regional Olympiad Celebration, which brought the best of the best from 10 Cogir Venvi retirement homes across Ottawa to compete in five events: a spelling bee, toy axe-throwing, bean bag-tossing, cup-stacking and a 1.6-km walk. Each athlete had made it to the finals by winning qualifying rounds in their respective residence.

Frappier had the benefit of home-field advantage, with the finals taking place at her Prince of Wales Retirement Residence. She was also quite familiar with spelling bees, having won some as a schoolgirl, including when she attended Immaculata High School (motto: Study Builds Character) a little more than six decades ago. And those weren’t butterflies, she said, but rather a fire burning in her belly. She badly wanted to beat her opponents. “Damn right I do,” she admitted just before the bee began. “I’m very competitive.”

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But it would have been a mistake to take her opponents lightly. One, for example, earned her Master’s degree in English. Another, Alta Vista Retirement Home’s Tom Campbell, had been an English teacher and department head at Sir Wilfrid Laurier Secondary School (“We Strive for the Highest”) and Glebe Collegiate Institute (“Strive for the Heights”).

Campbell admitted he was nervous heading into the fray. The rest of his Alta Vista team, he said, expected him to win, and he worried he’d have to walk back home if he failed to claim the gold. (He also joked that he’d finished third in the qualifying round, but the first- and second-place finishers subsequently tested positive for spelling-enhancing drugs).

The 90-year-old Campbell noted that he was diagnosed as borderline dyslexic when he was a primary school student in Glasgow, Scotland and that his biggest fear heading into Wednesday’s competition was tripping up on differences between British and American spellings.

Campbell’s brush with dyslexia was not the only example Wednesday of athletes overcoming adversity, a theme that has long been the stock-in-trade of the Olympic Games.

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The aforementioned Master’s graduate speller, for example, is now in memory care, while 87-year-old cup-stacker Wayne “Sharpshooter” Hill, competing as a member of Barrhaven Manor’s “Not Fast or Furious” team, is legally blind. “I can see the cups in front of me,” he said prior to the finals. “Not 100 per cent, but I know they’re there.”

In preparation, Hill spent some time on Tuesday stacking and unstacking cups. “I had a friend time me, and I did it in 42 seconds,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll do that today, but I really want to win. Because of my disabilities with seeing, I want to prove to Barrhaven Manor that I can do it.”

For spectators, Wednesday’s competition was a cacophonous flurry of whizzing axes, flying bean bags, and clattering cups, with four of the five events taking place simultaneously.

Organizers might, for future Olympiads, consider the wisdom of having axe-throwers stationed on one side of the paved path and their respective targets on the other. ± Either move those events from the path or somehow incorporate the passing pedestrians into the scoring.

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The fifth event, the 1.6-km walk — which, somewhat curiously given that it was the event that most resembled an actual Olympic contest, was not timed or medalled — took place later.

And one by one, the winners emerged and gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded. Sharpshooter Hill greatly improved on his 42-second practice mark, stacking and collapsing his 10-cup pyramid in just 33.94 seconds on his first try, and 29.05 on his second. But both times fell short of the 19.30 seconds that 77-year-old gold-medallist Ruth Howard, representing Westwood Retirement Home’s “The Wild Westwood” team, took, which was four seconds faster than her nearest opponent.

“I felt great after that first round,” Howard said. “I wanted to do it in under 20 seconds.”

As for her gold medal, Howard plans on wearing it and showing it off back at The Westwood.

Rose Ebata, meanwhile, competing in axe-throwing for the Prince of Wales team, never relinquished her early lead as she won gold.

The Westwood Retirement Home earned a second gold medal when Tim “I’m an Aries; I always want to win” Scott came in first in the bean bag toss, a thrilling come-from-behind effort that saw him score 750 points in the third and final round, after earning none in the second. His three-round total of 900 points dwarfed the second-place total of 490.

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But his victory also defied the oddsmakers from the start. After waiting a year-and-a-half for a cortisone injection for a torn tendon in his right shoulder, the right-hander finally got the treatment shortly before the Games. So instead of practising in the days leading up to the finals, he completely rested his shoulder for two days and then spent Tuesday night icing it.

“It was a challenge,” he admitted after the match. “Plus the setup — the board and the beanbags — is entirely different than what I’m used to.”

Yet he couldn’t, or at least didn’t, hide the elation he felt after winning. “I’m going to have my gold medal bronzed,” he said.

Back at the spelling bee, Carmen Frappier was resplendent in her new coif but failed to reach the podium. Tom Campbell also fell early and, coincidentally, by the very hand he most feared from the outset: the American/British spelling divide, as his choice of the U.S. spelling of the word jewellery — jewelry — saw him (perhaps unfairly?) eliminated.

Instead, it was Donna McGregor, a Glebe Collegiate graduate competing for Landmark Court’s all-female “Pink Ladies” squad, who won gold, despite having no previous spelling bee experience or related work experience that might have given her an edge.

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“I could use a Pink Lady about now,” she noted after the lengthy bee, which was decided when her only remaining opponent stumbled on the word “miniscule.”

McGregor said that she did some warm-up exercises beforehand, reading online lists of spelling bee words. Other than that, though, she largely credited her mother for her success.

“My mother was English, had a dictionary, and always spoke well,” she said. “So maybe it’s genetic? I always liked spelling, and it came easy for me.”

Wednesday’s Olympiad celebration, meanwhile, was everything participants could hope for, at least those who weren’t too hung up on winning. It was fun, dramatic, and inclusive, and indeed a celebration. While the other Olympic Games — the ones held in Paris this year — only last year changed their motto from “Higher, Faster, Stronger” to “Higher, Faster, Stronger – Together,” the together part was what this Olympiad was all about.

“It was a good thing to do,” said Campbell. “I think too many people in too many senior residences aren’t challenged enough, maybe not academically, but mentally.

“And while I’m gutted at not winning the spelling bee,” he (over)stated, “I expect I’ll be back next year.”

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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