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By Martin Cleary
When John Edwards was a young man, he was one of Canada’s star sprint flatwater canoeists in the 1970s.
A product of the Carleton Place Canoe Club, the oldest continuing flatwater racing canoe club in Canada, Edwards impressively worked his way through the divisional, provincial and national systems to qualify for the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic Games.
His race was the gruelling men’s C1 1,000 metres. He survived a heat, a repechage and a semifinal to finish ninth in the final.
A member of the Canadian Canoe Association (now Canoe Kayak Canada) national team until 1979, Edwards had eight full years of international experience, collecting three gold and one silver medals at two Pan-American championships and racing at three world senior championships. He also represented Canada as an 18-year-old team alternate at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics.
After retiring as an international canoeist, Edwards kept in touch with paddling, serving as Carleton Place Canoe Club commodore from 1988 to 1993 and later working as the Canoe Kayak Canada domestic development director from 1999-2015.
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And just as he was a gold medallist in his days as an athlete, Edwards stepped forward later to become a champion in developing the sport of sprint paddling.
“It’s really about expanding the sport in as many ways as I can possibly imagine,” Edwards said in a phone interview this week.
A member of the International Canoe Federation board of directors, Edwards organized the first world conference for paddlers with a disability in Montreal in 2008. That year he became the ICF paracanoe committee chair because of his impressive work at the conference and held that role for four years.
In 2012, he was selected the chair for the ICF paracanoe committee and retains that position today. He is the leading figure in the ICF paracanoeing program, which has attracted more than 65 participating national federations since 2009.
Edwards was successful in having paracanoe make its Paralympic Games debut in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 (six races) and continue for Tokyo 2020 (nine events) and Paris 2024 (10 events).
As co-leader and facilitator of the 2013 ICF Canoe Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland, Edwards was front and centre to promote female participation in the discipline of canoe. Women have competed in Olympic kayak racing since London 1948, but they had to wait until Tokyo 2020 to chase the medals in canoe.
Edwards attended his first annual general meeting of the Canadian Canoe Association in 1968 at age 16. He remembers a man standing up and asking what the association was doing about development in the sport, which had 3,000 members and 45 clubs nationally at the time.
When Edwards became domestic development director in 1999, membership was 3,100 with the same 45 clubs. By the time he retired in 2015, he had lifted those numbers to 4,500 members and 65 clubs.
He also founded Canada’s Aboriginal Paddling Initiative, and launched the Canoe Kayak Canada PaddleALL program to attract paddlers with physical and/or intellectual disabilities into the sport.
It’s no wonder Edwards has received international recognition in the past seven years.
In 2017, he was presented a Lifetime Achievement honour at the World Paddle Awards ceremony in Mortagua, Portugal. He also was made a member of the World Paddle Awards Academy.
Last week at the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, IOC president Thomas Bach gave Edwards the World Olympians Association’s Certificate of Recognition.
Edwards received that honour along with Italy’s Luciano Buonfiglio, the ICF’s treasurer and acting vice-president. Buonfiglio also competed at the Montreal 1976 Olympics in K4 1,000 metres. Edwards and Buonfiglio also received an OLY pin at the Olympic House and signed the Olympians’ Wall.
“After all these years, it is fantastic to be recognized in this way,” Edwards told sportswriter Geoff Berkeley. “I think this is a very good policy from the IOC to keep the attention on the athletes. There are so many influences pulling in different directions, but this is a very proactive initiative that keeps the alumni at the core of the Olympic Movement.
“The IOC is recognizing the Olympians who continue to be involved in their federations. There are probably thousands of other Olympians, like me, (who) are involved in their international federations, national federations, clubs and communities.
“We all feel a need to give back to those who helped us in our youth.”
That’s his nature.
“I enjoy getting things done,” he said during the interview. “It’s more fun, and more difficult, to make change … then they can appreciate their sport has a wider appeal and bring more energy and support to the clubs.”