HIGH ACHIEVERS: Getting to 2 Winter Olympics was half the challenge for 1960 slalom champion Anne Heggtveit

By Martin Cleary

Two-time Winter Olympian Anne Heggtveit almost didn’t make it into the alpine skiing start hut for both her Winter Games experiences, let alone win Canada’s first gold medal on the slopes.

But with the proper medical attention, her own perseverance and a few dashes of luck, the New Edinburgh-raised athlete not only raced three times at each of the 1956 and 1960 Olympics, but also she emerged as a Canadian sports history maker.

If you ask Heggtveit to describe her two Olympics, she would label the 1960 Squaw Valley Games as memorable and the 1956 Cortina Games as not memorable.

In the weeks preceding the 1960 Games, Heggtveit was training in Grindelwald, Switzerland, for the last series of women’s races before the Olympics. Unlike today, where athletes get familiar with the downhill course by skiing the run from top to bottom several times, each national team would be studying the course section by section at the same time in Heggtveit’s day.

As she descended the course one day in early January with a teammate and coach Pepi Salvenmoser, the shovel of a snow-clearing machine clipped the side of her left leg. The point of the shovel contacted the tibia area, but didn’t cut any muscle.

“I stood up, but I wasn’t sure if I had broken my leg,” Heggtveit, 87, recalled during a recent phone interview with High Achievers. “I could stand on it.

“When I went down for lunch, I noticed my pant leg was red. Someone said I better look after that. I went to a doctor down the street. I was lucky. When I got back to Canada (later in January), it still took a long time to heal.”

After racing the United States alpine ski championships, Heggtveit headed to the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics, where she placed 12th in both her first two races, the downhill and the giant slalom, and finished her competitive career with a bang – the slalom gold medal.

A skiing prodigy at the Ottawa Ski Club in her youth, Heggtveit was racing in women’s races as early as eight years old. She once won a car before she could drive it.

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Heggtveit became a first-time Olympian as a 17-year-old – 70 years ago later this month at the 1956 Cortina Games. Hopes were high for strong results as she had placed seventh in the slalom and ninth in the downhill at the 1954 world championships at 15.

Heggtveit wasn’t enthusiastic talking about the Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo. She placed 22nd in the downhill, 29th in the giant slalom and 30th in the slalom.

“It’s not something I think about,” insisted Heggtveit, who lives in Cornelius, North Carolina, with her husband James Ross Hamilton. “It was so difficult for me. It’s not memorable.”

What made it especially frustrating for Heggtveit was she had spent most of the previous year recovering from a serious left leg injury and wondering if she would be healthy for the 1956 Cortina Olympics.

On Jan. 31, 1955, she sustained a spiral fracture of her leg during a slalom practice. She spent three months in the Ottawa Civic Hospital, wore a leg cast for six to seven months and worried about nerve damage.

A student at Lisgar Collegiate Institute at the time, she missed the Canadian trials for the 1956 Olympics, but was named to the team based on her past performances.

When Heggtveit wants to think about something memorable, she focuses on the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics. Her Games started somewhat slow, but finished with the ultimate bang.

In her first two races, she was 12th in the downhill, placing 5.3 seconds behind the winner, and tied for 12th in the giant slalom, trailing the gold medallist by 2.2 seconds.

But the slalom made all the difference in her final Olympic experience as she executed two powerful and fluid runs, especially the first, and won by 3.3 seconds over American favourite Betsy Snite.

That Olympic title also earned her the gold medal as world champion because FIS, the international ski federation, considered the Winter Games as the world championships for that year. FIS also determined Heggtveit was the world championship combined winner with the best total placement points in her three races.

“My intention was to win it. I always had that goal,” Heggtveit said. “The slalom was definitely my stronger event.”

In the 1950s, the then-Canadian Amateur Ski Association would only send national alpine teams to Europe for competitive races every two years or the even-numbered years to race in the world championships and Olympic Games. But she convinced the association to send a team in 1959 to prepare for the upcoming Olympics.

That move reaped huge benefits for Heggtveit. At the famed Arlberg-Kandahar races in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, she placed second to Snite in the slalom, was third in the downhill and won the prestigious combined title for the lowest point score for both races.

“I didn’t feel any pressure because that’s what I was aiming for,” Heggtveit said about her two Olympic slalom runs.

She passed on the opportunity to study both slalom courses the day before her Feb. 26, 1960 slalom. Instead, she memorized the layout of the gates and the twists and turns on race day. That was always her style and strategy.

Heggtveit loved both courses, but handling the turns around the gates presented her with some discomfort because of the earlier injury to her left leg. The top part of the first run also had some tricky icy sections that could cause a skier to slide off course.

“I must be careful, I thought. I was, but it didn’t slow me down. I won by a huge margin,” said Heggtveit, who carried a 3.4-second advantage into the second run.

“I was a little bit nervous for the second run, but I didn’t slow down too much. I was glad it worked out. The gold gave me the satisfaction of doing it. I always wanted to be Canada’s first gold medallist (in alpine skiing) and I achieved that.”

And she gave a special nod to Ottawa figure skater Barbara Ann Scott for guiding her to her gold medal.

When the Minto Skating Club athlete returned home from winning the women’s singles gold medal at the 1948 St. Moritz Olympics, Heggtveit and family were among the thousands of Ottawa citizens who welcomed her home at a downtown parade.

“I’ll never forget that. She was my first idol, a non-skier, but really memorable,” Heggtveit added. “She did it. I thought I could do it. The fact she did it, that’s all she had to do for me. It was possible.”

As a rising nine-year-old alpine skier excitedly watching Scott’s return home, that’s all Heggtveit needed to turn impossible, at the time, to possible, 12 years later.

Scott was the first Canadian athlete to win an individual Olympic gold medal in any winter sport, after her unmatched performances on the tricky outdoor ice.

And Heggtveit followed in her footsteps as the second Canadian individual Olympic champion in any sport.