The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2002, Blaðsíða 6

90
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 57 ft3
Editorial
by Roger Newman
"There is a great deal of unhappiness
about this on the Internet," said my Gimli
office landlord Loren Gudbjartson when
he strolled into my office one day last fall.
That was my introduction to the
Winnipeg Falcons, winners of the gold
medal at the first Olympic Games hockey
competition in 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium.
Gudbjartson had just told me that
Icelandic-Canadians were upset about the
treatment the Falcons were receiving from
the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA).
He said the CHA had decided to hon-
our the 1924 Toronto Granites who won
Canada's second hockey gold medal at
Chamonix, France.
As the rule-makers for Canadian hock-
ey, association officials had recently
announced that Canada's 2002 Olympians
would wear a sweater logo dedicated to the
Granites during the forthcoming February
games in Salt Lake City. The Falcons, as it
turned out, were to be ignored because
their feat had been performed when hock-
ey was a "demonstration" sport at a
Summer Olympics.
At first hearing, I was not particularly
moved by Gudbjartson's news because I
had only vaguely heard of the Falcons
whose victory was recorded 15 years
before I was born. But as a veteran news
reporter, I smelled "story" when
Gudbjartson provided me with a print-out
and I read the comments that were being
exchanged on the Icelandic National
League's Internet chat line which links
North American Icelanders with each
other and with the people of Iceland.
Western Canadians of Icelandic back-
ground were perceiving the CHA's exclu-
sion of the Falcons as a snub with racist
roots.
The historians among them noted that
Icelandic settlers of the early 1900s were
regarded as lowly immigrants whose sons
were barred at one time from playing in the
Winnipeg senior hockey league. On a
broader level, the web correspondents were
taking the CHA's action as another eastern
Canadian insult to the west.
They also made the point—which
proved to be valid—that the Falcons took
home gold from a bonafide competition
and not from an exhibition demonstration
sport.
Armed with this information, I con-
tacted key figures on both sides of the con-
troversy and wrote a story that appeared in
the next edition of the Interlake Spectator,
the Gimli-based weekly serving the region
just north of Winnipeg. Because he was
short of sports material that week,
Spectator editor Jim Mosher used the arti-
cle to lead the sports section, although he
admitted later it should have been on the
newspaper's front page. But even though it
was under-played, it set off a reaction that
would soon turn the Falcons into a well-
known name in hockey-playing countries
around the world.
The next day I received a phone call
from Winnipeg Free Press sports writer
Randy Turner who had spotted my Falcon
piece on the Spectator website. Randy and
I are old acquaintances—I taught him in a
Red River Community College journalism
class in the early 1980s and he played for
the Winnipeg Press Club softball team I
coached in the city media league. He asked
if there was genuine concern about the
slight to the Falcons in the Icelandic com-
munity. I told him there was concern,
although not everybody was jumping up
and down. I also made the flippant editori-
al observation that while interest in sex is
universal, there are a few people who could
care less about hockey.