Will Chan be Canada's 1st cross-cultural sports hero?
Toronto skater emerged during the past year as the potential face of the greatest show on snow
His visage beams down…across from the CBC building in Toronto. Patrick Chan's broad smile is part of a collage of Canadian Olympic stars wearing white, assembled on white billboards promoting the Vancouver Games on another network.
The wide-eyed wunderkind from Toronto (can you call an Asian-Canadian a wunderkind?) emerged during the past year as the potential face of the greatest show on snow. But there's more to these pictures. Ironically on this palate of white, he is the only athlete who isn't.
He's a tri-lingual (English, French, Cantonese) first generation new Canadian who has embraced a traditional Canadian pastime — figure skating — and risen in the sport as swiftly as he covers the ice.
The Canadian senior champion at 17, world silver medallist at 18, a fashionable and legitimate pick for Olympic gold at 19. Even his birthday, New Year's Eve 1990, seems a harbinger of hope and possibility.
TV networks, fast food companies and others have quickly lined up behind Chan; charmed by his humility, mesmerized by his talent and swayed by his demographic. Not only as a Chinese athlete performing in front of one of the country's largest Asian communities in Vancouver, but perhaps intrigued by the promise that Patrick Chan could become Canada's first cross-cultural sports hero.
Past legends share similar qualities
Draw up a list of our most venerated sports legends — past and present, professional and amateur — and they share similar qualities. Howe, Richard, Orr, Gretzky, Nash, Weir, Greene, Street, Boucher, Klassen, Hughes. All of them modest, all gifted, all determined. And all of them white.
It's not as though this great big snow globe has failed to produce superstars of a different stripe. Donovan Bailey beat the big bad Americans in the 1996 Summer Games' glamour event. But his sprinting success in Atlanta never engendered a genuine affection from the Canadian public at large. Sponsors noticed. And besides we skate, we don't run. Perdita Felicien might have done it with a golden run in Athens six years ago. But her stumble and fall made her a sympathetic figure, not a national icon.
Patrick Chan has a chance.
He embodies the notion of Canada as a place that welcomes all and through hard work, dignity and a little luck, anyone can succeed. Figure skating has proven to be an attractive place for visible minorities in recent times. Emmanuel Sandhu, Mira Leung and Netty Kim have all had their moment.
But Chan appears to be the real deal in a sport with an honour roll of champions whose names reflect a Canada gone by - Scott, Jackson, Magnussen, Cranston, Manley. He can speak to our two founding nations as well as connect with the fastest-growing segment of the population.
It may seem un-Canadian to view this young man through the lens of ethnicity. Some might suggest he's just a brilliant skater whose background doesn't matter. Yet if he becomes the Olympic figure skating champion, Patrick Chan could likely reveal just how colour blind we really are.