Mighty Mouse of the pool auctioning off her championship past

Elaine Tanner became a teenaged sensation with stunning performances at the Commonwealth Games in 1966. Three years later, she would retire from her sport. ABOVE: The collection to be put up for auction. BELOW: Elaine Tanner in the pool in 1966, aged 15. INSET: The stopwatch that recorded a world record in 1966.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
May 18, 2011

VICTORIA

Elaine Tanner was a pipsqueak swimmer never more fleet than when cutting through the still waters of a pool. They called her Mighty Mouse.

She was still a teenager, a toothy 17-year-old, when she took with her to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City the hopes of a nation.

She remembers being still being dripping wet from a race when a reporter first asked why she had failed.

That she had acquitted herself well, coming home with three medals against the world’s best, did little to ease the pain she felt after failing to win the gold anticipated by so many of her countrymen.

In some ways, the hurt has never gone away. She has had bouts with depression and suffered an eating disorder. She titled her memoir, Off the Deep End.

These days, she is doing fine, thanks for asking, feeling fit mentally and physically.

She has also made a decision.

Canada’s greatest female swimmer is placing for auction her collection of memorabilia. It is a spring cleaning unlike any other.

“I should have done it four decades ago,” she said Tuesday.

“I know I’ll have my critics and people won’t understand.

“I’m doing it with peace. I’m excited to move on to the next chapter.”

The material had been boxed in a storage locker in Ontario, where she and her husband spend part of the year. Ms. Tanner had been winnowing out clothes when she went through boxes filled with mementoes and scrapbooks. She realized the time had come to let it go.

Among the items are her first bathing suit and her Red Cross beginner’s certificate; photographs with hockey star Bobby Orr, swimming sensation Mark Spitz, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau; assorted books, posters, and telegrams; her uniform from the 1968 Olympics; an original Roy Peterson caricature depicting her with mouse ears; and, four framed world-record certificates from her sport’s international governing body.

The greatest interest will be generated by seven Commonwealth Games medals and, especially, a bronze medal and a pair of silver medals from the Mexico Olympics.

The collection is to be listed by the auction house Classic Collectibles, which will conduct an online sale beginning May 23. The company, which is based in Delson, Que., south of Montreal, is best known for selling hockey items, most notably the collections of Rocket Richard and Jean Beliveau, as well as the Team Canada sweater worn by Paul Henderson when he scored his famous goal in 1972.

“It’s time to give them a new home,” she said.

She has donated many items over the years to charity. As well, Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, into which she was inducted in 1971, at age 20, has an extensive collection of her juvenile medals, plaques and trophies.

Ms. Tanner plans to use the auction proceeds to establish herself as a counsellor offering advice in kinesiology and holistic health.

If the auction is spectacularly successful, she would also like to make donations to charities involved with homelessness and mental health.

In Christmas, 2009, Ms. Tanner and her husband John Watt distributed blankets and homemade cookies to people living on the streets of downtown Victoria.

“They were so polite, so grateful, so warm,” she said. “They really too kcare of each other. There was more love among those people with nothing than in some homes of the affluent.”

As a teenager, her grin and effervescent personality captured the imagination of Canadians. She returned from the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Jamaica with four gold medals, an overnight sporting sensation.

Two years later, she set an Olympic mark in the heats of the 100-metre backstroke. In the finals, she raced faster yet, only to be beaten by a half-second by Kaye Hall, of Tacoma, Wash.

Two days later, Ms. Tanner finished second in the 200 backstroke.

The day after that, she claimed a bronze with fellow Canadian swimmers in the 400-metre freestyle relay.

Though the teenager won three of the five medals Canada took at those games, she returned home dejected and defeated.

She retired from the pool the following year.

Ms. Tanner turned 60 in February. She still will not go in the pool, not even for a recreational splash.

It does not bother her to relinquish such prizes as her medals. She had originally stored of them in her grandmother’s sewing box

“Just things,” she said.

She is keeping a single memento.

It is an ordinary blue ribbon, the kind awarded at country fairs and elementary school competitions. She won it at age 5 while swimming with the Lanai Club in Sunnyvale, Calif.

“I wanted that blue ribbon so badly,” she said. “That was the seed of my dream.”

That little blue ribbon took her all around the globe and into the pool against the world’s best. Ms. Tanner no longer has need of her medals as keepsakes. The ribbon is staying because it represents the joy she once felt for her sport.

Recognition of sprinter finally gets up to speed

At 17, Barbara Howard competed at the 1938 British Empire Games at Sydney, Australa. She had never before left her Vancouver home. She is shown here holding a stuffed koala bear given her by an admiring fan. City of Vancouver Archives photograph, CVA 371 1643

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
May 19, 2010

VICTORIA

Barbara Howard is lively in speech, a little slowed in the flesh.

She spends most days at a seniors’ centre near her Burnaby home, lifting weights and stretching stiff muscles. The exercises are a routine she has maintained all her life and not one she is about to disrupt even after turning 90 earlier this month. Arthritis in a knee limits her mobility.

Once, she was one of the fastest women in an empire that covered one-quarter of the globe.

At 17, as a schoolgirl from eastside Vancouver, she boarded an ocean liner for a month-long voyage to Australia, where she was to compete as a sprinter at the British Empire Games. She had never even left the city of her birth before.

She returned thinking herself a failure.

“I thought I’d disappointed Canada,” she said. “I was ashamed when I came home that I didn’t have a gold medal.”

She planned on earning redemption at the upcoming Olympics, but the outbreak of war led to the cancellation of the Games. Miss Howard completed her education.

She had not returned from Australia empty-handed. She brought home two medals and a prized souvenir. Only decades later, after working in near-anonymity as a physical education teacher, her youthful athletic achievements ignored or forgotten, has she received belated recognition as a trailblazer.

Miss Howard is believed to have been the first black woman athlete to represent Canada in international competition.

One newspaper called her “the colored flash.”

She was still in elementary school when teachers first noticed her swiftness afoot. When the principal rang the school bell in the yard, she remembers sprinting the last block-and-a-half to arrive at her desk before the start of class. She was school champion in her senior year at Laura Secord Elementary, before moving on to Britannia High.

Her family had a long history in Vancouver, as her maternal grandfather arrived by train from Winnipeg soon after the city’s incorporation. He owned and managed the Abbott Street Shaving Parlor and Baths, at No. 25, sandwiched between a hotel and a bakery.

Her mother, Cassie Scurry, a dressmaker, married Samuel Howard, an American-born stationary engineer. After her father died when she was aged eight, her mother’s brother supported the household.

Though a neighbour addressed family members by an abhorrent, though common, racial epithet, Miss Howard does not remember much discrimination based on her skin colour.

“My mother was very protective of us,” she said. “We had a happy life.”

Her first track suit was a pair of men’s long johns. Her mother dyed them navy blue. “They were warm,” Miss Howard said. “They did me fine.”

In Grade 11, still two years from graduation, she competed in a time trial, racing 100 yards in a stunning 11.2 seconds, besting the Games’ record by one-tenth of a second.
The performance earned her a spot on the Canadian team.

The athletes left Vancouver aboard the Aorangi, a liner aboard which they trained as best they could. Including a stop at Fiji, the voyage lasted a numbing 28 days, long enough to spark at least one romance among the athletes. (Bill Dale, a runner from Victoria, and Mary Baggaley, a swimmer from Vancouver, later married. Mr. Dale died earlier this month.)

Miss Howard shared a small cabin aboard ship with Ann Clark, team manager and chaperone for the Canadian women’s team.

The conditions at Sydney were primitive and the athletes were bothered as well by heat and flies.

One athlete in particular had to cope with the curiosity of crowds.

“Barbara Howard, dusky sprinter from B.C., caused quite a stir among Sydney’s populace during her appearance at the Empire games,” reported Globe sports columnist Fanny (Bobbie) Rosenfeld, an Olympic gold medal-winning relay sprinter. “She apparently was quite a novelty ... appearing on the front page of every newspaper. They seldom see colored athletes down there ... the photographers and autograph seekers kept on her trail.”

One admirer presented her with a stuffed koala bear, which she clutched tight to her chest.

Miss Howard finished sixth in the 100-yard dash, a half-second behind the Australian victor.

“I remember walking into the oval and being overwhelmed,” she said. “None of my high-school gang were out there cheering for me.”

She then managed to contribute to two relay teams, winning a silver and a bronze medal.

She returned home determined to make a faster run at the 1940 Olympics at Tokyo. But the deteriorating world situation led those Games to be moved to Helsinki before being cancelled. The 1938 British Empire Games would be the world’s last great athletic competition for a decade later, by which time her running days were over.

Miss Howard finished her education, earning an education degree at the University of British Columbia. She became a teacher and a consultant, and continued her volunteer work with the United Church.

She does exercises and receives hand massages through the seniors’ programs at the Confederation Centre in Burnaby, where, for many years, her peers were unaware of her athletic past. A few months ago, a poster series featuring women athletes were distributed to libraries and recreation centres in the Lower Mainland. One of these featured a smiling, 17-year-old girl holding a stuffed koala.

The doll now has moth holes and the black nose has faded, but it rests in a place of pride on a couch in her bedroom, a souvenir of a girl’s unforgettable journey.