November 4 marked another first-rate gala hosted by the Niverville Heritage Centre. Hundreds in attendance were treated to a night of fine dining accompanied by the inspirational and comedic storytelling of Jon Montgomery, 2010 Olympic gold medalist and host of Amazing Race Canada.
The fundraising goal was a lofty one this year, coming in at just over $151,000. According to an early tally, proceeds had already reached almost $93,000.
“We are expecting additional funds as many guests took home their pledge cards,” says Anne Eastman of Niverville Heritage Holdings’ board of directors. “We are hoping we will be closer to our goal.”
With a focus on improving life for the seniors living within the Heritage Centre’s aging-in-place campus, much of what is raised will be directed to improvements at the Heritage Life Personal Care Home (HLPCH) and Niverville Credit Union Manor.
This year, the HLPCH marks its tenth anniversary and the NCU Manor has reached the 16-year mark.
Prior to the evening event, Montgomery received a guided tour of the campus, a one-of-a-kind facility in Manitoba.
“This is the real deal here, folks,” Montgomery told the evening crowd. “I have never, ever been to a community that could lay claim to something like this.”
It became the launching pad from which Montgomery dived into his own life story, a story of dreaming big and achieving even bigger things for himself.
Montgomery grew up in Russell, Manitoba. As a child, one of his greatest inspirations was hometown hero Theo Fleury, also from Russell.
Despite his small stature, Fleury rose to international NHL fame and closed his hockey career with an Olympic gold win in 2002.
When Montgomery was 11 years old, Fleury paid a visit to his childhood school.
“I identified with this diminutive hockey player like the rest of the guys on my hockey team couldn’t,” Montgomery said. “I was the smallest guy on the ice every time I set foot out there. I was the second smallest kid in my class. The girl who was born prematurely, she was smaller. But when I stood shoulder to shoulder with this athlete, it was a watershed moment for me. [I knew] my limiting factors were self-imposed, and I began to view my world through a different lens that day.”
In 2001, Montgomery moved to Calgary and worked there as an auctioneer not far from Canada Olympic Park. He spent a lot of his time at the park working on what he called a self-guided tour of all of the winter Olympic sports, trying his hand at each one.
But the first time he witnessed skeleton racing, he was hooked.
“As we [stood] by the track, I happened to see an athlete come by at 125 kilometres per hour, on their stomach, hands at their side, toes pointed and chin draped over the end of their sled, going through a 360-degree roundabout, rising and falling and then smashing the wall on the way out, sparks flying, and I was like, ‘Yes! I have found it!’”
Unlike most other sports, Montgomery joked, skeleton required no great mental skill. As a matter of fact, you have to be a bit braindead to want to do it.
If high-level competition was the goal, though, serious training would be needed. He began by searching the internet to find the program that made sense for him.
It involved ten repetitions of ten squats every day for ten days, with weights. The kicker, he says, is that it required him to add ten extra pounds every day, per side, to the weight he’d been squatting with the day before.
“So at the end of ten days, you are doing 100 squats with 200 additional pounds on the bar than you had ten days ago.”
He didn’t make it. In fact, few humans would. But he didn’t know that until he reread the program details, only to realize that he’d inadvertently doubled the weight it prescribed. He was supposed to add only five pounds per side each day.
“I pushed myself to absolute crippling failure,” Montgomery said. “I had tried to do 100 percent more work than what was asked of me, but I had nearly completed it. And it made me realize that things are only truly fundamentally out of our reach if we put them there.”
Using self-limiting words such as “I can’t” or “I’m going to fail” will become self-fulfilling prophesies, he said.
In the end, Montgomery went on to take gold in the men’s skeleton event at the 2010 Winter Olympics held in Vancouver. He became renowned for his victory march through Whistler Village, taking celebratory swigs from a pitcher of beer as he passed through a crowd of raucous fans.
Looking back on the event, though, Montgomery never lets that victory overshadow the years of hard work that it took to get there.
“If you’re not celebrating the small victories and if you’re not savouring those incremental gains that you’re making, in skeleton racing and in life, you will convince yourself that you’re not getting any better. And you will quit before the miracle. Before you realize your own potential.”
The same is true, he said, as we attempt to accomplish things collaboratively. This was witnessed by Montgomery when his fellow Canadian Olympians reached a place where they were no longer competing with each other to make the final cut for the Olympic team, but were rather competing as a unit to bring home the medals for Canada.
A few years later, Montgomery faced a new challenge: a complete redirection in his career path. He found himself on a flight to Toronto for what he calls a terrifying audition for the position of host of Amazing Race Canada.
“I didn’t know how I was going to take the rejection of hearing, ‘We don’t like your face and certainly not your voice,’” Montgomery said. “But I did know one thing. I knew that 2014 and the Sochi games was going to be the end of my athletic journey. I had to be honest with myself that tobogganing in a spandex onesie has a definitive shelf life. And at 35 years old, I was approaching that best-before date, if I’m being truthful.”
Not only did Montgomery get the job, but he’s been the acting host of the reality TV show ever since.
Montgomery closed the Saturday night gala with an auction, calling out in his rapid-riff auctioneer voice to attendees, hoping to encourage a little extra investment in the seniors of Niverville.
On auction were a beer jug with an authentic Amazing Race Canada clue card and an autographed and gently used Connor Hellebuyck goalie stick. Together, they sold for $2,500.
“I was pleased with all the positive feedback I received, and with the generosity of Jon Montgomery staying until everyone that wanted had an opportunity for a picture and a few words,” Eastman concludes.
