2 mars 2004
Whistle blower overcame own battles to succeed
Olympic champion no stranger to controversy
RANDY STARKMAN
Myriam Bédard's mother may well have described her iron-willed daughter best.
"I have what my mother calls a tête de cochon — a pig's head," Bédard once said of her own stubborn nature. "Nobody can discourage me."
The same qualities that made Bédard a double Olympic champion in the most obscure of sports in Canada likely played a role in her being the whistle blower who proved the undoing of VIA Rail chairman Jean Pelletier.
He was fired yesterday by Prime Minister Paul Martin for statements belittling the Canadian sports heroine.
No one who knows Bédard from her sporting days would be surprised to find her in the middle of this present kerfuffle. Controversy had a way of finding the strong-minded athlete from Neufchatel, Que., throughout her career.
If Pelletier had checked her track record, he might have realized few come out of a skirmish with Bédard unscathed, let alone the victor.
Pelletier described her as "pitiable" and portrayed her as a non-team player who was trying to use the scandal to get attention.
And she has had her share of confrontations over the years, including a long and heated one with Biathlon Canada in which her national association suspended her at one point and threatened to keep her out of the 1994 Lillehammer Games, where she later starred.
Bédard trained apart from the team, but in the end delivered double Olympic gold and held the trump card.
"I don't want to get to the Olympics just to look around; I want to compete and perform," she said before the 1998 Nagano Games, where she would struggle mightily.
"If I wanted to go to look around, I have the possibility to pay for the trip myself without being on the national team. But I don't want to be a tourist. That's why I'm doing everything I can to be at my best."
Her father Pierre, an electrician, spoke of his daughter's independent nature during the 1994 Olympics.
"She's a bit like me," he said. "I run my own business. I'd rather trust myself than wait for someone to give me something."
Bédard has also waged political battles. When her sport's funding was about to be eliminated in late 1994 as part of a shakeup of the amateur sport's budget, she took the issue public and got then-sports minister Michel Dupuy to give biathlon a reprieve.
Aside from the incendiary comments that cost him his job, Pelletier may have had it right, though, when he said Bédard was not a team player.
She didn't have a history as being one. Very few athletes ascend to the heights she did in a backwater sport in this country by worrying about the needs or feelings of teammates. She looked out for No. 1 and created an environment that enabled her to thrive as an individual.
But when she did try to become part of a sporting family as a fledgling speed skater in Calgary after her fortunes in biathlon went awry, she was never accepted into that fraternity.
She is said to be estranged right now from her own family. A restaurant they had planned to open about 18 months ago in Lévis, Que., never got off the ground, leaving bitter feelings. Bédard lives with her daughter Maude, 9, and Nima Mazhari, an artist.
She is divorced from fellow biathlete Jean Paquet.
She has not fared so well since her star waned as an athlete. Along with the ill-fated job at VIA Rail, she has done some work in television, including analysis for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and hosting a parenting show.
She reached an out-of-court settlement with Wrigley Canada Inc., in July, 2000, over a doctored photo of her that was used without her permission.
She was a great Olympic champion, unrelenting in her training, to her own detriment in the end; she used to spend countless hours practising her cross-country skiing technique on a four-metre countertop retrieved from a junkyard for $40.
She logged hundreds of kilometres on roller skis, completing the same two-kilometre loop over and over again, and paddled herself to exhaustion in a kayak.
By the time the 1998 Nagano Olympics rolled around, she was no longer a top gun in her sport, but persisted nevertheless.
"But why do you quit when you're in the glory? Is it a rule?" she asked. "Should you not show that you maybe have weaknesses ...?"
page mise en ligne le 2 mars 2004 par SVP
