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Page 21
Fifteen years after a teenaged Steve Collins won a ski jumping world
championship, the Ojibwa from Thunder Bay is a much rustier, but still
capable, air traveler. He got the chance in March to once again look
down, even if briefly, upon the audience of 13,000 which gathered for
the opening ceremonies of the 1995 World Nordic Ski Championships.
He was not a competitor this time around, but an organizer. As Thunder
Bay's native son, however, he had the honor of lighting the ceremonial
flame.
His jump on the way in wasn't up to his best, even this year -- he has
made 87 metres. The sticky snow caught his skis on takeoff, and he only
cleared 65 metres. But it doesn't matter, really. The home crowd
cheered him on, among them his six-year-old son, Steven Michael.
More than a decade earlier he stood at the top of the big hills around
the world and he won his first (and only) World Cup. Collins shocked
the world with his unconventional "delta" style and his results.
Ski jumping isn't just an event measured by distance, but has a judged
component measured in style points.
Collins flew through the air with his skis tipped toward each other in
the reverse "V" technique. The trouble was that the officials, being
inflexible creatures, continued to dock style points.
"At that age Steve didn't know what couldn't be done," said Bill Bakke,
the facilities manager at Calgary's Canada Olympic Park and the national
ski-jumping coach in Collins' early days on the team.
"He wasn't inhibited that he had to work himself up the ranks. He was
so full of youthful enthusiasm."
Bakke recalled the 5'3" jumper weighed 105 lbs in his early ski jumping
days and creating such an influence that recruiters returned to Europe
in search of Collins clones.
"He had a pretty profound effect on what kind of build ski jumpers
should have,: said Bakke, acknowledging that in the late '80s the in
look became taller and leaner.
Today, the wide "V" is the form used to make jumpers buoyant, as they
attempt to get maximum carry. Using a narrower delta style, Collins has
jumped close to 90 meters in training this year, but only after slimming
down from an out-of-shape 150 lbs around Christmas.
He weighed 135 lbs. when he opened the Thunder Bay Worlds, the first to
be held in North America since 1950. The suspicion is that Collins could
come back, with a little extra work, and beat the best Canadian jumping
today. He was invited back to Austria for a gathering of former greats
in a late-March competition on a 40-metre hill.
It was on a much bigger hill in Lahti, Finland -- on Mar. 9, 1980 --
that Collins rode one of the biggest winds he's ever seen to World Cup
victory.
"The wind was just rifling up the hill like you wouldn't believe,"
Collins recalled. "I think its' the strongest I've ever seen."
But he loved it, flying 124 metres in the first round. There was no
second round, because of the wind, leaving Collins with the top prize.
That special feeling returns as Collins, in front of family and
friends, once again soars through the air. His style has been
vindicated, and he's still young enough to show some of what made him,
for a brief time, the world's best.
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