As Christmas Day nears, we’d like to thank everyone who threw their support and efforts into many charitable events during the past couple of weeks.
As we all know, residents of the Bow Valley are big on volunteering and lending a hand when necessary and it seems those efforts are spurred on to greater heights when it comes to ensuring as many people as possible enjoy the holiday season.
Thanks to many organizers, organizations and volunteers, there will be toys under trees and Christmas dinners gracing tables throughout the valley.
These efforts are valuable year-round, of course, but the thought of smiling faces valley-wide during the holiday season seems to make everyone’s efforts especially worthy.
Early competition gifts
Being that this is the issue that hits the newstands right before Christmas, we’d like to offer some kudos to valley athletes who gave themselves early gifts by turning in top results in ski events.
From Mark Arendz’s International Paralympic Committee gold to Chandra Crawford’s World Cup silver to a silver effort by Brian McKeever and guide Erik Carleton to a Kevin Sandau NorAm win, to Nathan Smith’s biathlon bronze and personal bests all over the place, valley athletes showed they are forces to be reckoned with at home and abroad.
It’s heartening to see that the long hours of training turned in by our local athletes is paying dividends on big stages. It’s particularly encouraging to see that these athletes are working and competing hard and positively representing the valley.
Possibly the most encouraging aspect of these athletes competing around the globe is that, unlike NHL hockey players and teams, say, which garner virtually all the sports headlines in Canadian markets, there is no multi-million dollar pot of gold at the end of the skiing rainbow. Our ski athletes are putting in long training hours doing something they love and they’re doing it well.
And that’s why these athletes grace the pages of the Outlook. Many of these top ski athletes were born and raised here in the valley and others call the area home because this is where our national cross-country and biathlon teams are based.
Here at the Outlook, unlike most national media outlets, we feel our local national team athletes deserve recognition – all the time, not just when Olympic games near. In a leadup to the Olympics every four years, the names of skiers which suddenly appear in national media outlets are already household names for our readers.
The same mandate of providing coverage of local athletic endeavours, of course, also trickles down to skiers, skaters, golfers, paddlers, footballers, high school students, climbers, runners, enthusiastic amateurs and many others.
Coverage of local athletes and their sports is just one of the ways in which the Outlook, like community newspapers across Canada, provides content not to be found in national outlets.
True, there are no stories about billionaire team owners coddling millionaire players in these pages, but those can be found in a plethora of other outlets.
But in those same outlets, you won’t read about the kid down the street, or somebody’s son or daughter, or a grandparents’ offspring, or the kid who flips your burger doing well on tracks, courts, pitches, routes, courses…
