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BEIJING — In a victory for anyone who ever found himself on the outside of a charmed circle, didn't know which fork to use or felt like a fraud, former Montreal street-kid-turned-equestrian Eric Lamaze won Canada's third gold medal of the Beijing Olympics yesterday in a dramatic jump-off.
"This was not for him," Tim Danson, the Toronto lawyer who three times represented Mr. Lamaze at various drug hearings during his troubled career and has become a close friend, said yesterday. "This was for Canada."
It was a bit of rough justice that the first-ever Canadian gold in individual show jumping — and only the second equestrian gold — was won by the once-raw and uneducated young man who made the privileged denizens of the horsey set sit up and take notice.
For some of the right reasons and some of the wrong ones, Mr. Lamaze has always done that.
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Yet in a measure of how far he has come, Mr. Lamaze was yesterday being heartily congratulated by some of the very officials who once wanted to drive him out of the competition arena forever.
In a conference call from the equestrian venue in Hong Kong with Canadian reporters in Beijing, Mr. Lamaze made a quiet and graceful pitch for the merits of giving "a second chance or a third chance" to those "who are struggling."
Now 40, Mr. Lamaze was three times banned from the sport — once for four years and twice for life — for drugs. Equally devastating, Mr. Danson said from Toronto, was the eagerness of some of the sport's moneyed class to believe the worst of Mr. Lamaze.
"He's not one of them; he never was one of them," Mr. Danson said. "In my view, he's never been accepted by the horsey set."
The first ban came before the 1996 Olympics when Mr. Lamaze tested positive for cocaine — which is not considered a performance-enhancing drug — and was dropped from the Canadian team. He and Mr. Danson later fought to have the suspension reduced and won, arguing that he had taken the drug for personal use, not competitive advantage.
Just before the 2000 Games in Sydney, he tested positive for the stimulant ephedrine and was handed the first of the lifetime bans.
Again, he and Mr. Danson had the decision overturned, proving that the maker of Diet Pep, a supplement he had taken for years without problems, had changed the ingredients without changing the label.
That ban was reduced to a warning, but when Mr. Lamaze was random drug-tested again in August of 2000, he again tested positive for cocaine.
Mr. Danson later successfully argued that Mr. Lamaze had taken the cocaine only because he was in a spiral of depression because of the innocently incurred ephedrine result. "Eric was in a real tailspin," Mr. Danson remembered yesterday. "He was absolutely suicidal; we were so scared we were losing him."
Although that lifetime ban was also lifted, the Canadian Olympic Association still barred Mr. Lamaze from competing in Sydney, a decision he told Mr. Danson not to appeal.
A year later, Mr. Lamaze had worked his way back onto Canada's Nations Cup team, but was still being frozen out by some of the sport's most influential people.
Ron Southern, the powerful co-chairman of Spruce Meadows in Calgary, was quoted that fall saying Mr. Lamaze would be accorded the usual courtesies, but said, "We want it known that we disagree — strongly disagree — with the selection … We want the public, the media and our sponsors to know we've done all we could to not accept him."
The story appeared on the front page of the Calgary Herald about a week before the competition began.
Mr. Lamaze received his first exposure to cocaine in the womb of his drug-addicted mother, who also gave him the drug as a baby, Mr. Danson said. He never knew who his father was, nor did his mother know, and as she was in and out of jail, he was raised by his grandmother, an alcoholic.
Unsurprisingly, he developed what Mr. Danson calls "a serious substance abuse problem" as a teenager and dropped out of school in Grade 7.
But he got his first job shovelling manure in the barns of the famous equestrian centre at Bromont, Que.
"And I just loved it," Mr. Lamaze told Canadian reporters after the medal ceremony. "I worked from the bottom up, as a groom … it was a lot of years of hard work. That's where the tears [on the medal podium] come from."
Some of the expert physicians Mr. Danson called to give evidence on Mr. Lamaze's behalf testified that most people, coming from his woeful background, would be dead or drug addicts, Mr. Danson said, adding that Mr. Lamaze should have been flattened by the odds stacked against him.
Instead, he managed to quit cocaine on his own, stayed clean and sober for a decade and built a life and a business — he is a trainer and coach — for himself. Mr. Danson said that while Mr. Lamaze has had no ongoing drug problem for many years — "He's turned his life around and no one knows how," he said — drugs remain "an Achilles heel" because of his prenatal exposure.
"Eric was never cheating," Mr. Danson said. "But the sport's establishment came down so hard on him … it's great to sit in judgment." He said he sings Mr. Lamaze's praises as "a role model" when he lectures on sports law. "I'm so impressed with his character, his strength and his discipline."
Mr. Lamaze believed that he had embarrassed Canada with his earlier difficulties, Mr. Danson said, and that just before he left for China, he was showing him around his new home near Schomberg, Ont., when "he stops and says, 'You know, I really want to win for Canada. I want to win for my country.' Eric's a proud guy; he was just driven by this."
Indeed, Mr. Lamaze was markedly modest about his accomplishment, describing the win as a victory for the whole team, deflecting praise to Hickstead, the big Dutch stallion he rode and described as "a once-in-a-lifetime" kind of horse, and thanking those unnamed people "who showed me great support at a time when that was not so easy."
When all was said and done, you might say, it was the kid from the wrong side of the tracks who put on the perfect display of exquisite manners.
