In this country's centennial year, a slim volume was published by two very fine writers, Trent Frayne and Peter Gzowski, spinning the greatest sports stories of Canada's first century. Here's betting it can still be found tucked away on many a bookshelf.
The cover image, though, would seem strange to those too young to remember: not a hockey player or a football player, not a rower or a runner, a swimmer or a skier, but a boat, a power boat, with a tail of spray boiling behind it.
That magnificent craft was called Miss Supertest III, and through Sunday it is on display at the Toronto International Boat Show. Though it raced only four times between 1959 and 1961 before being pulled from the water for good after its driver died in a terrible crash, in a very different Canada, its triumphs were splashed across newspaper sports sections and resonated for the same reasons as Sidney Crosby's golden goal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
"Well, we beat the Americans," Jim Thompson says, by way of explanation.
We beat the Americans, we outthought the Americans, we were technologically superior to the Americans. Think of the Avro Arrow jet interceptor, another triumph of that time, another symbol of national smarts, from which the Canadian government sadly walked away.
Miss Supertest III at least had its day.
Thompson, whose father, Gordon, founded the petroleum company from which the boat got its name, entered the world of unlimited hydroplane racing in 1950, taking over from another Canadian group which had attempted unsuccessfully to win the Harmsworth Cup, emblematic of supremacy in the sport. The boat was rechristened Miss Supertest. Miss Supertest II followed, an original design which briefly held the world speed record of more than 184 miles an hour, and then Miss Supertest III, the pinnacle, powered by the same Rolls-Royce Griffon engine that had been used in the last versions of the Spitfire fighter aircraft.
Thompson did some of the testing, but wasn't a speed demon by nature, and for other reasons opted not to race.
"I had a young family," he says, sitting in his living room in London, Ont. "I didn't bring the racing to the marriage. So to me, with young children, it wouldn't be fair, because of the risk as much as anything."
Instead, the driving duties eventually fell to a round-faced chicken farmer from Embro, Ont., named Bob Hayward, who was already working on the boat as part of the mechanical crew before Thompson found out about his reputation as drag racer. When Hayward took the wheel, it became the perfect pairing of man and machine.
They first raced in the Detroit Memorial in 1959, a practice run before challenging for the Harmsworth, which had been in U.S. hands for 39 years. Hayward won it with Miss Supertest III on the Detroit River in 1959, then repeated the feat in Picton, Ont., in 1960 and 1961, the first boat ever to win three times in a row.
A little over two weeks after that third victory, Hayward was back racing again, this time in Miss Supertest II (Miss Supertest III being reserved only for the biggest races) on the Detroit River. Jim Thompson was watching from a waterside hotel on the U.S. side.
"He had a poor start. He was back. And then he just stepped on it. There were two boats out in front of him. He passed them just before the first turn going very fast. About half way around the turn, he rolled like that – right around and came up again. That's all it took … I knew it was bad right away. … There was very little damage to the boat. That was the crazy part of it. But that's all it took He would have been travelling well over 100 miles an hour."
Hayward was dead, and no Miss Supertest would ever race again. When Thompson made that official six months after Hayward died, most believed he had simply lost heart following the accident. But he says it wasn't only that.
"I'm sure it [was interpreted that way]," he says. "But I surely wouldn't have been at it much longer even if Bob hadn't been killed. We had other lives to live. This was 10 or 11 years. Very intensive. A tremendous amount of work. It wasn't easy [taking the boat out of the water]. But I think it was the right thing to do."
There was no Canadian willing to carry on the tradition, though Thompson was more than willing to pass on his accumulated knowledge. The boats went into storage until then-Ontario Premier John Robarts asked if they could put Miss Supertest III on permanent display at the newly-opened Ontario Science Centre. A few years back, the Science Centre was redesigned, and the boat again disappeared from public view. Now, it comes out only for occasional appearances, like the one this week.
It will be on display again next summer, back in Picton, for the unveiling of a postage stamp commemorating those triumphs long past, and largely forgotten. Not just because it was once the fastest boat in the world, but because of who built it, who designed it, and what that came to represent.
"Let's face it," Thompson says. "We Canadians are no slouches."