The mom, Doreen Botterill (formerly Doreen McConnell), skated for Canada at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, then reprised her performance four years later in Grenoble, France.
The daughter, Jennifer Botterill, skated for Canada in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano and is reprising her performance now, in Salt Lake City.
The younger Botterill is a member of Canada's women's Olympic hockey team, 7-0 winners over Russia yesterday, moving them to 2-0 in the tournament. To her mother, watching the action from Section 111 at the E Center along with her husband Cal, the most difficult part of the process was putting her emotions into words.
"To be able to represent your country as an athlete is a very special experience," Doreen said, "but to do it as a parent makes you doubly proud."
Doreen competed for Canada as a speed skater in an era when the sport wasn't nearly as technically advanced as it is today. Canada sent just four skaters, two men and two women, to the 1964 Olympics and they competed in all events, outdoors, from the 500 metres to the 3,000 metres.
Nearly 40 years later, she is staggered by the scale of the modern Olympics.
"There are so many more sports and so many more athletes," she said. "In 1964, we only had four speed skaters from Canada in the whole Olympics. In '68, we had seven. This year, our long track is 16 members and then there's short track on top of that. We didn't have sports psychologists, physiotherapists or nutritionists, it was just the bare minimum team.
"I was just 16 the first time I went. It was as if I went to the Olympics with three parents because Doreen Ryan, who was my teammate, was 32 when she went and the two men were 30 and 36. But in Jen's first Olympics, she was 18 and France St. Louis [the oldest woman on the 1998 Canadian women's hockey team]was 39, so there's a strong similarity there too."
"My mom was really young when she went to the Olympics," Jennifer said yesterday, "and it helped me a lot last time, to realize: 'I'm young, but I can do this. It's been done before.' So that really helped me."
Jennifer won the 2001 Manitoba athlete-of-the-year award, some 35 years after her mother won it, making them the first mother/daughter combination to win the award in the province's history. According to Doreen, the opportunities for women in sport are significantly greater than when she competed.
"It's acceptable for women now to compete in anything. When we used to train in the summertime, people thought girls didn't ride bikes or train like we did. These girls," she said, nodding toward the ice, "are great role models. They prove that anything is possible. 'Dream big dreams' is what Jennifer tells all the young kids she talks to."
Years ago, Doreen and her sister, Donna, who was also a highly-rated speed skater, coached their daughters, Jen and Andrea, in ringette, but brought speed-skating techniques to their practices.
"We started our kids in skating quite young and because Jennifer had an older brother [Jason Botterill, in the Calgary Flames' system] she wanted to do the same things he did. Speed skating helped her skating because as soon as you put the long blades on, it forces your bum down and makes you skate lower to the ice. We kept telling her, if she wanted to switch to speed skating, she would have excelled at it rather quickly."
Jennifer herself says her speed skating helped her develop into one of the strongest skaters in women's hockey.
"Speed skating is all about the perfect stride," Jennifer said. "So when I was a young age, that probably helped me more than I ever realized, making sure I'm staying low and generating the most power I can from every stride. When you're young, you're obviously a sponge and you soak up all that information."
Over Christmas, the CBC sent the Botterills a videotape of an interview Doreen had done out of Grenoble. "I don't think we look so much alike now, but when you look at her when she was younger, I think we do look similar," Jen said. "It certainly was fun to see her in all that Olympic gear." eduhatschek@globeandmail.ca