Peggy Revell
Anne Renaud’s lifelong case of Olympic fever has transformed into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as the Fort Frances resident will be running with the Olympic flame in Vermilion Bay on Monday (Jan. 4).
“I’d just really, really like to thank Coca-Cola for selecting me—it’s the experience of a lifetime,” Renaud said last week.
“I’m just so grateful to them and obviously the whole Olympic torch [relay] that they’re doing this so many Canadians have this opportunity,” she added.
Renaud, manager of the Fort Frances campus of Confederation College, is scheduled to carry the flame for the 300 metres between the post office in Vermilion Bay and the municipal office around 4:47 p.m.
“I’m a little nervous, but not so much,” she said about carrying the torch for the 2010 Winter Olympics, which begin Feb. 12 in Vancouver.
“More just excited about just being a part of it. I know it’s just going to be an exciting moment,” she enthused.
“I just can’t wait to see the other person coming. Like to me that’s the moment, like when they’re coming and I’m waiting with my torch, that’s going to be pretty cool.”
Renaud explained persistence was the key when it came to being chosen by Coca-Cola, which, as sponsors of the Olympics, nominated 4,500 of the 12,000 torchbearers.
“When I heard that Coca-Cola was taking applicants for regular Canadians to become torchbearers, I applied 89 times—you [could] only apply once a day,” she noted.
“So I was very persistent, and everyone at work laughed at me every morning when I told them, ‘I applied! I applied again!’”
A random draw was held from all the entries submitted through icoke.ca, with those selected then being asked to write a short essay on how they “Live Olympic”—by either “living green” or “living active.”
From these essays, some of the 12,000 torchbearers were chosen.
“It was supposed to be announced or e-mailed on Aug. 5, so I was eagerly awaiting the day and it came and went and I was so disappointed, I was so bummed out.
“I was on holidays and I was checking my e-mail every hour and nothing,” Renaud recalled.
Then more than a week later, she was on the phone with a potential instructor in Atikokan when a little message popped up on her e-mail from iCoke, saying: “You have one more step.”
“I really, really tried to keep talking to [the potential instructor] and I couldn’t,” Renaud smiled. “I said, ‘I’m really sorry [but] I’m going to have to call you back,’ because I just couldn’t even concentrate.
“It’s the coolest e-mail I’ve ever got,” she remarked. “I clicked on it and it was like this Coke bottle that came up, and it had the song and everything, and out of the bottle it popped up, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been selected to be a torchbearer.’
“I started screaming, and everyone ran in to see what was going on,” she added. “It was very, very exciting after that.
“All I had to do after that was sign about 300 pages of things I’m not going to do and pass my RCMP police check, and then I was a torchbearer.”
It’s her love of the Olympics—which stretches back to when she was young—that made her so persistent about applying becoming a torchbearer, Renaud explained.
“I always loved what it represented, and it was bringing all the countries together and it was always in different countries,” she noted. “That was always really exciting.”
Prior to the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, Renaud was living in Montreal and went to an evening ceremony when the torch came through.
“We all had candles with the little red cup and held those up, and it just really marked me,” she admitted.
Most recently, during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Renaud invited a bunch of friends and their children to her home for their own mini-Olympics, she noted.
“We had paddle boat races in the lake and obstacle courses and stuff like that, and had little reproductions of the Beijing medals, so I’ve always been into the Olympics.
“And I mean, I’m not an athlete,” she stressed. “So when I saw that there could be an opportunity to in some way participate in the Olympics, I mean, that was just really, really exciting.”
The other reason Renaud wanted to be a torchbearer—and what she wrote as part of her submitted essay—comes from her love of running.
“I started running after I had my second daughter,” she explained. “A lot of people don’t know that about me, but I like to run and I don’t look like a typical runner.
“So I thought, this a way that I can maybe show people that it doesn’t matter what shape you’re in or what size you are, or anything like that, that you can be active and you can run,” she reasoned.
Watching her run those few hundred metres with the torch will be Renaud’s husband and two daughters.
“I just can’t wait for them to see,” she enthused. “They’ve been seeing me train—actually, I’ve been training with a bottle of wine because it’s exactly three-and-a-half pounds, which is exactly the weight of the torch.
“And [my daughters have] been running, too, because they’ve seen their mom do it so they want to do it, too.
“So I’m just really excited for them to be part of the moment.”
Although the torch won’t be passing through Rainy River District, other Northwestern Ontario communities who will see it have celebrations planned, including Thunder Bay, which will host the Olympic flame on Jan. 3 and 4.
Arriving in Dryden on Jan. 4 at 2:34 p.m., the torch will wind along King Street and Van Horne Avenue, with that community’s celebration taking place at Van Horne Landing from 2-4 p.m.
Celebrations also will take place at the Kenora Harbourfront from 6-10 p.m. that evening.
The torch relay also can be followed online through such sites as www.vancouver2010.com
