Winnipegger Beijing bound as official

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This article was published 14/01/2022 (1382 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Trevis Boyd may not be a high-performance athlete but he will be soaking up some of the same thrills that an Olympic athlete might encounter next month in Beijing.

As an assistant referee for the long-track speedskating competition at the Winter Olympics, the 62-year-old Winnipegger has experienced the heart-pumping action before.

A veteran of the World Cup circuit and the world championships for the past seven years, it’s the thrill of a lifetime to be tabbed for an important role in Beijing.

He’ll be one of only two Canadians to officiate at the speedskating venue.

“It’ll be the same skaters that are in World Championships and World Cups, but this is the pinnacle for skaters,” said Boyd Friday. “I really like being beside the ice. Standing four metres away from somebody skating 55 kilometres an hour is spectacular.

“And the other part of it is a certain amount of pride. I mean, I’ve earned my position there, so it’s good to know that you’re doing a good thing. There’s always going to be skating but there’s no competition without officials.”

But this isn’t Boyd’s first Olympics rodeo.

A self-proclaimed “joiner,” he was a speedskating oval volunteer at the 2014 Sochi Games and a corner judge at the 2010 Vancouver Games. Before that, he was a stretcher bearer at the 1988 Games in Calgary and a technician at the Atlanta Paralympics in 1996.

Boyd enjoys volunteering and, as the owner-operator of Black Pearl Coffee, he has a gig that allows him the freedom and time to travel to speedskating hotspots around the world.

“I’m very lucky,” said Boyd. “I have a great staff and that was part of my ability to move up in the referee ranks — I sometimes do back-to-back World Cups. I can leave my job with relatively short notice. My staff, I treat them very well, and they put up with me. The year before last, when the pandemic first started, I think I was gone for six weeks.”

Boyd was drawn to the sport more than 20 years ago when his daughter, Grace, began a skating career that would eventually take her to the 2011 Canada Winter Games in Halifax.

At that point, with the encouragment of fellow referees such as Rick Rempel and Wayne Fleming, his involvement took off.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” said Boyd’s wife Caroline Slegers-Boyd. “He took to it so quickly. And it wasn’t really a sport that that he grew up with.

“It wasn’t a sport that he was familiar with at all. Until we moved here, we really didn’t have anything to do and then our oldest daughter decided that that’s what she wanted to try.”

Slegers-Boyd made it a family affair, first serving as a grassroots volunteer before rising to the position of president of the Manitoba Speed Skating Association.

Slegers-Boyd appreciates her husband’s affinity for the sport.

“How many people get to go to the Olympics as an official?” she said. “So working with our staff and working with our family members, we do pretty good at covering what we need to cover to keep keep it moving.”

Boyd leaves for Beijing on Jan. 27 but his route will take him first to Zurich, where a charter flight will take a plane load of officials, athletes and technical personnel to China.

Frequent PCR tests in the next two weeks and travelling in a controlled environment will allow Boyd to bypass the standard 21-day isolation period.

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Once in Beijing, Boyd will set up shop at the National Speedskating Oval. Two referees for women’s events and two for the men are standard and Boyd will be the assistant to the chief referee for the men’s competition.

“We do the technical meetings and the draws and then we manage all infractions, incidents and challenges in field so the referee has a pretty big responsibility here, kind of like the CEO of the whole package deal,” said Boyd.

mike.sawatzky@winnipegfreepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @sawa14

Mike Sawatzky
Reporter

Mike has been working on the Free Press sports desk since 2003.

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