Photos from a century of British Columbia sports collected in new book

Lui Passaglia is lifted onto his teammates’ shoulders at the 1994 Grey Cup. Arlen Redekop/Province [PNG Merlin Archive].

Over the last century, BC has been home to some of Canada’s best Olympic athletes, speed skaters, hockey and football players and more. A newly published book provides, for the first time, a pictorial history of accomplishments by the province’s most prominent athletes.

Written/collated by sports librarian/archivist Kate Bird, Magic Moments features nearly 500 photos spanning 100 years. Find out more below.

Bird is an archivist at one of the largest photograph libraries in Canada and the sports and Olympics writer behind the column This Day in History. She is also the author of the photo histories Vancouver in the Sixties and City on Edge.

You’ll learn sports facts/trivia such as:

• B.C. was once home to the world’s fastest man

• the first Canadian woman to win Olympic gold on home soil hails from North Vancouver

• Steve Nash, an eight-time NBA All-Star, first picked up a basketball in Victoria

VANCOUVER, B.C.: FEBRUARY 28, 2010 – The celebrations were shared by many along Granville St. south onto the Granville St. Bridge. Thousands of people celebrated in a Gold medal hockey victory on the last day of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. (Stuart Davis/PNG).

Moments covered in the book include:

• Percy Williams’s world-record-breaking sprint in 1928
• Nancy Greene’s incredible gold and silver Olympic medals
• the Vancouver Whitecaps’ 1979 NASL soccer bowl win

Bird collected the photos from the Vancouver Sun/Province archives. Photos include both amateur and professional athletes, and demonstrate the wide range of sports enjoyed in the province: from taichi to sumo wrestling, Indigenous canoe racing to water-skiing, beach volleyball to roller derby.

Magic Moments in BC Sports

Publisher: Greystone Books
paperback
$24.95
ebook also available