AT H L E T E W I T H I M PAC T
CONQUERING
MOUNTAINS
Olympian Liam Gill empowers Indigenous Northwest Territories youth with Liam and Friends snowboard clinic BY JESSICA NATALE WOOLLARD MIKE YOSHIDA CHRIS WITWICKI A freelance writer based in Victoria, B.C. Through carefully chosen words, she brings to life the people, places, organizations and ideas she writes about. JRWOOLLARD
A
week after competing in his first Olympic games in Beijing, halfpipe snowboarder Liam Gill found himself in spectacularly different terrain: teaching kids to shred in the bush in the Northwest Territories. The 20-year-old from Calgary had been planning the trip to Fort Simpson, N.W.T., for a few years, ever since his grandmother who lived there told him a small youth snowboarding community had formed in the village of 1,200. Fresh from his 2022 Olympic appearance, Gill—the only Indigenous male athlete to represent Canada in Beijing—flew to Yellowknife for a three-stop tour, including a visit to his band in Fort Simpson, the Łíídlıı Kųę First Nation, which he had not visited since he was a child. “I got to share my Olympic experience with the kids… then ride with them and just have fun,” Gill says. “That was even more special.” The conditions were a far cry from the halfpipe he had ridden the week previous at Genting Resort Secret Garden in Hebei province, China. With the sport just gaining traction in Fort Simpson, facilities and infrastructure are non-existent; there are no chairlifts, no T-bars and no washrooms. “They snowboard in the bush,” Gill says. “The whole time we were running up and down the hill.” He recognizes he was lucky to have grown up a 15 minutes’ drive from WinSport (Canada Olympic Park) in Calgary. His parents put him on skis before his third birthday; by four, he was on a snowboard like his dad. Living so close to the facility, he boarded before and
66 I Inspiration Issue 2024 I IMPACT MAGAZINE
after school, honing his skills at one of the best high-performance training facilities in the nation, a legacy of the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Seeing the joy of the Fort Simpson youth on their boards, Gill wanted them to experience the sport they loved on a grand scale—in the Rocky Mountains. “Snowboarding is special in the way it spoke to me,” he says. “I wanted these kids to experience it, with no financial strings attached.”
Hopefully, what I do inspires others to be good people. The Gill family began to plan how they could bring youth from Fort Simpson to Calgary. The idea took shape when Banff Sunshine Village offered to assist; then, Olympics Canada awarded Gill a legacy grant in support of the project’s mission to empower youth through positive, healthy activity.