Norman Douglas LANE

Norm Lane was already well-regarded in canoeing circles as a strong competitor in the singles when he came in third at the Canadian Championships in 1940. It was not until 1948, however, when he was selected to represent Canada at that year’s Summer Olympics, that he truly captured national attention. At the Games he won a bronze medal in the grueling C1-10,000, two minutes behind František Čapek of Czechoslovakia and Frank Havens of the United States, but at least that much ahead of the rest of the five-man field, which consisted of France’s Raymond Argentin and Sweden’s Ingemar Andersson. After the Olympics Lane traded his long-held affiliation with the Balmy Beach Canoe Club in Toronto to Ottawa’s Rideau Canoe Club and won the national championship in 1950. At the trials for the 1952 Summer Olympics, he was again selected to compete in the C1-10,000, in which he finished fifth in a field of ten competitors. By then he had earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Toronto, but he continued to paddle until the end of the decade, eventually moving back to the Toronto area and returning to Balmy Beach. He retired from active competition after failing to qualify for the 1960 Summer Olympics and had a long career as a professor of mathematics and statistics at McMaster University from 1952 through 1987.