Olympic-sized snowmobile racing dreams in small-town Saskatchewan

Snowmobiling as an Olympic sport?

It hasn't happened yet, even though The National seemed to have an optimistic and seemingly speculative outlook on that at one point.

"Someday, snowmobile races may become a part of the Winter Olympics," the CBC's Knowlton Nash told viewers at the start of a Feb. 25, 1980 story about world-championship snowmobile racing.

"In the meantime, they'll just go on holding their own world championships."

According to CBC Kids, the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing featured seven new events. None of them involved snowmobiling. 

The 1980 story was focused on the snowmobile championships that were taking place in an Olympic year in Waldheim, Sask.

According to The National, it was the first time the event had been held in Canada.

Five hundred snowmobile drivers were taking part in the races and some 10,000 people were in Waldheim to see the show.

'Watching the sleds'

"Snowmobilers seem to be hard-core addicts. They got a real thrill from watching the sleds go around and around and around," the CBC's Eve Savory told viewers.

The small town of Waldheim was home to many fans of the sport.

And according to Savory, the championships "were the culmination of a dream for Waldheim," where a banked, half-mile track had been built in the snowmobile-mad town with the help of the province.

Savory also said the sport's proponents there had a further goal "to persuade the International Olympic Committee to make snowmobiling an Olympic sport."

There was no explanation, however, of how that would hypothetically occur, given there are no such motorized-vehicle sports that are part of the Olympic Games.