Nova Scotia man carries torch as a symbol of struggle against adversity, racism

AMHERST, N.S. — Paul Wilmot couldn’t help but think about the symbolism of the Olympic torch he carried Saturday morning through this Nova Scotia town.

“I’ll be praying for world peace,” the 48-year-old outdoor recreation professor said before his portion of the relay, which took place shortly before the torch was set to leave Nova Scotia.

Wilmot said, for him, the flame represents struggle against adversity, a struggle many people have faced during the history of the Games, and one he knows all too well.

“For me, the torch represents an opportunity for people to find all kinds of good things in what we do as opposed to focusing energy on negative things.”

Wilmot pointed to one of the Games’ darkest times as an example of how the Olympic spirit had triumphed through adversity.

During the 1936 Olympics in Berlin — the Games that Adolf Hitler and others in the Nazi party had hoped would show the superiority of the Aryan race — Jesse Owens, a black American track-and-field athlete, stepped up to make a different kind of statement, winning four gold medals.

Wilmot has overcome his own adversity.

Sent away from his Mi’kmaq community at a young age because of his visual impairment, Wilmot said he had to learn to accept being stuck between two worlds that didn’t accept him.

In his First Nations community, they would call him an “apple,” he said.

“(They would say) ’my friend, you may be red on the outside, but all the things you say and do . . . (are) pretty damn white,’” he said.

At a boarding school for the blind he attended in Halifax, he said he was called “redskin” by children who quite literally couldn’t see colour.

It was this struggle, and his success in overcoming it, that Wilmot said makes the symbolism of the torch resonate so strongly with him.

“I might have even shed a tear,” he said, of learning he would be a torchbearer. “I was so, so excited about this honourable experience.”

After visiting Amherst on Saturday morning, the Olympic flame will take the Wood Island ferry to Prince Edward Island. Once there, it will visit several communities before reaching Charlottetown for a community celebration.

The flame is scheduled to travel that province for two days, carried by 250 torchbearers over a distance of 220 kilometres.

Highlights include a visit to Cavendish, the hometown of Anne of Green Gables, and crossing Confederation Bridge, which is the longest bridge in the world that crosses ice-covered water.

The torch began its journey across Canada on Oct. 30 in Victoria.

The relay — a little more than 100 days in length — will see the torch carried through 1,000 communities, travelling 45,000 kilometres, before it reaches its final destination, the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, on Feb. 12, 2010.