The king of Mont Tremblant

With the great success of its article on Yvan Taché under its belt, Tremblant Express has decided torun a column in each issue to honour Mont-Tremblant skiing legends. This month, we’ll tell you about an extraordinary athlete nicknamed “the king of Mont Tremblant”.

Ernie McCulloch

Ernie McCulloch was born in Trois-Rivières in 1926. He was half First Nations, on his mother’s side, and learned from a very young age to enjoy life outdoors; he was already on skis at the age of three. As a teen he participated in all the competitions in Québec and then, starting in 1945, became an instructor at Mont Tremblant.

In 1949 the French Olympic team, which had won the gold medal in Alpine skiing at the Olympic Games the previous year, participated in the Kandahar race. At the starting line, nobody gave the Canadians much of a chance, but Ernie McCulloch hurtled down the slope at breakneck speed and reached the finish line first. Because he was employed teaching skiing, he was a skiing professional and couldn’t be given the trophy, but winner Georges Panisset was a good sport and sent him an exact replica of the cup from France. McCulloch subsequently won the Harriman Cup twice, in 1951 and 1952. 

But it was actually in teaching that the king showed his “royal” blood. In 1954 he became the sixth director of the Tremblant ski school. For 15 years he was the undisputed master of the mountain and taught hundreds of skiers. It was he who created the Canadian teaching technique, which was a mixture of Norwegian, Austrian and French techniques and became, before long, the standard across the country. His innovations were so significant that the ski school developed an international reputation, which meant that his leaving Québec for Ontario in 1969 was a particularly sad event.

Like Yvan Taché, Ernie McCulloch never participated in the Olympic Games, because of his professional status. But he made his mark in another way, by training world champions Peter Duncan and Lucille Wheeler. And while he passed away due to bone cancer in 1987, his name remains to this day connected with his kingdom: a run on the mountain’s South Side honours his memory.

Maxime Coursol, journalist