Tag: Sun Life

Whistler has hosted many Cup competitions, from World Cup races for various sports (such as the Eberspächer Luge World Cup races held at the Whistler Sliding Centre this past month) to the Whistler Cup that celebrated its 30th edition in 2023. Most of the participants in these events are professional athletes or, like in the Whistler Cup, younger competitive athletes. In 1983, however, the first Sun Life Whistler Corporate Cup pitted teams of corporate employees against each other in hopes of winning prizes and bragging rights.

Over one weekend in January 1983, twenty-five teams competed for the overall Corporate Cup title. Teams came from companies, firms, union locals or professional groups and had to be made up of ten full-time employees. Each team also had to have a minimum of three men and three women. In its first year, participants included teams from the Vancouver City Police Department, BC Hydro, and Canada Safeway.

These teams went head to head in six different events. The first was golf on the Whistler Golf Course, with holes ranging in length from 50m to 90m and made more difficult by the presence of snow. There was also a 5km cross-country ski race on the Lost Lake trails, a downhill race adjacent to the 1982 World Cup downhill run (the only World Cup race to have finished just above the Whistler Village), a snowshoe obstacle course, an inner tube pull named “Sliding Inflation,” and a snow sculpture competition called “Frozen Assets.”

At the end of the weekend, an awards ceremony recognized the team and individuals who had performed the best. Prizes included skis, boots, stays at Delta hotels and more, as well as prizes from the event sponsors Sun Life and Molson’s. The team from Envirocon came out ahead, due in part to their “dramatic” sculpture of a BC salmon, which put them ahead of the Vancouver Police who had created a representation of a reclining pig. According to event organizer Laurie Vance, “We had 250 people who had a positive experience at Whistler,” and the first meeting for the next Corporate Cup was already planned. Vance also thanked the sponsors and the more than 100 volunteers who helped make the event a success.

The 1984 Corporate Cup was very similar to the first event. The makeup of teams and form of most of the events stayed the same, though the winning team was from Touche Ross, an accounting and consulting firm. The biggest change was probably the subject matter of Frozen Assets, which saw entries such as “1984 George Orwell” (a likeness of the author by BC Hydro), a mermaid, a giant telephone, and two different BC Places (BC Place was completed in 1983).

Touche Ross successfully defended their title against nineteen other teams in 1985. The Beauvallon Club, the only team to enter that was from Whistler, came second while the team from ICBC finished third. Though the downhill race had been replaced with a dual slalom race, most of the competition remained similar to the one held in 1983. The standout sculpture of 1985, according to the Whistler Question photographers, seems to have been “Reclining Nude in a Bathtub” by Pacific Press.

By 1986, the organization of the Corporate Cup had been taken over by June Paley. That year, the competition was held earlier (“too early” according to Paley), and had only ten teams. Nevertheless, the teams that competed enjoyed themselves and the title again went to Touche Ross. There is not record of a Corporate Cup in 1987; instead, different events took its place in January, such as other races and the Finlandia Ice Festival, which featured ice carving rather than snow sculpture. 1986 appears to have been the last Corporate Cup held in Whistler, leaving Touche Ross the undefeated winner.