| Men |
| John Currie |
| John Taylor |
| Bud Clark |
| Harry Pangman |
| Walter Ryan |
| Hubert Douglas |
| Kaare Engstad |
Two months prior to the 3rd Winter Olympics Sigurd Lockeberg and Herman Smith-Johannsen, among others, assisted Canada’s Olympic team prepare and train for the cross country events. Ottawa’s John Currie, John Taylor and William Clark, along with Harold Pangman of Montreal, entered the 18 kilometre sprint while Kaare Engstad of Burns Lake, B.C., Ottawa’s David Douglas and William Ryan of Montreal were named for the 50 kilometre.
The mild weather which combined with a sudden mid-race snowstorm failed to stop Sven Utterstrom defend Sweden’s hold on the 50 km with a time of 4:28:00. Among 32 starters, Engstad clocked 5:19:19 for 16th, a placing which remains as Canada’s best to date. Douglas and Ryan were among nine who did not finish. Veli Saarinen of Finland grabbed the sprint in 1:23:07 while Pangman, Clarke, Taylor and Currie ran 35th, 38th, 39th and 40th respectively among 42 finishers. Of the 15 Canadians who competed in jumping, nordic combined and cross country, Jostein Nordmoe of Camrose, Alta., who posted tenth in the nordic combined, remains the best Olympic cross country skiing related result to date.
Two skiers from British Columbia qualified for the Canadian Ski Team competing in the 1932 Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, NY – Karl Lindaas and Kaare Engstad – both from the Omineca Ski Club in Burns Lake. Unfortunately, naturalization requirements and/or financial obstacles prevented many qualifiers from representing Canada during this period, and only Karre Engstad was able to raise the necessary support to travel to Lake Placid (most of it from the Burns Lake community, who even went so far as to make box lunches for his rail trip to the east).
In those days athletes competed in one cross-country event only, and the 50 km was the race that Engstad was entered in. He finished 16th, the best Canadian result in cross-country skiing at the Winter Olympics until Pierre Harvey surpassed it with a 14th place finish in the 30 km in 1988 at Calgary.
Kaare Engstad’s 16th placing in the 50 km remained a Canadian best for 78 years, until the 2010 Vancouver/Whistler Olympics when Devon Kershaw came in 5th, a mere 0.6 seconds from third place. In 2018, Alex Harvey finished 4th at the PyeongChang Olympics.
During the 1932 Olympics, mild weather combined with a mid-race snow storm to create difficult ski conditions. This resulted in some participants, including the two other Canadian entries, not having recorded finish times.
Source: Cross Country BC
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