Who came up with the idea of the Carleton Cup?
JK: After our first year at Carleton I went to go visit Jonathon Cliff in Montreal during the Jazz Festival, summer ’88. Those were heady times. One afternoon we sat on a patio on St. Denis and drank beer. I wanted to argue about the Velvet Underground, but Jonny kept steering the conversation back to the horrible Ottawa winter, and how he couldn’t face another one. We talked about how the Rideau Canal was the one saving grace of the Ottawa winter, and Jon said he thought it’d be a good idea to start “a skating race or something” to help us all take our minds off the misery of winter. We talked of starting downtown and skating to Carleton, but that didn’t seem to make much sense, so we reversed it. We hashed it out, heh heh, and by the time we left the bar that afternoon the Carleton Cup idea had been hatched pretty much as it exists today, name included (Jonny’s idea). We ran our first race the next February, 1989.
