The last, tragic moments of a Canadian OIympic gold medalist

Victor Davis was a Canadian Olympic gold medalist

   One of the most stunning and saddening events of the late '80s was the death of Canadian Olympic gold medalist Victor Davis following a showdown with a motorist on the main drag in Ste. Anne's on Nov. 11, 1989.
   There's an unreported element to that story that I learned from an inside source that has long haunted me.
   Davis, one of the world's greatest-ever breast-strokers, was from Guelph, Ontario and had moved to Montreal after medaling at the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games.
   Davis had retired from competition and was involved in a swimming-related start-up on the West Island.
   On that fateful evening Davis went to meet his girlfriend Donna Clavel, who was already with friend Jennifer Watt, at the Brass, or the Belle-Vue Brasserie as it was officially known, at 69 Ste. Anne in Ste Anne's.
   Their plan was to go to a nightclub after a beer or two at that popular establishment, which was housed in a wood building that burned down around 2000 to be replaced by another structure.
   The two women were sitting near a table adjacent to another group of young men, some of whom had expressed their interest in what they thought were two unaccompanied young beauties.
    That table included Glen Crossley and Frank Dres and a third man who left at around the same time that Victor Davis arrived to meet the girls at around 9 p.m. 
   The trio re-emerged in a black Honda soon after. The two groups crossed paths when Davis went across the street to buy a bottle of Orangina at a convenience store.
   According to Crossley's testimony,* it was Frank Dres who did much of the yapping at the women.
   Davis -- who had a fiery temper, once having kicked over a chair in front of the Queen --was irritated by the men, who had been cat-calling his female company.
   So Davis stood in the road and tossed the Orangina bottle at the car, hitting its windshield.
   Crossley accelerated towards Davis, assuming that the swimming champion would leap out of the way.
  Davis jumped but it was a bit late and his head hit the metal above the windshield and he died two days later of brain injuries.
  Crossley was sentenced to 10 months but only served four.
  Davis, having signed an organ donor card, had four of his organs given to others, which is a worthy legacy.
  What has gone unsaid, however is that prior to his death, Davis brought his girlfriend into the bathroom where he spoke to her in an entirely-uncharacteristic way.
   Davis had never previously spoken to his longstanding girlfriend in the way he spoke that night. Suddenly he was addressing subjects that he had never discussed.
   Davis spoke with passion and intensity about his past, future, feelings, ideas, vulnerabilities, and many other subjects in that chat, which Clavel found profoundly touching. It was as if a bottle had opened and so many of Davis' thoughts were coming out all at once.
   His bathroom elocution was a breakthrough moment, but she would later interpret it in a different light, believing that it was somehow a portent of things that were to come later that evening.
   It was as if Davis somehow had some sort of sense that something was going to happen.
   As a rational skeptic, I might dismiss such a story, but as someone who had experienced a very similar thing, I have learned that people can sometimes sense such things in advance. In my case it was when a girlfriend I had as a young man died -- also getting run over by a car in a city street -- on Feb. 22, 1985. In the hours prior to that event, I was paralyzed by an uncharacteristic and seemingly unprompted bout of anxiety and had tried repeatedly to get her on the phone after not having spoken to her for many days.
   So I know from personal experience that such fatal premonitory phenomena occasionally exist.
   Canadians were honoured to have a world-beating swimming champion such as Victor Davis and it's a shame that he couldn't have survived and stayed in Montreal, but fate put its icy hand on his shoulder that night and only his girlfriend can ever know of what consisted his last moments of profound self-expression.
*Said Crossley in testimony cited in his unsuccessful 1995 appeal attempt:  I left the pizza place, I went back to the brasserie one more time. We looked around. We hung out outside. Frank got out of the car, we were leaning on the car. We were there for a few minutes, parked right in front. We were looking around. I was waiting to see if I saw anybody I know and we didn't. Then we got in the car because we wanted to find Gary, because he was wandering around by himself.    So we get in the car, we see him just a little bit up the road. That's when Frank said something to Donna and Jennifer and then we saw Victor and everything and we let Gary in the car. Then I went back again, seeing now that we found Gary because he said he was with Ashley, I think, or something like that.