AHFMC - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• President of the Canadian Olympic Committee, Pra

Marcel Aubut, president of the Canadian Olympic Committee, praised Baird's contribution to sport. "The sport of diving in this country has been permanently strengthened as a direct result of Vaughan Baird. His contribution, from the grass roots level all the way up to Canada's Olympic movement, has left a lasting legacy from which Canadian athletes in and out of the pool will benefit for generations to come."

Pierre Lafontaine, the former chief executive officer and national coach of Swimming Canada, remembers spending three hours at Baird's home. "The man was so passionate about preserving and celebrating aquatics in Canada. The details of his passion for aquatics, not just diving, was brilliant."

Vaughan was born in Winnipeg and earned a BA at the University of Manitoba in 1949, and a law degree at Dalhousie University in 1952. His life-long passion for art, history, politics, and the French language was no doubt nourished by his post-graduate studies in French Civilization at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1987, his academic distinctions were crowned by an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Winnipeg. Vaughan's distinguished law career was recognized with his appointment as Queen's Counsel in 1966. One of his most cherished achievements as a lawyer was the successful challenge of the constitutionality of Manitoba's English-only legislation that culminated with a favourable decision by Supreme Court of Canada. The combative - some would say "pugnacious" - spirit that served Vaughan so well as a lawyer and litigator also served him well in sports, where he distinguished himself during his university years in swimming, diving and boxing. However good an athlete he may have been, it was as a sports administrator, fundraiser and official that Vaughan made his most enduring mark. His particular devotion to diving led him to establish, in 1968, the Canadian Amateur Diving Association, now known as Diving Canada, of which he was at the time of his death the Honorary President. At the same time that he asserted diving's independence from swimming, he helped to unite those two disciplines together with water polo and synchronized swimming under the umbrella of the Aquatic Federation of Canada.