A Prince George man has invented a golden variation on our two national sports.
What artist Jean Jacques Gigure has designed is an adaptation to hockey (ice or inline) and lacrosse. He calls it "vitockey," a compound of the words "hockey" and both "vite" and "vit" (French for "fast" and "life" respectively).
The CBC television show Dragon's Den is coming to B.C.'s northern capital this weekend to film the new invention in action. Their cameras will be focused on local players demonstrating vitockey at the Elksentre arena.
Gigure could just as easily have applied his principles to baseball or football or soccer. "Go for it, it applies to everything," he said about the foundation features of his invention. It is based on a universal mathematical formula rooted in what artists, architects and scientists know as the "golden ratio" or "golden mean."
Gigure's playing surface is the chief difference. He told The Citizen it is measured out precisely according to the golden ratio so that the puck, boards, net, lines, face-off dots, even the shape of the playing area are built from that baseline.
Additionally, Gigure's new game also incorporates the universal rules of the colour spectrum, whereby he presents to the viewer's eyes the best possible combinations of colour for the brain's liking. No ads are permitted on the boards, for example, because that clashes with the brain's natural functions "maybe only for a billionth of a second, but it causes hesitation."
It is a blank canvass for all involved, he explained, so the athletes perform more purely.
"It's so when you step on the ice, you know all the physical elements instinctually, and that goes for the spectator as well," he said. "Your brain understands all of this instantly."
The new design has other benefits, too, he said, like maximizing speed.
"It plays like magic," he said, admiring the flow of the rehearsals held on Wednesday by some of the city's best inline players. "When you shoot the puck, it just moves, it never stops. Regular hockey stops or slows all the time. This flows like classical music, and the brain wants that. The players and spectators do too."
The invention doesn't lend well to mass marketing, but Gigure did take out a patent on the "elliptical playing area kit" which is the physical structure inside which the game takes place. It is oval, not a rectangle with rounded corners.
Gigure pitched his idea once already to the Dragon's Den and he saw immediately that he was not being taken seriously.
"I didn't want this (the television cameras in Prince George), they called me," he said. "They told me they wanted to do an update. I told them I didn't have the game, I didn't have a prototype, but I did what I could to make it work."
Because of all the interconnecting math, you can't change the size of the goal crease or the distance from the boards to the net (much deeper than conventional hockey or lacrosse) without causing all elements of the playing area to be altered proportionally, so those things are now essentially set, but the rules are still a work in progress. He is tweaking things like icing and offside as the demonstration players rehearse the game.
Perhaps this TV segment is destined to be just an education for people on the principles of colour transition and the golden ratio, but once upon a time a Canadian with a couple of peach baskets in an Indiana gymnasium changed the world of sports forever, so Gigure sees this demonstration as a worthwhile venture no matter what the outcome.
