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It played out like any racing tragedy in motorsports, only this struck a community of enthusiasts that had seen relatively few casualties compared to other forms of racing. It was late February 1978, the Canadian Power Toboggan Championships were being run in Beausejour, Manitoba just as they had since 1962 and just as they would every year after that. A factory Polaris driver named Jerry Bunke was set to cap off another record year with only two races to go in the season.
That’s where things start to get blurry.
Some accounts claim the weather in the weeks leading up to the event was unseasonably warm. So warm it created large puddles of water not only on the ice track, but in the surrounding race complex. Then, only days before the race, temperatures turned bitterly cold, freezing everything solid, but creating an unstable surface on which to race. When race day came it was clear to many that trouble was looming; frigid temperatures with barely a breeze led to snow dust hanging in the air like a fog, obscuring vision; one of the unfortunate hazards every snowmobile racer has faced at some point.
The decision was made to race and Jerry Bunke started the Premier 440 class race and amid the poor visibility and rough track conditions he spun out and was thrown from his sled. With more cruel twists than one could purposely weave into a story, Bunke was struck by his teammate, Brad Hulings and sustained trauma that he would die from a short time later.
This was the only fatality in the history of the Canadian Power Toboggan Championships. Jerry’s wife Pam, in her early 20s, was at the race and likely witnessed the accident and somewhere, in the background, with no consciousness of what was taking place, a 11/2-year old boy, Gabriel, lost a father and, perhaps gained an unfortunate legacy.