Line Technicians: Inside the Jean Romard Challenge
Video / October 17, 2025
Transcript
Hey, I’m Sgt Kneabone, and we’re here today in Kingston for the Jean Romard Challenge, where we’re testing all the skills required to be a Line Tech.
We welcome teams from across the Canadian Forces. Teams will carry a 30-foot pole for 25 metres, four times, just to foster the competitive spirit.
Just behind me, they’re preparing to do a hundred-foot ascent of a self-supporting structure, where members will, one from each team, ascend the structure four times – safely, of course – to the top and be graded.
I’d say it went pretty well. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve actually climbed a tower, but it felt good to be back out here today in the nice weather.
The teams are going to move down to the other lower part of the Harvey training area where we reside right now, and they’re going to do the “lash the pole.” They’ll use a lasher, which is just the device that basically winds steel cable around the cable, and it suspends it to a heavy steel cable.
We’re doing the lasher exercise. We started off really good, came in hot, helping our buddies out, then they got tangled accidentally within the lasher. But on the second part, we did OK. We had one line help us out. I thought we did pretty good.