Canada's Laurent Dubreuil, who won a bronze medal in Milan, is opting to stay in Europe. The move will save Dubreuil the additional travel from Canada when he competes in the upcoming world championships in the Netherlands.DANIEL MUNOZ/AFP/Getty Images
Before leaving for Milan, I reinstalled CBC Gem on my TV. Once I get home, I’ll torch it and put it back again a week before L.A. 2028.
CBC does a lot of things, but to me, it is the Olympics. Without the Games, our national broadcaster is PBS, minus the thrills.
So how do we explain that we publicly fund the national broadcaster to the tune of $1.4-billion a year, but won’t give a fraction of that to the event that gives it its main purpose?
We spend money on a lot of things that bring us no enjoyment, or enrage us if we think about them too much.
The feds spend about $20-billion per year outsourcing contracts. They designed a payroll system so buggy that it cost more than $5-billion to fix – and was never really fixed.
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Every time Ottawa wants to build an app that a 14-year-old could bang up in an afternoon, boom, that’s another eight figures out the window.
Obviously, this isn’t great, but it puts the Canadian Olympic Committee’s current ask in perspective.
On Sunday, in its closing presser, rather than a make a nod toward funding declines in the midst of the usual cheerleading, the COC made the whole thing a plea for money.
According to COC CEO David Shoemaker, the government funnels about $220-million annually to all the various sports organizations that make up the Canadian Olympic tapestry. They would like a raise – by $144-million – to $364-million annually.
Team Canada Chef de Mission Jennifer Heil says that today's Canadian Olympian isn't receiving the level of all-around training that they need to land on the podium.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
This isn’t to install an MRI machine in the rumpus room of every snowboarder. According to the assembled sports executives, it’s to get the basics.
Milan’s Chef de Mission and former gold medalist, Jennifer Heil, told the story of a young Canadian Olympian being chided in a grocery store by a veteran teammate for not buying enough greens. Their excuse? They can’t afford fresh vegetables.
Later, Heil listed off some of the things she got when she competed back in the literal salad days – regular training camps, specialized training camps, ski waxing experts on staff, medical and physiological services, bio-neurofeedback.
So what part of that do the athletes doing it now get?
“They don’t even get to the training camps,” said Heil.
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Milan bronze medalist Laurent Dubreuil told the story of how he’s going to stay in Europe until the world speed skating championships so that he doesn’t have to pay his own airfare back. Once he gets there, he’ll forego a hotel and stay with Dutch friends.
Here’s how this is supposed to work – we help the Dutch and they aren’t expected to help us back. It’s been a good system since the Second World War. Instead, we have turned our Olympic champions into a gaggle of couch surfers.
However bad it gets, Canada will always have a robust Olympic presence because there will always be people who will do anything to be able to say they are Olympians.
But the winning of medals isn’t the core issue. As Heil pointed out, an underfunded sports system will become a playground exclusive to the rich. They’re the only ones who can afford to become permanent amateurs through their 20s and 30s.
Canada's Megan Oldham celebrates her gold medal win in the women's freeski big air final. If sport becomes inaccessible to the average Canadian, Cathal Kelly argues, the country will lose out on elite athletes.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
I’m not concerned about creating overlapping generations of athletic supermen. I am concerned about living in a country where kids who can’t afford power skating and personal coaches don’t even bother to dream about getting to the top.
We don’t fund athletics just to win things. We fund it to create that possibility for the widest swath of Canadians.
Hopefully, medals are the result of that largesse. For the last 10, 20 years, that idea worked. Now it is fading away, to be replaced by a market-based system where team Canada is exclusively made up of the children of doctors. And no mere GPs. You know how much hockey sticks cost? Surgeons and specialists, exclusively.
Is this really the country we want to be? The one that slaps away the hands of people volunteering to travel around the world dressed up like human flags, making the rest of us look good?
Some might call it good financial stewardship. I call it cheap and short-sighted.
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As best I can tell, this is going to work out one of two ways.
We can continue down the route of evasion. Explain it to us again? How much exactly? Where’s it going? Maybe you could do another report? How about a report on the report?
If we burn off enough time that way, we can wait to see how Canada does in L.A., as we have just done between Paris and Milan.
If they’re good, then great. Despite not working, and leaving a bunch of people behind, the system is working.
If it goes pear shaped, we can have a nice, big freakout and start blaming each other. Fire a few coaches. Curse whoever’s in office at that moment. It’s their fault. Then promise to be better and start the whole cycle over again.
The other way is to trust that the people who run our Olympic set-up aren’t trying to con us, and believe them when they say the money is not going to be used to buy everyone a gold-plated BowFlex.
That’s what this is really about, right? The sense that the Olympians are getting goodies the rest of us don’t have access to? But you do have that access. We can meet at the rink at 5 a.m. You bring your skates and I’ll bring a stopwatch and we’ll see about getting you signed up for the team.
We love the athletes when they’re at a Games. For those two weeks, we act as if we know them as friends. Then the Olympics end and we lose their number until a day before the next one.
Fair enough. Nobody’s owed constant attention. But if you want them to show well during that brief period you do care, you can’t expect them to do it for too little to compete, living on even less, with the promise of absolutely nothing to come once it’s done.