Canada’s Ted-Jan Bloemen wipes his face after competing in the men’s 10,000-metre speed skating race at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 11.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
You know who’s having a great Winter Olympics? Italy.
First of all, there’s the uniforms. If the Olympics are now a fashion show as well as a sports tournament, Italy wins every time. It has the self-confidence to stick with what works – well-cut blue on blue.
Everyone else tries too hard. Canada is a repeat offender in this regard. Whose husband’s brother designed the uniforms for snowboard cross?
Husband’s brother: “I have a bold new vision for winter activewear: brown. And not just brown. Brown on brown. I call it ‘Ode to Burlap.’”
Canada: “You had us at ‘brown.’”
Italy just has to show up and be Italian and it is already Olympic legends. In Beijing, it’s also winning at a bunch of things, some by accident.
It ran the table in mixed-doubles curling, knocking off Canada in the process. According to its coach, there are about 400 curlers in all of Italy. You will find more curlers at a typical Manitoba wedding.
The Italians curl like they don’t know any better. Canada curls like the goal is gripping your broom hard enough to shatter it into toothpicks. The difference shows in our general Olympic approach.
If Italy wins more than a couple of things here, it’s in a bonus situation. It has already scored 11 medals. One of them is hanging around the neck of Gina Lollobrigida’s grandniece. If we intend on winning this head-to-head battle, Gordon Pinsent’s kids’ kids should get cracking.
What Canada has that Italy does not is the aspiration of an Olympic obsessive.
For Italy (and most other countries here), the Winter Olympics are a bit of a lark. For Canada, it’s work. We’re here to collect a steady rate of return on our investment.
Owning the podium has not turned Canada into a powerhouse in the iconic winter sports.
We don’t ski as well as the Austrians or skate as well as the Dutch. There is no government program that can manufacture organic growth in a sport.
What Canada does well is identify vulnerabilities in the Olympic market and exploit them.
If you time-warped back 30 or 40 years and showed our medal table to an Olympian of that time, she would have trouble figuring out what she was looking at.
Slopestyle. Team aerials. Freestyle skiing. Snowboard cross. Mixed-team snowboard cross. Snowboard cross again.
Canada finds sports other countries don’t invest in and plows in cash. Whenever the International Olympic Committee has a brainstorming session about new sports, Canada’s idea is: “Why don’t we make everything we already have ‘mixed?’”
Canada's Meryeta O'Dine and Eliot Grondin celebrate their bronze medal in mixed-team snowboard cross at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in Zhangjiakou, China, on Saturday.The Canadian Press
Why is women’s hockey so uncompetitive? Because nobody wants to pay to develop dozens of elite athletes in the hopes they might win a single Olympic medal, when you can buy snowboards for a couple of teenagers and they might win three or four.
This isn’t prejudice. It’s cost-benefit analysis.
Canada grandfathers/grandmothers hockey and curling in. Every other sport must show earnings potential before it gets the big national push.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach. All the Winter Olympic powers do it. But it can turn the Olympics into a grind.
Here’s a general rule about winter games – if Australia is good at it, it’s a made-up sport. The new and improved Olympic powerhouse Canada is proficient at a lot of the same things as Australians.
Along with the sense of grim purpose applied to what could be frivolous, there is also the question of expectations. Now that we don’t fight wars any more, we apply “not one step backward” thinking to the Games.
We cracked double-digits in medals for the first time at a Winter Olympics at Lillehammer 1994. We pushed pass 20 for the first time at Turin 2006. We notched our best-ever total (29) at Pyeongchang 2018.
As of end of day on Sunday – one week left to go – Canada has 14 medals. Only one of them is gold.
Start ticking off what we are still likely to win: women’s hockey; men’s big air, maybe; a couple of bobsleigh disciplines. Curling looks like a crapshoot and who knows with men’s hockey?
Beijing is shaping up as Canada’s first winter retreat of the 21st century.
Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that Canadian sports officials keep selling this vision of more Olympic moreness. More facilities. More athletes playing more sports. More party hosting.
All this gets wrapped in “athlete focused” (strange term – what else would the Olympics be? Equipment focused? Lunch-menu focused?) wrapping. But at its root, it reminds us what the Games have become. This isn’t a sports competition. It’s a spending competition.
When you think of it like that, losing can be good for business. What happens when all the money you spent didn’t buy you as many medals as you hoped? Obviously, cheapskate, you spend more money.
Push your IOC buddies to make skydiving and laundry-folding new Olympic events. Build a sports centre of excellence for each one. Ensure that no other country’s best and brightest sharpen the corner of a bed like Canada.
Which is fine. It’s not like it’s my money (wait).
One small drawback is self-flagellation when things don’t work out.
The other night at long-track speed skating, Canada’s greatest Winter Olympics ROI, Ted-Jan Bloemen, hit the skids. Why does Bloemen look so good on a balance sheet? Because he didn’t cost us anything. His country of birth, the Netherlands, put in the developmental work. Canada swung by to pick up his medals.
But that was 2018 and what you have you done for us lately, Ted-Jan? Nothing. So there’s a half dozen journos waiting afterward to give him the (gentle) gears after he bombs out. One side effect of Canadians never winning was that no one cared if they lost. Now we do. After years of steady pulling, that’s the point at which the athletes start getting pushed. Few of them appear to have given that much thought until it happens to them.
While Bloemen was collapsing, an Italian, Davide Ghiotto, won a surprise bronze in the same event.
Only one reporter showed up to talk to Ghiotto. They were there together for a long while, nattering away. At one point, it appeared Ghiotto was crying from joy.
“For me, it’s a dream,” Ghiotto said.
That’s what the Olympics are like when you treat them as fun. You remember that, right?
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