Mikael Kingsbury was celebrated by his skiing peers and his family in his final race on Saturday in Saint-Sauveur, Que.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Over the weekend, Mikaël Kingsbury pulled a Pope Benedict – giving up the throne before he had to.
An unusually supple 33-year-old, Kingsbury was coming off a gold and a silver in moguls at the Milan Cortina Winter Games when he announced his retirement. No freestyle skier can retire undefeated, but Kingsbury will come as close as it gets.
Aside from Wayne Gretzky, he may be the only Canadian athlete of which it can be said that they were undeniably the best to ever do what they did.
Kingsbury’s brilliance was threefold – having the balance of a cat tossed in the air, going first on the old Winter Olympic schedule and being more poised than any twentysomething should reasonably be.
When Kingsbury spoke, he did so in the voice of the Canada we imagine ourselves to be – self-effacing, gentle, but with a hard edge. He was the sort of person who could handle finishing second, but had not once in his life considered it happening until it did.
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As he leaves, Canada loses a great athlete, sure. More importantly, it loses a great international ambassador. For an hour or so during the last few Winter Olympic Games, while the whole world watched, Kingsbury was this country. He was speaking on your behalf, as well as mine. Forget about easily replaced. I would go so far as to say that he can’t be replaced. Not any more.
When Kingsbury arrived on the scene around 2011, there was already a king in place, Alexandre Bilodeau. He was similarly ruthless and charming. Bilodeau was coming off a gold medal at Vancouver. Two other Canadians finished in the top five in those Games (Kingsbury wasn’t one of them).
Bilodeau and Kingsbury overlapped at Sochi 2014 – they won gold and silver, respectively. Then it was Kingsbury’s turn to run the shop by himself.
Obviously, you’re not going to dominate every Olympic event in this way, but it is the template for every program. Find something you are good at. Perform at it. Use that profile to attract the best young prospects. Keep the whole thing spinning with money, support and high expectations, which attracts new blood. Turn the soil with regularity.
Alex Bilodeau, gold medalist, right, passed the mogul-skiing torch on to silver medalist Mikaël Kingsbury at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press
Having set this operation in motion, you cannot afford to let it come to a stop. But that’s what Canada’s doing right now.
We spent all this money and effort to get things going ahead the Vancouver Games. Why? It wasn’t ambition. It was fear of embarrassment. We remembered how they laughed at us after Montreal 1976, and weren’t going to let that happen twice.
There was no guarantee that any of this would turn out, but it did. Spectacularly so. Bilodeau was just one of many stars produced during that time, the benefit of which was passed on to successors like Kingsbury. This tide has floated every boat in the Canadian athletic fleet, from the Olympics on out.
Were you to time travel back to the turn of the millennium, it would amuse the average Canadian to hear that this country is now good at things like basketball and soccer. Not just Canadian good. Actually good.
You think that happened by accident? It was money and attention that did that.
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Freed of the fear of embarrassment in a home Games, and terrified that people will yell at them for spending tax dollars on anything that isn’t Arctic defence, Canada has been gradually getting out of the sports business. We continue to fund it, but not at the levels required to keep the program robust.
This is what that looks like – a giant like Mikaël Kingsbury retiring, with no obvious young replacement steaming up right behind him.
I have no doubt that Canada will continue to be competitive in the men’s moguls. But will it rule the discipline? Will young people with knees like shock absorbers and a high tolerance for physical peril be drawn to its prestige? No, which means a slow fade back to the middle. That process is already beginning to cascade in every winter sport that isn’t hockey.
The problem here isn’t money. There is no more popular government spending initiative than sports, since it is something that interests and involves the vast majority of Canadians. Most of us understand on some fundamental level that while sports is a want rather than a need, it’s a pretty big want. Nobody’s ever had a great dinner conversation about procurement.
Kingsbury, centre, was applauded by his teammates and competitors after finishing his final race and winning the men's dual moguls competition at the Canadian freestyle ski championships in Saint-Sauveur, Que., on Saturday.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The problem is that things have been trending in this positive way for too long. A critical mass of us have forgotten what things used to be like, back when Canada was international slang for ‘fourth place’.
So here we go, headed back to the future.
My guess? It’ll take at least two terrible Olympics before Canadians start to get embarrassed again. Some American will make a joke about what a bunch of losers we are, and all of a sudden sports will become a new (i.e. old) priority. I was hoping either American hockey team would do us the favour in Milan, but they resisted the urge. A real missed opportunity.
Eventually, a Canadian city will get a Games, probably Toronto. That could be 15 years or more from now.
By that time, we’ll be back where we were in the eighties and nineties – a country that occasionally produces a megastar out of nowhere, but no longer a sports player. More of a hanger on.
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To build things up again will require an enormous infusion of cash. You’re no longer waiting for the gold medalists of tomorrow to come to you. Now you’ve got to go find them. It’ll be building a business from scratch.
The only thing I can say for certain about any of this is that it will happen. Eventually, we will want to be good again, and do what it takes to get there. Then we’ll end up spending far more than it would have cost to maintain the current system.
Or we could do what serious countries do, whether its sports or anything else, and commit to trying to be good all of the time, at all of the things.