Canada's Ivanie Blondin competes during the women's mass start speedskating finals Saturday where she won silver.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Canada losing ground to other countries in the 2026 Olympic Games is a symptom of a sport system under strain, said a Canadian Olympic Committee leader Sunday.
Canada finished outside the top five countries in the medal table at the Milan Cortina Games for the first time since 1994 in Lillehammer, Norway.
“There were incredible medal moments,” chief executive officer David Shoemaker said at the COC’s closing news conference in Milan on Sunday. “But we’re competitive. We look up at the medal table. We see the countries ahead of us. We aspire to do better, and we worry about the future.
“Canadians deserve a sports system that is properly funded. National sports organizations are stretched unbearably thin.”
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The stated target was matching or bettering the 26 medals Canada amassed in 2022 in Beijing.
The 2026 team finished eighth in the overall medal count with 21. That’s without winter-sport power Russia taking medals off the table in Italy. Only 13 athletes from that country competed as neutrals.
Five gold was higher than the four in Beijing. That tied with Austria, Japan and China for ninth.
Canada’s first gold medal eight days into the Games was the longest a Canadian team waited for its first since 1988.
Before Jack Hughes scored the overtime winner for the United States in a 2-1 win over Canada in Sunday’s men’s hockey final, there was a sombre tone to the COC’s morning news conference.
The heady days of 29 medals in 2018, and 14 gold by the host team in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C. in 2010, were shrinking in the rear-view mirror.
COC leaders predicted more slippage without correction.
“This is a crossroads,” said Canada’s chef de mission Jenn Heil, a moguls gold medalist in 2006 and silver medalist in 2010. “We are at the end of what we did really well in 2010 and that investment.”
The COC and Canadian Paralympic Committee jointly lobbied on behalf of national sport organizations in two successive federal budgets for a boost to core funding, which they say hasn’t risen since 2005.
The latest ask for what’s been described as “the blood in the veins” of an organization by Freestyle Canada CEO Peter Judge was a $144-million increase.
Athletes received a $410 raise in their monthly “carding” cheques in 2024, but Shoemaker says that’s eaten up by team fees and covering costs their organizations can no longer afford.
“Our system is in decline,” said COC chief sport officer Eric Myles. “As we witness other nations accelerate, investing exponentially more in coaching, sports science, technology, training environment, national sports organizations are having to cut training camps.
“Staff with PhDs in sports science wonder if they’ll have a job next year. Our athlete pool is shrinking.”
Several Canadian medalists in Italy were over the age of 30. The Milan Cortina Games was their Olympic swan song.
Speedskater Valérie Maltais, 35, was one example, with a gold and two bronze.
“These are the beneficiaries of two decades of adequate investment in the system,” Shoemaker said. “The bench is not deep.”
The federal government currently spends $266 million on sport, according to its 2024 figures.
The COC funds its operations privately through corporate sponsorship, which Shoemaker says has increased by 300 per cent in two decades “and subsequently increased our investment in the sports system.”
The COC’s athlete excellence funds reward gold medalists with $20,000, $15,000 for silver and $10,000 for bronze.
Canadian performances ran the gamut from Canada’s heartbreaking overtime losses to the U.S. in the men’s and women’s hockey finals to Mikaël Kingsbury’s triumph in dual moguls after he was narrowly beaten for gold in moguls.
Freestyle skier Megan Oldham rose to the occasion by besting international superstar Eileen Gu for big air gold, and also added a slopestyle bronze to boot, despite a second-run crash.
Speed skating, long track and short track combined, was a 10-medal motherlode, including two gold. Maltais, Ivanie Blondin and Isabelle Weidemann repeated as women’s team pursuit champions.
Steven Dubois captured 500-metre short track gold, but there were swings and misses on the men’s team.
Multi-medal favourite William Dandjinou was shut out of the podium in three individual races. The favoured men’s relay team was fourth.
Ski cross, one of Canada’s most reliable medal generators historically, struck out with no skier reaching a semi-final.
Injuries knocked previous Olympic medalists out of their events: halfpipe freestyle skier Cassie Sharpe (concussion) and snowboarder Meryeta O’Dine (broken ankle).
Triple medalist Mark McMorris was beaten up for snowboard slopestyle after a training crash took him out of big air.
Canadian curlers produced two team medals for the first time since 2014, and also one of the biggest brouhahas of the Games.
Men’s team third Marc Kennedy responding with profanity to Swedish counterpart Oskar Eriksson’s contention that Kennedy double-touched a stone spawned dozens of social-media memes.
It also drew accusations from some quarters of Canadian cheating.
“What took place on the ice a couple of weeks ago was not cheating,” Shoemaker said. “The rules of curling contemplate in the sport, on the field of play, that if you double touch a rock, if you touch the granite, you burn the stone, you remove it.
“For me, it’s like a foot fault in tennis, or travelling in basketball. So if LeBron James takes four steps on the way to the hoop, no one says LeBron James is a cheater. They give the ball over to the other side. It’s a turnover.”
Brad Jacobs skipped the men’s team to gold a dozen years after doing the same with a different lineup in 2014. After starting 1-3, Rachel Homan’s foursome fended off elimination en route to bronze.
The postponement by a year of Tokyo’s Summer Olympics to 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic compressed four Olympic Games into six years.
There’s now a break of over two years before the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
“Team Canada athletes have proven here in Italy that we have the talent, we have the drive, we have the potential,” Shoemaker said. “The imperative now is to match that ambition with sustainable long-term investment.
“Los Angeles 2028 is just 27 months away. We can all agree that showing up here strong, prepared, and unmistakably Canadian is the only option.”
Canadians aren’t done competing in the Milan Cortina Games. The Paralympic Games run March 6-15.