2010 Vancouver Olympics: Own The Podium

Canada’s history of hosting the Olympic games has been a bumpy one. The Montreal 1976 Summer Games have been immortalized as a financial debacle where we earned the distinction of being the only host country not to win a gold medal — a dubious achievement we repeated in Calgary at the 1988 Winter Games.

This no-golds-on-home-soil thing really irks some folks. Our dismal medal counts over the years (and the disparaging media coverage that invariably follows) pisses off our national sport federations and leaves us Canadians hungry for a little national pride, dammit.

And so, in January 2005, after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2010 Winter Games to Vancouver-Whistler, Canada’s 13 national winter sport federations set things in motion to change the course of Canadian Olympic history — to the tune of $150 million over five years. The initiative is called Own the Podium (OTP) and the target is clear.

“The goal is to become the number one nation, to beat all the other countries in 2010,” says OTP’s CEO Roger Jackson.

OTP’s millions go into coaching, sports medicine, research and technology, all with the vision of Canada’s athletes winning the most medals at the Vancouver Olympics and ranking top three in the Paralympic Games that traditionally follow.

Ballsy? You bet. Doable? Amazingly … yes.

We’ve been ratcheting up the medal count ladder ever since the Salt Lake City Games in 2002. There, we won 17 medals (a fourth-place tie with Austria), jumping up to 24 in Torino, Italy, in 2006, which put us third after Germany and the United States.

“[In 2008/2009], we won 29 medals at the world championship competitions,” says Jackson. “That’s our best indicator of whether we’re notching upward relative to the other countries. It’s been a grand success up to this point.”

Meanwhile, the Paralympic team surprised everyone with an unexpected climb past their goal of third place to claim top spot in the 2008/2009 world championship events.

A little context? At the 1988 Winter Games, Canada garnered only five medals (two silver and three bronze), putting us in 10th place. We’ve certainly come a long way, baby, and if everything goes as planned, Canada is poised to dominate the 2010 Olympics.

But, you’ve got to admit, the goal is a little weird. Not just to reach a personal best but to beat all the other countries in 2010? It seems so … un-Canadian. And, to be honest, we’ve been accused of that a lot recently. Like when American speed skater Catherine Raney complained about us limiting her access to the Richmond Olympic Oval in Richmond, B.C., even though she spent more than seven years living in Canada and training with the Canadian national team. Or when our bobsled and skeleton teams were criticized for not sharing information about the fastest lines on Whistler’s new track.

It’s not like we’re kneecapping our rivals, but OTP’s unabashed focus on winning seems slightly at odds with both the view of Canadians as passive and the Olympic values of fairness and respect.

Pierre de Coubertin, who is credited with reviving the Olympic Games in 1896, said the Games are about more than competition and winning, but tell that to the Salt Lake City organizers who bribed IOC members, or the Chinese government with their Gattaca-like grooming of baby Olympians.

The gloves are off in Canada and OTP isn’t about making other countries feel good; it’s about kicking everyone’s butt. In fact, OTP isn’t about making the Canadian team feel good, either, since the program focuses only on targeted sports and athletes with podium potential. Medal contenders, especially alpine skiers, speed skaters and athletes in the sliding sports, are being given everything they need to succeed, from full-time physiotherapists and world-class coaches to high-tech equipment innovation and priority access to training facilities.  

Such a multi-million-dollar funding push isn’t unprecedented. Australia spent $135 million Australian ($132.5 million Cdn) on its Gold Medal Plan for the 2000 Sydney Summer Games. And the U.K. has just committed £300 million ($528 million Cdn) to get their athletes podium-ready for London in 2012. It’s no longer enough for host countries to build new infrastructure and put on multi-billion-dollar spectacles. We also have to win.

Home-field advantage is huge for host countries, athletes and spectators, alike — the expectation, excitement and energy wrapped up in a home Games makes losing here way worse than losing elsewhere.

“We’re expected to put on a good Games,” says Cathy Priestner Allinger, executive vice-president of sport and games operations for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC). “When the host country does well, there’s an energy in the air. Without that, you lose your edge.”

It seems organizing and marketing an Olympic Games is as competitive as competing in one — and part of OTP’s home-field strategy is making sure our athletes get more access to training facilities than anyone else.

In fact, the alpine team has practically set up shop on the downhill run at Whistler, and that carte blanche access could be the key to their success.

“Access is a big one. It’s a huge advantage,” explains Max Gartner, chief athletics officer and director of Alpine Canada’s Own the Podium projects. “In downhill, the course is a fixed setting. Because of our access, we get intimate knowledge of the track. We get more chances to familiarize ourselves with variations in conditions.”

The cost of this kind of access is high, requiring commercial ski hills like Whistler to shut down recreational access to the run, not to mention the legion of volunteers necessary to set and manage the course. “It’s an intensive effort,” says Gartner. “It’s a big deal to get a whole downhill course.”

It’s the kind of deal none of the other countries will be getting, but, according to Gartner, it’s not uncommon. “In Salt Lake, we never got to run the course beforehand. We didn’t in Torino, either,” he says. “It’s a home advantage every country will use.”

And, it turns out, investing in home-field advantage tends to pay off. Australia’s Gold Medal Plan saw the country climb from 27 medals in 1992 to a whopping 58 in Sydney in 2000, putting them just shy of their 60-medal goal. Following Australia’s lead (and adopting its Gold Medal Plan model), OTP put its money where its mouth is and has been developing would-be winners since its inception in 2005. The $150-million, five-year program is half funded by the federal government, half by VANOC and its sponsors. It’s a new idea for Canada and, at $30 million per year, it’s a big shift from the strategy for Torino 2006. Winter sport funding for the four years leading up to Torino totalled less than $20 million.

“Our competitors are spending two, three or four times [what we are],” Jackson says. Still, what we’re spending is paying off. Our World Cup results are better than ever before and, with a full roster of World Championship races, we’re sitting pretty at first place going into the Games, with critical victories over powerhouses like Germany and the U.S. (where the annual athletic budget of a single university can top $110 million US).

But for Canada, $150 million won’t go far if you have to split it between 13 winter sports.  And that means to maximize potential some sports are getting the short end of the stick.

“I was part of the initial meeting where we came up with Own the Podium,” says Brent Morrice, chairman of Ski Jumping Canada. “And when we agreed to OTP, one of the things we agreed to was that all the 13 winter sports would be included.”

That hasn’t happened. Besides a token amount of $35,000 to be doled just before the Games themselves, Nordic Combined (a combination of ski jumping and cross-country skiing) has never received Own the Podium funds. OTP funding for ski jumping was minimal for the 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 seasons.

By comparison, funding for speed skating has nearly doubled over the five years of the program, to more than $3.8 million this past year. Ski cross, the newest sport in the Winter Olympics, jumped from zero to $1.2 million almost as soon as the IOC gave it the nod late in 2006. In fact, Canada didn’t even have a ski cross team until the sport was allowed into the Games. Own the Podium officials and the ski federations determined that Canada had contenders and a team was created in early 2007. (We’ve dominated the world in the sport ever since.)

OTP’s priority is sports where we’ve traditionally excelled, like speed skating, cross-country skiing and alpine skiing, and newer sports like ski cross, where we have the potential to win. The targeted sport federations distribute the OTP funds to support their targeted athletes, and as we draw nearer to the Games, the focus gets narrower and narrower by the day as the contenders rise to the top.

But ski jumping is out of luck. Canada’s best bet for the sport is Stefan Read, a 22-year-old from Edmonton who placed 30th at the Torino Games. Not exactly stellar results, but, according to his coach, Gregor Linsig, he’s closer to the podium than you’d think. “He’s so talented, it’s not even funny,” Linsig says.

But Jackson isn’t wavering: “We don’t [have contenders in ski jumping],” he says. “It’s the same with Nordic combined. We have no tradition, no history and really no senior athletes.”

According to Linsig, we’ve got a ski jumping contender, but he’s living in his parents’ basement and serving tables at Valley Ridge Golf Course, while the rest of the contenders that OTP recognizes enjoy massages and physio appointments.

This is the reality of a program like OTP. If you’re going to fund contenders and only contenders, lines have to be drawn somewhere. The trouble is, this kind of thinking has some heavy long-term effects.

“Own the Podium has narrowed its focus and it’s forgetting about the grassroots,” Morrice says. “And if you forget about the grassroots, eventually it won’t just be ski jumping and Nordic combined that are gone.”

Priestner Allinger, herself a one-time speed skating Olympic medallist, explains it this way: “There are sports in this country that work better for Canadians than others. Is this a sport that’s considered Canadian? Do Canadians value it and participate in it? In the case of ski jumping, there’s only one facility in the country, so there’s limited opportunity.”

The OTP may rationalize its cuts on the basis of things like Canadian tradition or participation, but this has never been about the rest of us; it’s about the shiny hardware. And in fact, the line organizers try to sell us about the Olympics inspiring kids and leading to more people participating in sports doesn’t actually wash. Studies show the only sport Canadians are doing more of these days is watching. Even participation in women’s hockey, which tripled between 1998 and 2005, has levelled off in recent years, despite the women bringing home a gold medal from Torino.

And if lack of funds leads to ski jumping and Nordic combined going the way of the dinosaur, there’s 18 potential medals Canada can kiss goodbye.

“You need that base funding to maintain the sports,” says Morrice. “Then we can find that diamond in the rough and turn them into champions, like Kyle Shewfelt or Horst Bulau.”

Remember Bulau? Ski jump junior world champ in 1979? First-ever world Nordic title for a Canadian? Thirteen World Cup wins in four years? No? Me neither.

But we all remember Shewfelt. Tumbling wasn’t on anyone’s radar for medals in the 2004 Summer Games, but Shewfelt came out of nowhere with a gold in Athens. He became a household name in Canada overnight, but he’d been toiling in obscurity since 1988. Putting our money into sure bets doesn’t get us these Cinderella stories.

Still, the success of the OTP program meant an extension beyond the 2010 Games, including a $24 million-per-year initiative to get our summer athletes up to snuff.

Initiatives like OTP are transforming Canada’s underdog image and doing what it takes to create a nation of winners. That’s because the real challenge isn’t finding good athletes; it’s getting good athletes to the point where they can win.

“Getting to 95 percent of your potential isn’t hard,” says Jeff Adams, a 13-time Paralympic medallist in wheelchair racing. “It’s that last five percent that takes Herculean effort and support. To win, everything has to be perfect. Perfection costs money.”

Adams sees OTP  as a step in the right direction, but with a caveat to the performance-focused system. “The danger lies in who decides,” he says. “If you reward people for performance, not potential, athletes have to get good by themselves.”

Which means losing many athletes before they hit their peak. Linsig says the average Canadian ski jumper’s career ends at 18. “As soon as they graduate high school and move out of their parents’ house, that’s it,” he says. “There’s still a whole other chapter of their athletic career they never get to.”

Sooner or later, all athletes have to face this fact: unless they’re in the upper echelon of the elite, their sport federation won’t pay the bills.

Adams knows the kind of tough choices Canadian athletes are forced to make. “At one point, I had to decide whether to buy food or buy a tire for my race chair,” he says. “I stole the food and bought the tire.”

As Canadians, we don’t like to think of “our” athletes living hand to mouth or shoplifting, but this is the harsh reality. We’ve made these young people symbols of our country and national values, but we seldom think about what that actually means.

“When you wear a Maple Leaf on your chest, your behaviour and performance reflects on an entire country,” Adams says. “Whether you win or lose, you demonstrate the character of a Canadian, which is then broadcast to the world.”

That’s a lot of pressure for a kid who can’t even pay rent, especially given the fact we only care about the Olympics, and Olympians, every two or four years. “The interests of Canadians fluctuate with the Olympic calendar,” says Jean Harvey, director of the Research Centre for Sport in Canadian Society. “When we’re close to a Games, Canadians are concerned about high-performance athletes, but six months later, we’re more interested in grassroots sport.”

We’re happy to put the pride of our entire nation on our athletes’ shoulders when there’s a Games, but in between, they’re on their own.

“There’s a misconception about what it takes to be an athlete,” says Adams. “You can’t really show people what it’s like on a Monday morning at 6 a.m. when you don’t want to work out. People aren’t clapping you on the back for that. They clap you on the back every four years.”

There’s another side to being an athlete most of us don’t consider. Despite the feel-good love-in of CTV’s “Do You Believe?” commercials, a world-class athlete doesn’t always embody beauty-pageant Olympic values of peace, love and harmony.

“They expect you to win, and to do that, you have to be a killer,” says Adams. “You can’t be a nice, soft person. You have to be the toughest one out there.” It’s just a tad hypocritical.

And this is where the OTP initiative draws its line in the snow.

“I think the majority of Canadians would be proud of any overall performance,” says Jackson. “Where we in the sport community get off on this is, if we didn’t have the goal of being number one, we wouldn’t have the incentive to push for five or six years.”

OTP is about winning. We’re not just going to be on the podium in Vancouver and Whistler, we’re going to own it. OTP makes no bones about its blatant focus on medals and little else. And it may seem un-Canadian to want to beat the whole winter sports world to a bloody pulp, but that’s exactly what OTP set out to do. And, let’s be honest, it’s what every top-level athlete wants when they toe that starting line.

So, if we want to go ahead and make athletes the symbols and stewards of our national pride and identity, then here’s the new deal: Canadians are through being polite. And, yeah, it gives us the willies to say this is just about winning and we’re doing it anyway. Yeah, we’re keeping our secrets and training facilities to ourselves. Yeah, some sports may fall off the back of the truck.

But it’s about freaking time.