Own the Podium was HOGWASH!

Author: Scott Taylor

February 22, 2010

Scott Taylor's E-Take is sponsored by Biotech Laser, who utilize a low intensity laser that stimulates the natural healing of tissue.

After Canadian snowboard half-pipe competitor, Mercedes Nicol fell in her second run in the final last Thursday night, she looked into CTV’s camera, smiled, waved and said, “Sorry, Canada.”

Sorry?  I’ve never been angrier.  Is that what CTV, TSN and the federal government has done to Canadian athletes?  Have we now reached the point in this country that the national media pressure that has been put on our athletes through this patently stupid “I-Believe-Own-the-Podium,” campaign has resulted in athletes now feeling they have to apologize to the nation if they don’t win a medal?

When gold medal hopeful, Melissa Hollingsworth, finished fifth in the skeleton on Friday she cried.  Then said, “I feel like I let my whole country down.”

I wonder if skier Britt Janyk had to apologize after she finished 17th in the Super G?  In one of those dreadful (and they ARE dreadful) athlete profile-promos that CTV created, Janyk said, “When I stand at the top of the podium...”

When I stand?  Not “if I stand,” but “when I stand.”  Who made her say that?  Who wrote that script?

For almost two years we’ve been bombarded by this horrible pre-Olympic hype, the I Believe promotion where children screamed “Canada Wins the Games!” into the TV camera and Canadians are taught to feel as though we’ll overcome our limited population and lack of a coherent national sports policy and score the 35-plus medals required to win the Games.  How silly.

For those of us who have been to an Olympic Games, we knew that wasn’t going to happen.  I’ve been to the Olympics nine times and if Canada wins 15 medals it’s worth a national celebration.  Sure, in Torino, we had a once-in-lifetime 24 medals: seven gold, 10 silver and seven bronze and finished fifth (third in total medals won), but that was the exception not the rule.  This year, with nine medals so far, the Canadian athletes are being looked upon as failures because, well because they’re ... fourth overall?

Fourth!?  That’s freaking sensational.

We’re ahead of Russia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, Austria, Switzerland and China.  That’s an amazing performance.  A kid from Russell, Man., has a gold medal in skeleton for goodness sake.  Anyone who thinks it gets better than that... well anyone who thinks it gets better than that has been watching way too much television and has been listening to a federal government that truly believed it could buy 35 medals – that was the goal, remember, 35 medals – at a bargain basement price.  This is a country that spends $1 billion per year in taxpayers’ money on a far-left-leaning public broadcaster.  Spending $117 million over five years seems like a pittance in comparison.

Before the Games began, an Angus Reid Opinion Poll asked 1,001 randomly chosen Canadians aged 18-55+ what they wanted to see in Vancouver/Whistler this month.

According to the pollsters, more than half of the Canadians polled said the success of a host nation rests on its team winning more medals overall than any other country.  Fifty-six per cent of respondents said medal count was the best measure of success.  Interestingly, Albertans, who have played host to a Winter Olympic Games, were the least likely to measure success by gold medals at only 5 per cent, while Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Quebec were most likely to demand a high gold medal count at 16 per cent. My goodness.

As well, according to the poll, “The older Canadians are, the loftier their expectations will be.”  Respondents over age 55 (62 per cent) value medals as the only measure of success more than people aged 18 to 34 (48 per cent).  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), those same older Canadians weren’t asked if the federal government could provide, oh, maybe $250 million annually to Olympic sport in Canada instead of the $117 million total and the $22.35 million that was spent on “Own the Podium” in 2009.  You can bet those folks don’t want the feds to spend another nickel on sport (the breakdown for Own the Podium’s 2009 funding can be found at: http://www.ownthepodium2010.com/Funding/winter_sports.aspx).

Then again, if you stop and think about it, Montgomery’s Skeleton gold medal actually cost about $6.5 million in total.  People involved in the program admit that Canada could win 16 medals without Own the Podium.  Folks who don’t want the government to spend money on Olympic sports just might be right.

But I digress, the problem with our approach to sport is not in the amount of money we spend as a nation but is instead, clearly illustrated in the two years of hype leading up to the Games.  If you watched Canadian TV for those two years, you’d think people such as Hollingsworth, Janyk, Patrick Chan, Emily Brydon, Manny Osborne-Paradis, Jeremy Wotherspoon and Denny Morrison were all going to win gold medals. Guaranteed.  They were locks.  Each and every one of them.

In reality, they were very good athletes who should be praised for their tremendous efforts, but they should never have been poster children for medal podiums.  We have been convinced by our national television conglomerates that gold and only gold -- that owning the podium and nothing less than that -- is the only way to measure success.

It’s not.  For a nation of 30 million people in a large, but mostly unpopulated democratic country in the northern hemisphere, we have done tremendously well at these Games.  And with a week left, we will, no doubt, do even better. It was worth the effort to have a goal, but not worth the level of bullshit we threw at it.

If only CTV and TSN hadn’t led us down the garden path before the Games began, we all might enjoy it a little more.

For one thing, we wouldn’t have put a 26-year-old snowboarder in a position that she felt she had to apologize to the country for finishing sixth.

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