The 2010 Olympic Road to Mediocrity!

Author: Jeff Fisher

February 17, 2010

Jeff Fisher's E-Take is sponsored by Elite Performance, the inventor and leader in High Performance Training in Winnipeg, with over 12,000 athletes trained to date.

It was paved years ago with Canada’s socialist approach to sport.

Sport for the love of it…fair play…it doesn’t matter who wins as long as you try.  Great messages for the school yard and community centers of Canada, but how does it fare when Canada starts playing with the “big boys”?  Not so well.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sport for the sake of sport.  It helps people of all ages with life-skills that you can’t learn anywhere else.  The physical benefits of exercise while “playing” - just like coating a pill with honey.  You get what you need and it tastes good too!

But please.  Should we expect our athletes to do better?  Should we really be disappointed?

Sure, our men’s hockey team won gold back in 2002 and again back in the pre-“cold war”, fifty years earlier.  There could be many reasons why we aren’t hauling in the hardware from the big “O”, especially the winter ones, but I think there is one that outshines them all.  We don’t want to win.

Sure we say that we do.   We fund our provincial and national team programming to groom athletes.  We have associations and programming that are created to pacify the masses in our “race” for gold.  But all it takes is one trip down to the big “winning” machine of the US to figure out why we are always a bridesmaid.  Just “GOOGLE” Colorado Springs Olympic Team Training Center.

Sport in the US is a huge business.  Sponsors and their dollars push teams to “explore” the best performance options available.  With the backing of aggressive options to produce winners, the big winning machine will once again, winter or summer, trounce us on our race to the podium. 

Sure, their “pool” is larger and by the law of natural selection (not only the weak being weeded out, but the strong rigorsously tested) dictates perhaps more experience with top-level competitors, but should that account for such a thrashing?  No!

In my opinion, it is the acceptance of the socialized Canadian Sport meme.  A model where, through participation, hoping that 1000 monkeys typing on 1000 typewriters for 1000 years will turn out the words of William Shakespeare, does not work!

Recently, I had a number of Canadian National Team athletes contact our centers to discuss adequate nutritional guidelines for their off-season training programming.   These are the folks who wear the “Red and White”, invest their lives to achieve greatness, practice hours a day… and when asking their trainer, ”What appropriate fuel should we use to fuel our Olympic Dreams?”, the answer could have been found on a magnet stuck to your fridge at home:

“REVIEW YOUR CANADA FOOD GUIDE!”

I love Canada.  I love sport so much, I have dedicated my career to it….I have trained thousands of athletes, world champions and Olympians.   I see what it takes to win and know that there is still a long last leg to run between here and the podium.

jeff@elitewinnipeg.com

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