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Let The Games Begin Posting Date: Aug 10 2008 7:35PM The 2008 Summer Olympics are on and my give-a-crap meter hasn’t flickered.
This might seem odd for a life-long sports fan. My relationship with the Olympics goes back to 1976 when I vividly recall watching the Montreal Games with my mother. In 1984, I remember cheering for Alex Baumann and Victor Davis when they dominated the pool in Los Angeles. That same year I learned that the world considers rhythmic gymnastics, which is like dancing with props, a sport. Lori Fung fancy-danced her way to a gold medal for Canada that year, however, so I was a big fan.
In 1988, I got rug burns on my knees when I dropped to the floor screaming at the televised image of Ben Johnson, “Run you sonofabitch, run!” In 1992, my head nearly exploded with the injustice of a Canadian synchronized swimmer getting robbed of a gold medal by a judge’s admitted error.
In 1996, I built a hot date around watching Donovan Bailey run the 100 metre final, and let’s just say Canada won two gold medals that evening, if you know what I mean. Four years later, I stayed up all night to watch Daniel Nestor and Sebastien Lareau win gold in doubles tennis in Sydney. And then in 2004, I got all fired up when Lori-Ann Muenzer, who was something like fifty-three years old at the time, won a gold medal in one of the forty-seven different cycling events featured in Athens. I think her event was the 1,000 metre banana-seat pursuit with hockey card spokes.
Now, however, the Olympics don’t mean so much to me because all the athletes I care about are in sports I barely recognize.
When did Canada become a nation of trampoliners and synchronized divers? Surely, if you were to devise a strategy for making the Olympics irrelevant in your home country, you would do what Canada has done – make sure that you suck at all the spectator-friendly sports that give out lots of medals.
In Beijing, Michael Phelps will win more gold medals than the entire nation of Canada, and to me, that’s a problem.
Canada doesn’t have a lot of money to throw at Olympic sports. I get that. Every dollar not invested in hockey is, to many Canadians, a dollar wasted. But every four years, this policy reveals its shortcomings on the largest stage in sport. The Canadian approach is to kick ass at ice hockey, a sport in which we assemble two dozen super-elite athletes to win one gold medal with no ability to sweep the podium, regardless of how dominant we are. Conversely, the Chinese have something like six good divers who will combine to win seven thousand medals. Clearly, they’re onto something.
Let me lay this out in simple terms in case Canada’s Ambassador for Amateur Sport is reading. One talented swimmer can win half a dozen medals or, as we are about to see with Mr. Phelps, more. A gifted sprinter can win three, a world-class badminton artist (or whatever they’re called) can win two. In each case, those athletes also do not compete alone for his or her country. If one nation has the three fastest sprinters, that country wins gold, silver and bronze. That’s efficiency: you invest in one sport and win a bucketful of medals. No matter how many great hockey players Canada produces, it still only produces one Olympic medal.
Canada has 331 athletes in China at this year’s Olympics. Experts are predicting something like fifteen medals from this crew. Now, I admire every single one of those 331. Even the most marginal of them has more discipline and athletic ability in his or her toenail clippings than I do in my entire body, but think about this for a second … we could keep them all at home, send Michael Phelps a good gymnast to the Games and win the same number of medals.
Either Canadians care about the Olympics, or we don’t. Since I believe we need to invest and give our athletes the chance to outperform some freak from the American swim team, I have decided that I should care … so I’m going to go now and watch synchronized beach archery. Go Canada go! |
