Canada looks to top 2010 Olympic medal count
Topping the medal standings and bettering Vancouver’s total remains Canada’s Olympic goal
When Canadian athletes reached Own The Podium’s lofty goal of topping the Winter Olympics medals table four years ago in Vancouver — on the gold-medal count, at least — they did so while swaddled in a nation’s warm, fuzzy embrace amid all the comforts of home.
They did it in an atmosphere of corporate bandwagon-jumping, or so it seemed, when it was an easy sale to convince large companies to support a home Olympics with a guaranteed captive audience, and pour dollars into funding for athletes and programs and resources to give our heroes every chance to succeed, and then some.
And succeed they did, on courses and in rinks they had studied and prepared on and mastered, as thoroughly as any country ever used home-field advantage.
This time, halfway around the world in a strange and inhospitable environment, against a background of concern for personal safety, is it too much to ask they be held to their stated goal of conquering Sochi with more medals than they won in 2010?
Evidently not. That’s what the Canadian Olympic Committee envisions, and it’s what Own The Podium is projecting, and it’s what the athletes themselves believe … so what do we know?
Marcel Aubut, the COC’s formidable chief executive, was asked if his organization was reluctant to place a possibly unattainable medals expectation on the athletes’ shoulders, and he said absolutely not — then declined to name a figure.
“We are not reluctant,” said the 66-year-old former Quebec Nordiques owner, whose other dream, helping Quebecor media magnate Pierre Karl Peladeau bring an NHL club back to the provincial capital, is also equal parts faith and ambitious planning.
“We are absolutely behind the philosophy of having audacious goals,” he said recently, in an interview with Postmedia News. “We don’t believe, just to look good, in having easy ones so then we can say we have reached them. That’s not us. We want to be forced to go to the limit. And you do that when you set goals that are tough to reach.
“We often get the question: ‘Maybe you put too much pressure on the athletes?’ No way. They put that pressure on themselves. They are worse than us by far. And those guys, if they have a precise goal, are going to do everything to achieve it.
“On the contrary, we believe we have a chance in Sochi to be No. 1 in total medals, and we are gearing the whole organization and preparation for this.”
The United States won the totalmedals race in Vancouver with 37. Canada, despite its record 14 golds, was a long way back with 26, four behind second-place Germany.
So Anne Merklinger is not going quite as far out on Aubut’s limb.
“Our performance objectives are pretty clear: we want to win more medals than we won in Vancouver,” says Merklinger, 55, the former national team swimmer and elite-level curler from Ottawa who succeeded Alex Baumann as Own the Podium’s CEO two years ago.
“We want to win more medals at the Games subsequent to Vancouver than we did in Vancouver — we did that following the Calgary Olympics, and no nation has ever done it twice in the Games after they hosted.
“Plus, for each of the past eight Winter Olympics, we’ve improved on our medal count from the previous one. So those are two pretty important objectives for us, and both are accomplished by us winning 27 or more medals in Sochi.”
Is it do-able? Well, in theory, yes. If the conditions are right, and with a break or two and no further injuries … if there are no terrorist attacks, and the food is edible and nobody drinks the water by accident … and if the host nation, a poor sixth with just 15 medals in Vancouver, doesn’t rise up and snaffle a bunch of medals everyone else had been counting on.
It is sports, after all, and until recently, Canadians had not exactly seized the day at the five-ring circus. But the Own The Podium mandate established in the buildup to Vancouver — criticized in some quarters internationally for its presumptuous-sounding moniker — may have changed all of that forever.
“I think what happened in preparing for Vancouver has changed the entire culture of high-performance sport in Canada,” said Merklinger. “I see it in winter and summer Olympics and Paralympics, I see it in the leaders, athletes, support staff … they believe that they can win, and want to win, and that is the demeanour with which they carry themselves.
“It brought a bolder, brasher approach to what we do in high-performance sports and, some will argue, in many aspects of Canadian society.”
Indeed, OTP’s 27 medals may be an intentionally modest estimate.
The Associated Press, for instance, predicted 31 medals for Canada in Sochi, including 13 gold. Netherlands-based Infostrada Sports agreed with the total, but predicted 11 gold medals. The Canadian Press said 30.
Our own Postmedia Olympics editor, Bev Wake, has Canada with 31 medals. The median guess, admittedly before news of defending Olympic and world snowboard cross champion Maelle Ricker’s broken wrist, seemed to be somewhere in the 30-32 range.
But if Canadians fall short of the projections it won’t be because their support systems failed. Between the COC’s aggressive fundraising, the government of Canada’s steppedup contribution, OTP’s targeting of podium-potential athletes and shrewd investments in specific athletes by altruistic donors like B2ten, the dreaded financial fall-off after Vancouver never materialized.
“That was really the part that scared me the most,” admitted Aubut. “Just imagine: you had the Olympics at home, best Winter Games ever, and all of a sudden you have to renew those guys. There is usually an incredible recession after a Games at home.
“Athens, for instance. Greece went from 68 to three sponsors (after 2004). Same thing with Calgary, from 36 to four, they all left to do something else because it’s so cashintensive. But we knew that. First of all, the success of the (2010) Games really helped us, but secondly, we really attacked that right away to make sure that they stayed on the team.
“We lined up corporate Canada like never before in a very volatile economy, as you know, and got Suncor, the RBC, the Bay, adidas, about everybody we wanted, and now that we’ve done that with corporate Canada, we have to (activate) the wealthy families of this country.”
The private-donor end happened through B2ten and more recently the Canadian Olympic
“We often get the question: ‘Maybe you put too much pressure on the athletes?’ No way. They put that pressure on themselves.”
Canad ian Olympic Comm i ttee CEO Marcel Aubut
foundation.
“I can tell you that there’s $14 million more being invested into the Sochi quadrennial than was invested into Vancouver, for direct national sport organization (NSO) support,” Merklinger said.
“Certainly some NSOs have significant corporate support that was directed entirely to them, but for the high-performance sector itself, $14 million more over the quad, that’s a significant increase in preparation for these Games.”
The federal government picked up the $11 million a year the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) had contributed, the COC went hard after corporations, and outfits like B2ten quietly went about the business of providing resources for podium-ready athletes “so it’s a tremendous public-private partnership,” Merklinger said. “The Canadian government, COC, CPC (Canadian Paralympic Committee), B2ten have made and continue to make a difference to the overall environment.”
Matching funds from some provinces, “especially B.C., Quebec and Ontario,” Merklinger said, have helped ensure that “the support and prep heading into Sochi has been phenomenal. Virtually every sport organization and targeted team has had a chance to go to Sochi and become familiar with what will be a very different environment — there’s been no stone unturned in terms of ensuring that athletes can go to these Games and not look over their shoulder and say, ‘Well, if I’d only had better this or that, if I’d only done this’ … that doesn’t exist, and that’s been our job as an organization.”
In some ways, OTP has done its job too conspicuously well, because the concept has spread to plenty of Canada’s challengers.
“We’ve had to … I won’t say reinvent, but continue to find ways we can be better and stronger relative to the rest of the world, because many countries looked to what Canada did with Own The Podium and mirrored it or copied it,” Merklinger said, “so we can never stand still.”
“Just to stay competitive as we are now is challenging, because of the countries investing massive amounts of money to be better,” said Aubut. Italy, which is close to bankruptcy, takes it as an absolute priority, so just to stay where we are, and the cost is going up every year, is going to be a challenge. And we all know we’ll never accept to be like we were.”
Happy to be there, he meant. That’s not Canada, anymore.
So the stakeholders are dreaming big dreams. Not as big as Aubut, maybe — not No. 1 in total medals — but big.
So, Mr. Aubut, what if Canada doesn’t top the overall medal table but, like Vancouver, wins the most golds?
“That would be OK,” he said, smiling.
“Everybody is on the same (page). The country is aligned with this. And when we are aligned, usually we are dangerous.”