Canada’s best Olympics? Not if you count medal inflation.
Idon’t want to rain on our Winter Olympics parade. It was great TV for two weeks with lots of terrific personal i nterest stories and an amazingly improbable nail- biting gold medal game in men’s hockey ( Russia vs. Germany), as well as a completely expected nailbiting gold medal game in women’s hockey ( Canada vs. the U. S.). Judging by all the diplomatic happy talk, it may even mark the beginning of a Frankenstein- like political merger between the Stalinist hermit kingdom in the north of the Korean peninsula and the rich, modern democracy in the south.
What it wasn’t is what all the headlines say: Canada’s best ever Olympic medal haul. Not unless you ignore medal inflation, which at the Winter Olympics averages a little over nine per cent every Olympics.
If you forget about the absolute number of medals we won and look instead at the percentage we took of all the medals available, this was only our fourth- best Winter Olympics ever.
As t he accompanying chart shows, our very best ever was in 1932 at Lake Placid. We won only seven medals, but that was seven out of 42 awarded or 16.7 per cent. By contrast, at Pyeongchang, according to Wikipedia, 307 medals were awarded. Our “record haul” of 29 represented only 9.4 per cent of that total. That’s not bad. And, with Russia sidelined, it gave us our best finish ever, third behind Norway and Germany. But in terms of medal hauls, we did slightly better in 2006 at Torino, where we won 9.5 per cent of all medals, and then again four years later in Vancouver, where we won 10.1 per cent.
If you look only at the 14 sports that were contested at Lake Placid in 1932, we actually did a little worse in Pyeongchang, with one fewer medal, though two were gold ( two- man bobsleigh and 10,000- metre speed skating) vs only one gold in 1932 ( men’s hockey). In Lake Placid we medalled in every one of the women’s events. But there were only two, women’s and pair’s figure skating. We got bronze in both.
The better balance of female events in Olympic sports has clearly helped us. Our 29 medals at Pyeongchang broke down perfectly evenly, 12 won by men, 12 by women and five in mixed sports. Beyond that, our improved absolute medal haul is a result of all the new sports that have been added, including the crazy ones where people do flips and spins while wearing skis and snowboards. Canadians are supposedly colourless by nature, but we happen to excel at those sports, so good on us.
The buzz coming out of Korea is that we keep doi ng better and better in the Olympics so we should spend even more on highperformance sports. Even if we were doing better and better, that logic wouldn’t necessarily follow. There could be a point of diminishing returns. But in fact we aren’t doing better and better. We’re doing more or less the same as we have for the last few Olympics.
I suppose the sports lobby will conclude from that we’re stuck in a rut so we have to spend more. That’s the gold, silver, bronze and iron law of lobbying: no matter what happens, more spending is always required.