National Post (National Edition)
Emergency cash lets Canada prepare for 2021 Olympics
OTTAWA PROVIDES $72-MILLION LIFELINE
Before he joined the Canadian Olympic Committee as chief executive at the end of 2018, David Shoemaker ran the NBA’s business in China for seven years.
When he started that job, basketball was booming overseas. Yao Ming was the planet’s most famous Chinese man and basketball was the most global sport other than soccer. Within Shoemaker’s first month, Yao retired from professional basketball and the NBA locked out its players to begin a five-month work stoppage.
“Nothing quite goes according to plan,” Shoemaker says with a laugh as he tells the story.
These days, a retirement and a labour dispute sound like minor inconveniences. Instead of the closing stretch toward what would have been his first Olympics with Team Canada, Shoemaker finds himself surveying an amateur sports landscape that has been utterly upended by the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is hardly unique in that regard, not with so many industries — and people — reeling from the effects of a months-long shutdown, but an Olympic year is usually a payoff after years of low-profile investment. The visibility of sports that often are on the fringes of the mainstream suddenly spikes, and that brings increased attention and activity for the COC and its many business partners, who invest a lot of money to ensure that they are reflected in the glow of Olympic medals.
“The commercial activity can crescendo around an Olympic period,” Shoemaker says. That money is then poured into training and investment, which have in turn led to unprecedented Canadian
performances on the international stage.
Everything was ticking along toward Tokyo 2020 when the brakes were hit. After the belated decision to push the next summer Olympics back by a year, amateur-sports programs throughout the world had to figure out how their normal four-year cycles of expenses and revenues would be affected by a one-year pause right before one of those crescendos. Would they run out of money absent the expected payoff? Could they afford to wait things out for a year? And with hundreds of athletes nearing what was supposed to be the end of an intensive training cycle, would there be money to essentially reinvest in another year of preparation?
Some form of an answer started to come late last week, when the federal government announced $72 million in emergency funding for amateur sports in Canada. The federal Heritage Minister described the cash infusion, which will mostly go to national and provincial sports bodies, as well as some direct assistance to athletes, as intended to preserve the country’s “sports ecosystem.” It was a recognition that the whole thing could come crashing down in a year where, in addition to the Olympic delay, grassroots registrations are expected to plummet as a result of the pandemic and ongoing public-health measures.
Shoemaker said the funding from Ottawa “means that we have a partner that is sincere about making sure that the Canadian sport system is viable and functioning, and allows us to field the most competitive Olympic and Paralympic teams in Tokyo in 2021.”
But if the government part of the funding puzzle is at least temporarily sorted, the COC still has a lot left to figure out. The backbone of its recent success comes from those corporate partners, the most recent of which, the national law firm Fasken, was announced on Tuesday. Shoemaker says this partnership was expedited in part because Fasken will provide legal services to amateur sports organizations — work that takes on new significance in a post-COVID-19 world.
“We are so incredibly thankful for the team at Fasken for fast-tracking these services,” he said.
While the legal-services element to this partnership is unique, the deals allow companies to use Team Canada and Olympic logos on their buildings and communication materials, and the COC in normal times would bring athletes to the partners for a big, flashy announcement. In recent years I’ve covered such events at an airplane hangar, a downtown shopping mall, a swanky hotel and a corporate grocery headquarters. When the economy is booming, it’s a win-win for Team Canada and their sponsors, but the coronavirus will have significant impacts on some of the usual amateur-sports backers. The COC knows there could be knock-on effects on its business.
“For sure I think there’s a risk of our partners having to re-evaluate their partnership with us,” Shoemaker says, while noting that nothing has lessened the value of an association with Team Canada itself. “But we have partners whose business has been profoundly impacted by this pandemic. We’re going to be good partners with all of them.”
Those are decisions and discussions that could take months, even years, to sort out. The impacts of the pandemic, at the amateur-sports level, will likely extend well beyond the next Olympics, whenever they might be.
And if they are next summer in Tokyo, as is presently the plan, then they will be Shoemaker’s first. “I have to think they will be ever sweeter,” he says.
COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY CAN CRESCENDO AROUND AN OLYMPIC PERIOD.