Canada’s Olympic success: Being one with winter
As of this writing, the Winter Olympic Games are well underway in distant Pyeongchang, South Korea. Canada is sending its largest delegation ever to the competition - 225 athletes, competing in all 15 of the events in the snow, ice and sliding competitions.
Canada, according to the sports bookies, is an odds-on bet to come out on top of the medal count, as it did in the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. In the only previous Winter Games Canada has hosted, in Calgary in 1988, the Soviet Union took the top spot, and then promptly disintegrated as a political “union.” All told, though, Russia, in Soviet or solo configuration, has won the most Winter Games, at 10.
Interestingly, the mighty United States has not “won” a Winter Olympics since Lake Placid in 1932, when there were all of eight sports in play. Of course, Americans more or less have owned the Summer Games, with the Soviets perpetually on their tail.
Canada, then, stands to make history, winning an Olympic medal count for the first time on foreign ice and snow. Team Canada has representation from across the country, with Ontario contributing the largest contingent at 68, Alberta with 54 and Quebec with 50.
Of the Quebec delegation, a third, or 16 athletes, come from the Quebec City region, and several others, from the Townships and eastern Quebec, train at centres of excellence in the provincial capital. Over the years, world class facilities have been established and evolved for cross-country skiing, biathlon, alpine skiing, snowboarding and acrobatic skiing. The legacy of local stars like Pierre Harvey, Myriam Bedard and Gaetan Boucher no doubt boosts the cause.
But besides the facilities and support organizations, what is it about Quebec that produces such a stellar crop of champions of snow and ice? For every one of the persistent and talented few who make it to the Games, and especially a podium, there are literally hundreds of other hopefuls whose Olympic dreams come to naught.
Could it be how Quebecers, as a whole, living in the most nordic chunk of the country (excluding the three territories, of course), have embraced winter and have come to see it over the course of more than four hundred years of European settlement as nothing that can’t be enjoyed with the right attitude and appropriate outdoor clothing.
The evidence of this cold-defying phenomenon is everywhere. You see it on the outdoor rinks where folks of all ages bundle up, slap on the blades and carve up the ice, despite bone-chilling cold. Living close to the Plains of Abraham as we do, it’s astounding and heartening to see a parade of people with cross-country skis, snowshoes and skates trekking to the vast, urban winter playground no matter the inclement conditions.
On a more mundane level, those who wage war on winter to protect their homes and roofs from ice and snow, shovelling, scraping, hacking and pounding, are channelling in a way the indomitable Olympic spirit. We all shovel for Canada, to put a twist on the clever commercial slogan.
We grumble a lot about the cold and snow and being imprisoned for half the year in an unforgiving frozen white world. In the end, as a community of dogged survivors who built a powerful nation from a pristine hivernal paradise, we revel in our mastery of the cold.
This may be a bit tangential, but this recent account of a Sidney Crosby encounter in the Laurentians, seems to evoke that spirit. So the world’s greatest hockey player shows up in a jeep at an outdoor rink in Mont Tremblant on a freezing early morning in January. He puts on his skates in a snowbank and then proceeds to do practice drills on the ice with the only other brave hockey
DEAR MR. BLAIS,
Tsoul there at that hour, a 19-year-old student, who is probably still pinching himself.
Sid the Kid, an immortal Olympic hero, won’t be at the Five Rings winter rodeo this time, but the same joyful defiance will be embodied in every athlete sporting the red and white in Pyeongchang.
How does Canada succeed in snow and ice sports? We become one with winter. o mark Valentine's Day, the collective rights organizations (DCD) of the Estrie feel it’s important to revisit actions they have taken to nurture their love affair with the government. We have chosen to send you a retrospective of all our activities since 2011 to remind you how much the Estrie community has strongly mobilized to highlight the relevance and urgency of increasing our funding.
From a national demonstration to a fictional food drive, through the Fini le temps des peanuts campaign to a formal notice to the Minister, in addition to many petitions and tours with MNAS, several initiatives were undertaken to get the government to listen. This retrospective has in a way become the little black book of DCD groups in the Estrie.
Collective rights groups are heartbroken. The purpose of our relationship is very simple: we want to be loved to the extent of our true worth. The recent announcement of a $2.2 million bonus is a first step, but it still represents peanuts compared to the $40 million that collective rights groups really need to carry out their overall mission. Subsequent investments for DCD groups offering individual services are also of concern to us. These groups defend collective rights. All this breaks our heart and gives us little support in our relationship with the government.
We believe that this retrospective will lead you to reconsider the commitment your government wants to give to its relationship with DCD groups. We would like to change our perception of a government that does not have a heart.