Olympic-level effort
COC’s new marketing campaign focuses on athletes’ perseverance and integrity
TORONTO — The Canadian Olympic Committee unveiled its slick new marketing vision on Tuesday morning, and the 60-second video at the heart of it felt like a litmus test of one’s natural level of cynicism.
The message of the “Be Olympic” campaign is about amateur-sport virtues: perseverance, integrity, inspiration, determination, all that good stuff.
And so, we see Canadian Olympians displaying all of the above, but in a manner that is unexpectedly, er, biblical. Speed skater Denny Morrison, returning to the Games after a motorcycle crash and then a stroke that left him in considerable peril, elevates into the air and toward a light above as though he is either ascending to the afterlife or is about to throw down with Magneto.
Figure skaters Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford perform a throw in front of a table of judges, in a shot that has a decidedly Last Supper feel, as though the disciples had ordered in a little pre-betrayal entertainment.
Snowboarder Mark McMorris, who like Morrison is coming back from a lifethreatening accident, his a back-country crash that fractured 17 bones, is seen lying in a hospital bed, broken and bloodied. He opens his eyes to the light. He’s either coming back from the dead or his wounds are about to magically heal, Wolverine-style.
Toward the end, a young girl stands in front of three golden statues of hockey gold medallists Hayley Wickenheiser, Vicky Sunohara and Caroline Ouellette. She looks up at them, sufficiently awestruck. In an accompanying still image, she kneels before them with a stick in her hand, just in case the idolatry thing was lost on anyone.
It is, as mentioned way back at the start of this thing, slick. It’s also very artistic and, to my eyes at least, comically over the top. But I guess when you take a couple of years to work on launching a new “brand platform,” to use the corporate jargon that was frequently in use on Tuesday morning in the presentation at the Art Gallery of Ontario, you dispense with the subtlety. Might as well showcase the ad that evokes Renaissance paintings in a place that actually has Renaissance paintings.
But for all my cynicism, and I admit it is plentiful, the thing is, there is a good message here. You’d have a hard time coming up with a better example of perseverance than Morrison, who in real life now has a story that would be just a bit too farfetched for believable fiction. There was the motorcycle accident more than two years ago that left him with a badly broken right leg, one that to this day hampers him a little during the explosive start of a race. Several months later, he and his then-girlfriend went on an 800-mile bicycle trail ride in Arizona, as one does. After the three-week trek, Josie, now his wife, noticed that Morrison had the slurred speech and droopy eye that can be indications of a stroke. It was exactly that, the result of a tear in his carotid artery that was likely a by-product of the earlier crash. Had those problems developed just days earlier, when they were in remote parts of Arizona, “I don’t like to think about what would have happened,” Morrison said Tuesday.
At 32 years old and entering his fourth Olympics, Morrison said there were times when he doubted he could make it back this far. Even being asked to take part in this COC campaign, a process that began many months ago, was a daunting prospect. He has a steel rod in his leg, and a wonky knee, and stents in that carotid artery. Careers have ended for a lot less.
“Part of me was really unsure that I would make it as far as I have,” Morrison says. “But part of me was, this campaign is about taking those risks and rising strong and daring greatly to achieve the opportunity to do something great. Virtue is victory” — one of the tag lines of the campaign — “is kind of what I began with.”
All of this happened to Morrison, of course, after he already played a part in one of the more virtuous Olympic stories in recent years, when teammate Gilmore Junio surrendered his spot in the 1,000-metre race at Sochi 2014 so that Morrison could compete. (Morrison had fallen at nationals and was only an alternate in the event.) Morrison won the silver medal in Russia; Junio would have gotten the primary assist, if such things existed in speed skating.
It is not a coincidence that Junio, who will compete again in Pyeongchang, is featured alongside Morrison on the Be Olympic website that officially launched Tuesday.
They are remarkable stories, and the Olympics are full of them. It’s an event that can make stars, but the vast majority of athletes will get nothing other than the satisfaction of having performed, and knowing that it took thousands of hours of training to get there.
Does Canada have a monopoly on such sto-