Our Olympians whiter, better off, study says

Results emphasize high cost of sports, and add fodder for the funding debate

Even before the opening ceremony and weeks of competition at an Olympic Games, statisticians have a pretty good idea of what the final medal table will look like.

That’s because a country’s participation and success at the Olympics is strongly correlated with a nation’s wealth, government investment in sport and past results.

Now, sports physician and researcher David Lawrence has delved deeper to look at individual athletes and what he has found shows that Olympic sport is a lot less equitable than many would like to believe.

Canada’s Olympic athletes are whiter and — using private high schooling as a rough proxy for wealth and opportunity — better off than the overall population.

It’s a similar situation in the United States, Britain and Australia, which Lawrence also analyzed in the study to be published Wednesday in the international journal, Public Health.

The Winter Olympics had the greatest disparity, with 95 per cent of Canada’s 2014 Sochi team identified through photo examination as white. That’s well above the 81 per cent of Canadians identified as white through census data. The Summer Games had a fair population representation with 83 per cent of Canada’s 2016 Rio team identified as white. But a sport-by-sport breakdown shows a less equitable picture.

The only sports with a basis favouring non-white, publicly educated athletes were athletics, archery, basketball, badminton, judo and soccer. In every other summer sport, and all the winter sports, the Canadian Olympic team was biased to white, privately educated athletes.

The study defined privately educated athletes as those who attended a high school, for at least one year, with tuition fees for core required credits.

Nearly 15 per cent of Canada’s Rio team and 18 per cent of the Sochi team fit that definition compared to the seven per cent the study cites as the overall national private education figure for elementary and high school combined.

“No one has ever looked at race and a marker of socioeconomic status at an athlete level before,” said Lawrence who was motivated to conduct the research after volunteering as a doctor for the Canadian team in Rio and being struck by the stories he heard about the costs involved.

“(Olympic sport) is obviously heavily publicly subsidized, so if there’s inequitable access to this public endeavour that would be a problem.”

His findings are hardly surprising. Sports have historical and cultural roots that determine, in part, who might take them up. And while all sport is increasingly expensive, some sports require substantial family resources or access to social circles where lucrative sponsorships can be found. And census data still shows that white Canadians, on average, have higher incomes than visible minorities.

But the study shines yet another spotlight on problems in sport and how high costs can limit who gets to play. And it comes at a time when the federal government is reviewing its own funding approach to Olympic sport, which values reaching the podium over participation.

Currently, $64 million — almost a third of the $200 million that Ottawa puts into sports annually — goes to funding athletes in events identified by the national elite sport body, Own the Podium, as having strong Olympic medal potential.

Many in the sport community have started questioning this hyper-targeted focus and academics have long urged a more honest discussion about what exactly this funding does.

“A lot of people in the Olympic community, including the (Canadian Olympic Committee), promulgate the idea that supporting elite athletes actually has a health promotive affect in increasing physical activity in the general population, which has been well-studied and it doesn’t,” said Lawrence, who is currently completing a masters in public health at the University of Toronto.

“So we need to question what value as a society we place on elite sport and there is value, it’s entertainment, and that’s what it needs to be viewed as . . . If we want to promote health in the general population we should target the general population not target the top one per cent of athletes.”

Carla Qualtrough, Canada’s Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities has said that medal-winning performances are important because they inspire youth and “everyone gets more fit and more active and Canada is proud.”

She has also said the review of the medal-targetted funding approach should lead to a broader discussion about whether it’s producing the outcomes Canadians want.

“As a former athlete, I know firsthand how sport can change the lives of young Canadians and we are taking steps to increase opportunities for all youth to get involved in sport at the community level and to stay in sport to possibly become the next generation of national, international, Olympic and Paralympic athletes,” Qualtrough said in response to the study’s findings. “We are always looking at ways we can better support the Canadian sports system to ensure it is more inclusive for all.”

That’s a discussion that Lawrence hopes his research helps stimulate.

“We need to examine sport in Canada more closely, whether all these sports we’re funding now need to be funded, how much funding we’re actually putting into it, what’s the value we place on sport and, if we want to promote sport, what is a better way of doing that?”

“We need to examine . . . whether all these sports we’re funding need to be funded.” DAVID LAWRENCE SPORTS PHYSICIAN/RESEARCHER