OWNING THE PODIUM
Medal surge is a reminder of why we invest in success, and how good it feels
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— It’s that feeling of connection that is the magic, right? The feeling that there is something that cannot be defined, holding them together. Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir performed their seamless magic at the Olympics on Tuesday, as part of their final Games. It was breathtaking.
It was the apex of a golden surge for Canada, as part of what has been the kind of Games we should perhaps get used to. Canada used to be a sucker at the Olympics until we were embarrassed on our own soil in Calgary, the only host to not win gold. And then came Vancouver 2010, and everything that came with it. That was Virtue and Moir’s first exquisite moment, their first gold.
And Tuesday morning, they completed that journey. God, it was something. It was one of those moments that people will remember: the emotion, the feeling, the way they skate as if they are one person, somehow twinned. The desperate way they hold each other when it is over. They have been perfecting all of that for 20 years. It is a remarkable sort of what we are told, over and over again, is platonic love.
Every Olympics has a theme, a story map. Canada’s has been filled with all sorts of successes, which has become how a Canadian Winter Games goes. Virtue and Moir’s performance was the highlight of a golden surge. On Monday night, Justin Kripps and Alex Kopacz won gold in the two-man bobsled, sharing it with the Germans, their times identical to the hundredth of a second. On Tuesday morning, freestyle skier Cassie Sharpe dominated the women’s halfpipe. She didn’t even need her final run.
And then Virtue and Moir, who had to set a world record to win Canada’s eighth gold medal of the Games, and 19th overall. The high-water mark was 26 in Vancouver. Sochi, 25. Canada is approaching that neighbourhood again.
“We’re positioned better than we ever have been in terms of depth and medal potential,” says Anne Merklinger, the head of Own The Podium, Canada’s Olympic funding nerve centre, before the Olympics began. “We’re in a position to win more than we won in Sochi. We’re north of Sochi. Vancouver changed sport in Canada, created a culture of believing that we could win, so athletes coming out of Vancouver . . . they could see it, they could touch it, they could feel it, they had confidence they could do it. So that momentum has continued.”
Money is a huge part of success in sports, of course, and especially winter sports. Equipment, coaches, training, nutrition, travel, everything. It’s Canada’s goal to become the dominant power in winter sports, and if we’re really trying, it should be. Funding for this cycle was down from Sochi — $75.3 million versus $81.8 million — but Own The Podium also got approximately $10 million in new funding.
That went to its NextGen initiative, with funding for coaches and aimed at athletes who show medal potential up to eight years out, rather than four. Our horizons are longer now.
Tuesday was a good reminder of one result of the money. It feels good when we win. It feels good to see these stories, and to tell them. The medal table belongs to Norway here, and you can’t help but appreciate it: They don’t let kids in Norway keep score before they are 13, and the biggest rule in Norwegian Olympics is to be a good teammate. They are a nation of 5.8 million, and they have found a way to sit atop the world, in the most agreeable way possible.
But when you have surges like that, it is intoxicating, and you can see the threads. Kripps didn’t decide he wanted to become a driver until after the 2010 Olympics. Sharpe started freestyle skiing because the late Sarah Burke, who pushed the sport toward the Olympic program in 2014, was a freestyle skier. In 2014 skiers from Canada brought Burke’s ashes to the Olympics, carefully stored and treasured, and sprinkled them on the Sochi halfpipe. Sharpe, in a way, has brought her here.
For every unicorn like Ted-Jan Bloemen in long track, there was a link to the past. Mikael Kingsbury has followed and exceeded the moguls legacies of Jean-Luc Brassard and Alex Bilodeau, the latter of whom won his first gold in Vancouver; Samuel Girard and Kim Boutin followed in the wake of Charles Hamelin and Marianne St-Gelais, whose brilliant smiles were first memorized in Vancouver. The luge team’s bronze and silver — Alex Gough in women’s, the mixed relay of Gough, Sam Edney, Tristan Walker, Justin Snith — came on ice carved by the same artisans who run the Whistler track, where they train. And then came Virtue and Moir. They carried the flag to open these Games, and that was right. The question now — well, we have no shortage of candidates to carry the flag at the closing ceremony. We win at the Winter Games, now.
Well, maybe they should let Virtue and Moir carry the flag out, too. They are the most decorated ice dancers in history, and have two gold medals here, but more: they made us feel something. We have so many winners here, and maybe more to come. They all could do it.
But some things are unforgettable. Some things, you just love. If they carry the flag, we will all know what it means.