Olympics: Pandemic exemptions give Canadians the inside track on training
Ontario’s Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls received good news this week when the province allowed an exemption for high-performance athletes to continue to train, despite restrictions for others as governments across the country fight the coronavirus pandemic.
“That’s terrific news,” said Anne Merklinger, the chief executive officer of Own the Podium.
Ontario joins Quebec and B.C. in allowing athletes who are preparing for the 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing to continue training indoors.
“The guidelines that are developed by local, provincial and federal health authorities have to be respected, and that’s what’s happening in sport at the high-performance level,” said Merklinger.
Around Toronto, it means places like the Toronto Pan-Am Sports Centre in Scarborough, Canadian Sports Institute Ontario’s field house for wheelchair basketball and rugby, the velodrome in Milton, and the Downsview facility for beach volleyball are up and running.
“The sports are being responsible in following protocols and this will allow athletes at the high-performance level to know they can carry on doing what they need to do in order to be successful,” said John Atkinson, the high-performance director and national coach of Swimming Canada and a member of a national Return to Sport task force.
Montreal’s International Sports Institute and the University of British Columbia’s aquatic centre are also open to high-performance athletes thanks to exemptions in Quebec and B.C.
Own the Podium, the Canadian Olympic Committee and the various national sports bodies have been lobbying the various levels of government for allowances to continue to train. Part of that was developing strict protocols to mitigate the risk of the transmission of the virus.
In the case of swimming, for example, there have been no known transmissions of the virus despite the participation of 23,500 swimmers of all levels in 282,000 training sessions over the summer and through most of September, Atkinson said.
“You have one way to get to the pool when you arrive,” he said. “You have a limited number people around you when you take off your mask. You’re in a chlorinated environment. You then leave the pool. You dress on deck. You leave with a oneway system.”
Temperature checks are part of the return to sport, but there’s no nasal-swab testing like there was for the NHL and NBA. That is cost prohibitive for each association, and would be a drain on public health efforts, Atkinson said. Instead, physical distancing is the key.
“If you’re following science, you can be as safe as you can be,” he said. “But you have to be stringent on your physical distancing protocols because if someone came into the environment, and were COVID positive, then if you followed physical distancing, you won’t have transmission.”
According to the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is “no evidence” that COVID-19 can spread to people through recreational water.
Atkinson, of course, is worried about his high-performance athletes. Canada’s top swimmers haven’t raced since
March, and were out of the pool for 122 days, longer than any other swimming nation.
“Some countries didn’t miss a day. Some missed between 10 and 20 days,” he said. “We were out longer than any of them. That in itself caused a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety over what your career is in high-performance sport and not (being) able to train.
“We found ways to communicate with our athletes, with our coaches, keeping them focused on what they needed to do.”
The athletes did dry-land training, video sessions, nutritional training and worked with coaches throughout their time away from events while sports organizations worked on the return-to-sport guidelines and lobbied the government for the exemptions for high-performance athletes.
“While it was a long period out, and very tough for them, they’ve made good advances in other areas,” Atkinson said of his swimmers. “What this exemption will allow is some certainty that they can carry on and build from where they are now without that added fear they will be out next week, or in three weeks’ time.”