CRITICISM UNFAIR: TODD
Fans too tough on Larocque
By any measure, Canada had a splendiferous Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang: 29 medals, including 11 gold, behind only Norway (with 39 and 14 golds) and Germany (31 medals, 14 gold.)
We done good, Canada, and every single member of that Olympic team should be proud today.
The fans back home, on the other hand? Epic fail. Lots of whining because Canada didn’t win gold medals in hockey and curling (which has become the sport that ate the Olympics.) And an unforgivable social media assault on Team Canada defender Jocelyne Larocque because she dared to take off her silver medal.
That behaviour, ladies and gentleman, was pathetic, hateful, ignorant, bigoted, rooted in a misunderstanding of the very nature of Olympic competition and just plain wrong.
Should Larocque have removed her medal? No, probably not. But relative to the Russian dopers being allowed at the Games? To the hypocrisy of Thomas Bach of the IOC and René Fasel of the IIHF? Larocque’s action was not worth a raised eyebrow.
Yet here were Canadians by the dozen, putting down the nachos and beer to jump on their smartphones to call an athlete who has sacrificed so much for Canada a disgrace and a bad example for children.
Let’s be clear: Jocelyne Larocque can be a role model for my child every day of the week and twice on Sunday. She is courageous, hard-working, caring and a fiery competitor on the ice. There are a million reasons some athletes need to apologize, ranging from doping to domestic battery. But Larocque owed no one an apology, least of all the couch potatoes back home.
It was left to Hayley Wickenheiser, the most honoured player in the history of the women’s game, to come to Larocque’s defence. “Jocelyne Larocque,” Wickenheiser said on Twitter, “is one fine person, teammate and as competitive as anyone I’ve ever played with. We need more like her. It was gold or bust and a heated emotional moment. Cut her some slack people, she’d go through a brick wall for you if she was on your team!”
Amen. Here’s the problem: Canadians are so stupefied by the NHL that we fail to grasp what life is like for the vast majority of high-performance athletes. We equate all athletes with the fat cats — but if an NHL player has a bad night, he goes home to count his money, knowing he’ll have another shot the night after and so on, for a minimum of 82 games a season, year after year.
For most Olympic athletes, there is one event that truly matters: the Olympic Games. In women’s hockey, it boils down to even less than that, to a single game. That time every four years when the U.S. and Canada meet, with a gold medal on the line.
Meanwhile, our athletes make enough scrape by. They have just enough to meet their nutrition needs, to pay for extra physical therapy, massages, transport to and from practice.
After an increase in the budget in 2017, the government of Canada, through its Athlete Assistance Program, provided $33 million to 1,900 athletes, which works out to an average of $17,368.42 annually. A player in the NHL with a $10 million per year contract earns $121,951 per game (roughly $153,000 Canadian) for an 82-game season, not counting bonuses, endorsements and all the rest of it.
For athletes like Jocelyne Larocque, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They play for the love of the game, no other reason. They drag themselves to the rink on cold January days when everything hurts and the last thing they want to do is to train. They endure painful rehab for the inevitable injuries, with no eight-figure contract waiting at the end of the trail. Some of them are raising children and struggling to make ends meet.
There are other sources of income for the top athletes, especially sponsorships. But sponsorship money is hard to come by, in large part because our sports networks (TSN, RDS, TVA and especially Sportsnet) resolutely ignore the Olympians from one Olympics to the next while the CRTC refuses to force them to show Canadian ski cross and speedskating instead of British darts and American poker.
The only thing these athletes deserve from us is our support and our bottomless thanks. The next time you decide to bring down the Twitter posse on the head of a young woman whose only sin was to remove her medal from her neck, ask yourself how much time you’ve spent watching her sport since the last Olympics.
If you want to bring on the outrage, bring it on for Gilbert Brulé, whose irrational goonery helped cost Canada a shot at the gold medal in men’s hockey. For Don Cherry, who defended this thuggish behaviour. For Korean short-track skaters who cruelly ignored their teammate, sobbing in the infield after a bad race.
Save a little outrage for Russian dopers, for IIHF boss Fasel, for Gary Bettman’s decision to keep NHL players at home, for the IOC’s sham punishment of the Russians.
Jocelyne Larocque? She deserves nothing but applause and gratitude. In my book, she’s a hero. And she always will be.
We need more like her. It was gold-or-bust-and a heated emotional moment. Cut her some slack people, she’d go through a brick wall for you if she was on your team!