MEDALLING WITH THE MONEY
More cash for best athletes pays off
Peter Eriksson, on the phone from Beijing, is talking about the Canadians at the World Track and Field Championships.
The head coach at Athletics Canada says the different thing about this group of competitors is that, figuratively speaking, they know the way to the podium.
That is, they know the type of training that is required. They are aware of the needed effort. They are not interested in participation.
“We aren’t putting people on the team just to be here,” Eriksson says.
That statement is backed up by the results.
Canada, depending on what happens on the weekend in China, is in a very good position to break its record of five medals at a world championships. (It had four through Thursday.)
At the London Olympics in 2012, the Canadians had a lone medal in track and field events.
Eriksson, a Swede who has coached in Canadian athletics for 30 years, minus a brief stint in Britain, doesn’t exactly tent his fingers like a scheming mastermind who is seeing his plan come together, but he says that the success being witnessed this year meets the first of the goals that were put in place when he took the head coach job in 2013.
“The goal,” he says, “has been (to win) two to three medals at every major event. Historically, we would win zero to one medal.”
It was an ambitious goal, then. A 200 per cent increase in medals.
But it was also in keeping with the attitude that has informed Canadian amateur athletics in the past decade or so.
Changed funding models have funnelled the bulk of government money toward those athletes with the best chance of making it to podiums, while leaving much less money for those who might be the best in their country at a particular discipline, but not among the world’s elite.
First in Canada, but 57th in the world? No money for you.
It’s a controversial system, and rightly so, but no one is apologizing for it.
“They hired me to get more medals,” Eriksson says. “Getting more medals means you have to have a different mindset.”
It is, he says, a “pretty hardnosed, cutthroat approach.” It is that. Funding from Own The Podium, the non-profit agency that distributes government dollars, jumped significantly for track and field events in the period before the London games, and has ticked upward slightly for the pre-Rio run. (It’s on pace for about $11 million in the Rio quadrennial.)
Funding for other sports — sailing, taekwondo, gymnastics, to pick three examples — has been cut deeply.
Gymnastics, which received $6 million from OTP in the London cycle, was given $1.6 million through the first two years of the Rio training period.
What the support has meant for athletics in this country is evident in Beijing. Coupled with funding through the B2ten program, a private initiative where wealthy benefactors donate money that is distributed to elite medal hopefuls, Eriksson says the goal is for a program that builds repeated success.
Brianne Theisen-Eaton, who won a heptathlon silver in China, is on the B2ten list of athletes, as are high jumper Derek Drouin and decathlete Damian Warner, both of whom could make the podium at the worlds this weekend.
Eriksson says the stable funding allows for a “planned approach to get more medals.” Without it, you might have the odd gifted athlete who jumps up into a medal at a major event, but those instances are rare.
“You can have the one-off, but they come along only once every eight years or so,” he says.
Eriksson points to the sport of race walking, where coach Gerry Dragomir wanted to build a program that had both strength and depth. Ben Thorne, who wasn’t among the two Canadian race walkers who made last month’s Pan Am team, won the bronze in Beijing. His two teammates finished in the top 15. All hope to make it to Rio.
“Our goal was total world domination,” Dragomir told The Canadian Press of his long-term plan, a funny turn of phrase for a sport in which competitors look like they are in a desperate rush to make it to a bathroom before something awful happens.
But if the third-best guy on a team can make the podium at the worlds, you must be doing something right.
Does the focus on winning really represent the Olympic ideal? That’s disputable, but Eriksson says this is a generation of Canadian athletes that, having seen homegrown success on the biggest stage, simply has lofty ambitions. The performance in Beijing quite obviously bodes well for Rio. And before that, there are some podium chances to come, and a shot at that record.
“I try to refrain from predictions,” Eriksson says, noting it’s only a chance to be proven wrong. “But what we do from here is just icing on the cake.”