Navigating the countdown to Tokyo
Canada helping athletes prepare without an Olympic calendar, international competitions
This would have been a rare quiet spot in the high-performance sports calendar, if not for the pandemic. The Tokyo Olympics would have come and gone, and Beijing 2024 would still be some distance off.
It's still a quiet spot in the calendar, but for an obviously different reason. The spring shutdowns that ultimately brought about an Olympic postponement have largely been lifted, but competitive events have been slow to return in amateur sports. They face challenges that pro leagues didn't have to deal with as they returned to action.
There is much more international travel, with athletes normally arriving from around the globe. And it's not uncommon for events to be held in different countries week after week, which would make observing any sort of quarantine difficult while managing a normal travel schedule.
Meanwhile, outside of the Olympics themselves, amateur sport gets little in the way of big-money television interest, which was the driver for the return of professional competitions. The void that began with the rash of competitive postponements and cancellations in the spring has yet to be seriously filled. But in Canada, at least, there has started to be some movement. Own the Podium, the organization that allocates funding for Canada's Olympic and Paralympic teams, chaired a panel that brought together sports and medical experts to develop guidelines for a return-to-sport strategy. The resulting framework can be applied down at the grassroots level, and up to and including elite competitions.
Many of the questions that were asked about the Olympic schedule at the start of the pandemic still don't have answers, and meanwhile, months have ticked by. If athletes are going to train and compete in the coming months, they can't wait endlessly for the calendar to take shape. Anne Merklinger, the chief executive of Own the Podium, says this was part of the reason for going ahead and developing a return-tosport framework: it could at the very least be a starting point.
“There are a number of elements that we don't have the answers to,” she says during a phone interview, talking about a high-performance schedule in which the Tokyo Olympics are just 10 months away. “We can't control that. So, let's focus on what we can control and do the best possible job for our athletes. And so, it's not a question of it being perfect, it's a question of what's the best we can do with what's available to us.”
What this could mean in the short term is that athletes who would normally train abroad in the run up to an Olympics might stay home instead, forgoing the travel and the quarantines that would require.
“If this results in a subtle shift of Canada's national sport organizations looking at a `Canada First' training environment as opposed to training abroad,” Merklinger says, “that may be a real positive long-term outcome out of this.”
It's worth noting here that almost nothing about the sporting environment can be predicted week to week, given the way the summer lull in new COVID-19 cases in many parts of the world has given way to autumn increases, including here in Canada.
If governments prove to be no better prepared to deal with the rises this time than they were in the spring, amateur sports could be shut down again before they even come back.
But for now, Merklinger thinks that Olympic organizers remain hopeful that they'll be able to follow the lead of pro sports and hold qualifying events and, ultimately, some sort of Tokyo 2020, even if it comes in 2021.
“I don't think the (International Olympic Committee) or the (International Paralympic Committee) and all their respective international federations are going to give up,” she says.
“They're going to find … they're going to do everything possible to try and provide countries with an opportunity to qualify for the Games.”
The success of leagues like the NHL and NBA in keeping COVID-19 out of their competitive bubbles is a “terrific pilot,” she says.
“I can say first-hand that the NHL and the NBA have been very forthcoming in sharing their resources with national sport organizations who may be wanting to consider a similar kind of bubble approach for a particular competition” Merklinger says.
Where those leagues, which threw major money at the problem and instituted mass testing of their players and staff within a bubble, were able to avoid setbacks, Major League Baseball provided the counter example by eschewing the bubble and struggling through a series of COVID-related postponements. The MLB situation showed just how quickly a positive case could spread through a team setting.
Own the Podium's initial work was focused on ensuring that coaches and athletes were safely able to return to training, even if a lot of that is still being done virtually. Merklinger says Team Canada's athletes are largely back at work; the next step will be seeing if they will be able to compete.
“And so that's been our focus over the last 16 weeks, to resolve these return-to-competition guidelines that I think have been really valuable at all levels of the sport system in our country,” she says.
Down the road further remains the prospect of not just one Olympics, but two of them bunched together — Beijing 2022 would take place just six months after the closing ceremonies in Tokyo. That means, for Canada's athletes, there is much to do.
“For us, it's full steam ahead,” Merklinger says