Investment in team sports paying off for Canada at Olympics
Canada is sending five teams to the Rio Olympics, equalling the most since eight competed at the boycotted Los Angeles Games in 1984.
The women’s soccer, basketball and rugby sevens teams, as well as the men’s volleyball and field hockey squads all qualified for Rio.
Women’s soccer and basketball were the only two Canadian entries in team sports in London in 2012.
Five teams also competed in Beijing in 2008 and in Sydney, Australia, in 2000. The record is nine in Montreal in 1976 when the host country was guaranteed entry in every sport.
With team sport not historically a strength for Canada at Summer Games, the federal government declared in 2010 that $6 million in taxpayer money must be set aside annually for Olympic and Paralympic summer teams.
Own the Podium decides how that money gets distributed.
While OTP’s chief executive officer believes that move six years ago di- rectly contributed to the high number of teams heading to Rio, Anne Merklinger says funding decisions were not made with Rio in mind.
“It was more of a longer-term approach,” Merklinger said. “We didn’t have the strength throughout the system at that time to have a shorter horizon.
“We knew it was going to take longer to build and strengthen our summer team sports to get to the point of having medal potential.” Which teams got money and how much in the four years since 2012 was based on medal prospects for 2020 and 2024 and not 2016, Merklinger said.
That strategy created an odd financial optic for one Rio-bound squad.
The men’s field hockey team got $900,000 in 2012-13 and then zero dollars for the next three years.
The men qualified for Rio while the women, who received a total of $2.5 million over the same time frame, did not.
“This is about an eight-to-12-year lens,” Merklinger said. “We’re talking about 2020 and 2024.
“Post-London, our assessment of the women’s program relative to the men’s program was that longer-term . . . there was a higher medal potential at that point in time for the women as opposed to the men.”
The men’s field hockey players dug deeper into their own pockets the last few years to pay for their trips. Team sports are expensive because it means funding a dozen or more athletes who can win only one medal, instead of an individual athlete who, in some cases, can bring home more than one.
Prior to the women’s soccer bronze in 2012, Canada hadn’t put a soccer, baseball, basketball, softball, water polo or volleyball team on the Olympic podium since a basketball silver in 1936.
But the sentiment is a team medal, or even a team’s participation in the Olympics, evokes emotions at home that individual sports don’t.
The Canadian Team Sports Coalition said in 2009 when it was lobbying for more funding that “approximately 24 million adult Canadians were involved in team sport, while approximately 10 million, or less than half, were involved in individual sport.”
While the team-funding strategy since 2012 wasn’t about Rio, it still helped get a lot of Canadian teams there, according to Merklinger.
“It’s an extremely critical factor in their success since that new funding was identified,” she said. “Now we’re starting to see the benefit of that investment.”