Rush for gold shortchanging long-term goal
Study urges Own the Podium to share the wealth beyond pursuit of top-three finishes
Since being awarded the 2010 Vancouver Games, Canadians have been spending an increasing amount of money on the very best athletes in pursuit of Olympic and Paralympic medals. Now, a review of the federal government’s high performance sport program says that needs to change.
Own the Podium, which targets $64 million of federal funds to athletes and sports with the most potential, has succeeded in the sense that Canadian athletes are winning more medals, the report released Thursday states.
But it also found that the targeted funding program has destabilized the sports system with wildly fluctuating budgets where high performance funding is there one day for a sport and gone the next, along with its experienced coaches, staff and even athletes. And the short-term focus on winning medals at the next Olympics precludes the development of the next generation of athletes, putting Canada’s ability to keep winning medals in doubt.
National sport organizations, coaches and athletes have been anxiously awaiting the results of this review knowing its findings could support maintaining status quo, which provides a lot of money to the most successful athletes and sports and very little to those trying to climb up the international rankings, or possibly a return to spreading funding more broadly as Canada did before the OTP era.
“While there is support for the notion of targeted excellence funding to achieve high performance, the current targeted excellence approach, as administered by OTP, needs a major re-think and revision,” the report states.
“The feeling is that the balance between targeted excellence and sport development funding is not right at present, with proportionately too much spent on targeted excellence.”
The federal government hired management consultants Goss Gilroy last year to review their funding approach to see if it was working and whether there were any “unintended impacts.” The review found plenty of those. Strife within teams where some athletes have training costs funded and not others.
An entire sport “bombed back to the stone age” after losing its funding.
Teams struggling to keep coaches when they can only guarantee a year’s salary.
Sport administrators spending weeks filling in forms to get funding rather than running their high performance programs.
“These are things that have been said in the sports community for a number of years and it’s now been validated, and we need to fix it,” said Carla Qualtrough, Canada’s Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities.
But where the report states that the majority of those in the high performance sports world want a “major re-think” of how OTP operates, it seems like the government is thinking more along the lines of fine-tuning it.
“It’s been a success … What we need to focus on more broadly is the sustainability of that success and so, if anything, the focus will broaden to further down in the system as we work around programs for next generation athletes,” Qualtrough said.
“One of my favourite legacies of 2010 is that we became a nation who unapologetically was proud saying we wanted to win. We like winning, winning feels good and it has the result of inspiring the next generation of young Canadians to dream big and reach for their own podiums whatever that is.”
Own the Podium was created in 2005 to avoid a repeat of being the only country to host an Olympics without winning a single gold medal, which happened twice — in 1976 Montreal and 1988 Calgary.
It morphed into permanent federal government policy with an ever- increasing role — it not only recommends funding, it advises sport organizations on which high performance initiatives to pursue.
National sport organizations and elite athletes have always welcomed OTP funding which has made it possible to hire more coaches, travel to international competitions, hold training camps and access sports medicine and science, to a degree they never could before. And all of that is definitely a requirement to get to the top of the podium in this competitive sports era. That more money equals more medals has never been in doubt. The questions have always been about the costs: to taxpayers and the culture of the Canadian sports system. Many in the sports community have argued that the targeted approach has gone too far — creating have and have-not sports and firstand second-class athletes within sports — and balked at the idea that the value of Olympic and Paralympic sport comes down to medals alone.
From 2012 London to the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, federal funding targeted to winning medals went up 11 per cent and medals increased by 22 per cent, from 18 to 22, the report states.
That sounds like good value, but that entire increased haul of four medals can be attributed to a single person, Penny Oleksiak, a 16-yearold swimmer who developed so quickly that OTP can’t really take much credit.
From Vancouver 2010 to Sochi 2014 targeted funding increased 21 per cent and medals dropped by four per cent, from 26 to 25.
That decline of one medal could just as easily have gone the other way with more consistent judging in slopestyle snowboarding or one less fall in short-track speed skating.
In essence, Canada is caught up in a global arms race where it takes more and more money to win even a similar share of Olympic medals.
On the Paralympic front, the overall funding is much smaller but the trends are even worse: Canada is increasing funding while medal counts are dropping as more countries see the value of investing in para sport.
But the pursuit of medals remains an important goal for Canada, Qualtrough said.
“You’re not going to hear me say that medals aren’t worth the price, because of all the intangible things that medals give to Canadians and our kids and in terms of pride and inspiration,” she said.
Anne Merklinger, chief executive of Own the Podium, holds a similar view.
“We won’t identify a ceiling. We’re always going to strive to help Canada win more medals,” she said.