Canadian entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den panelist Brett Wilson wrote a column in the Globe and Mail Feb. 6 that got a lot of attention in the sports community.
The crux of his argument was that Canada’s relatively new high performance funding approach is doomed to fail.
Own The Podium, or OTP, has attracted a lot of attention since its beginning in 2005. It was started as a way to manage the increased funding in sports that went with the 2010 Vancouver Games.
While it has done a good job investing in research and holding sport organizations accountable for government money, the controversy lies in its targeted funding approach.
OTP is ruthless about its mandate to win medals. The program targets roughly $75 million at sports and individuals it thinks can win medals. The organization makes this choice largely retroactively and looks for sports or people who’ve consistently won medals in the past and gives them more money.
The criticisms of the program generally fall into two camps. One is that it’s brash and un-Canadian to declare we will own the podium. The other is that it’s a flawed model.
I agree with the first argument, but it’s personal. The second “it won’t work long-term” argument is probably right, if you look only at medals as a measure of “success.”
But it’s hard to do this since the Olympics aren’t static. There are 12 new events in Sochi, which virtually guarantees a higher total medal count for Canada.
But who cares about medals?
The Association for Canadian Studies found after the Vancouver Games in 2010 that most Canadians don’t believe sport is only about winning. In fact, we think medals come second to people doing their best.
This leads me to a third issue that, for some reason, people find difficult to articulate: since when were Olympic medals what sport in Canada was all about?
It’s absurd to think someone’s success or failure in a pursuit they’ve devoted most of their life to is reduced to whether or not they finished in the top three.
But that is where Own The Podium is taking sport. Fourth place is a disappointment, a bad return on investment. Athlete “x” has “failed” to reach the podium.
The message to Canadians in this model is that if you can’t be top three in the world at something, then don’t even try. In fact, we’ll try to devise a national, mostly tax-funded, sports system that won’t even let you try if you haven’t met targets.
Some people try to slip this bitter pill in a candy coating.
They reason that if you can tell a young person they shouldn’t try to be an Olympian because they don’t fit into a predetermined pathway or meet a physiological marker, then that kid will be able to move on with life and not waste their time being disappointed.
There is no one pathway to the podium. There will never be. Mine was a roller coaster.
In my sport, sprint canoeing, I was excellent as a junior but then hit a rough patch at 20. I was told to quit, that I would never make it. It took about four years before I settled enough in school and life to start racing at my level again.
Even after racing close to my best again for years after that, I was plagued by injuries and doubt. Ten months before the Beijing Olympics, I almost gave up, thinking I wouldn’t be able to qualify.
But in 2008 I had the race of my life and finished with an Olympic bronze. The lesson every Olympian learns is that sport is unpredictable. That’s why it’s exciting.
Wilson argues that sport is about more than medals, that it needs to be part of our culture.
He’s right.
The Olympics aren’t about medals. They’re an opportunity to celebrate a journey. Measuring the worth of decades of effort by medals is an insult to everyone who dreams.
