Illustration by Cristian Fowlie
In advance of asking government for a whack of dough to cover the new Own the Podium initiative, the Canadian Olympic Committee put some hard numbers to their plan.
This was in late 2004.
The COC predicted that Canada could win 25 medals at Turin 2006 (we’d never come anywhere close to doing that) and 35 medals at Vancouver 2010 (only Germany had ever done that).
They got the money. They didn’t hit either target.
But those predictions – ones which prompted Canadian Olympic legend Clara Hughes to say, “I really wonder how they’re coming up with these numbers” – reconfigured the way the country thought about the Olympics.
We were no longer participants in a global jamboree. We were millions of investors in an athletic corporation.
Until that point, Canada’s most symbolic Olympics had been the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary – the last Cold War showdown.
The Soviet Union and East Germany dominated the medals table, but nobody congratulated them for it. While their countries were in the midst of falling apart, both were making sure the cross-country ski team had everything they needed.
There was at that time a term for countries that rammed a non-insignificant portion of their GDP into athletic flexing – try-hards. It was looked down on because we in the West weren’t as good at it.
The two big stars out of the Calgary Olympics were famous losers – Eddie the Eagle and the Jamaican bobsled team. The winner everybody fell in love with was Italy’s Alberto Tomba, mostly because he had a bit of a spare tire in his skin-tight ski suit.
Fans cheer and wave flags as the Canadian delegation (lower right) parades during the opening ceremony of the 1988 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, on Feb. 13, 1988.JONATHAN UTZ/AFP/Getty Images
The Calgary zeitgeist did not equate winning with success. Winning was something the Commies bought. Success had to do with expressions of national character.
Canadians weren’t winners – for the second time, we failed to take a gold medal in a Games we hosted. But we threw a good party and were kind to strangers – both excellent qualities. It was a good system and it worked for us.
Then the Wall fell, and we no longer felt rich because we had unlimited access to Levi’s.
The decline of the Soviets and their satellites created a performance vacuum. What you needed now was money and a plan. It took Canada longer than most to figure this out, but we had both.
It’s amazing how much better you can get just by telling people out loud that you’re going to get better.
The Olympics are in constant expansion, but this country has remained consistent. It has been three decades since Canada was lower than fifth in overall medals at a Winter Games.
We’re good for twenty-some medals at a Summer Games – running with a crew that includes South Korea, the Netherlands and New Zealand. On a per-capita level, we’re among the best.
Only one country can slug with the biggest in the world despite its structural limitations and that’s Norway. Norwegians have a 93-per-cent participation rate in youth sports, all of which are underwritten by the government, as well as a deep distrust of the competitive model. Norwegians don’t keep score which, ironically, makes them a Winter Olympics powerhouse.
Canada could be Norway, but only if we got a national personality transplant first. That wasn’t the goal.
Within its mandate, Own the Podium lays out a one-sentence vision for the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic programs – “to be a world leader in high-performance sport.”
Twenty years after first proposing the idea, it’s worked.
It isn’t the totals. It’s the expectations. For a long time, the default Canadian entry into an Olympics, but especially a Summer Olympics, was ‘I hope we don’t embarrass ourselves.’
Now it’s ‘How much can we get?’
Canada's Penny Oleksiak reacts after she won the Women's 100m Freestyle Final during the swimming event at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on Aug. 11, 2016.GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP
Damian Warner celebrates his gold medal in the men’s decathlon at the Tokyo Summer Olympics, on Aug. 5, 2021.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
The latest prediction from Nielsen’s Gracenote Sports, which tracks major competitions, has Canada winning 20 medals in Paris. It doesn’t sound like much. In fact, it isn’t that much. But people don’t remember numbers. They remember people.
What is the contemporary history of Canada at the Summer Olympics?
It’s the look on a then-16-year-old Penny Oleksiak’s face after realizing she’d tied for gold in Rio.
It’s Andre de Grasse grinning at Usain Bolt during a 200-metre heat in the same Games.
It’s the rage and tears of the women’s soccer team after being jobbed out of a gold-medal chance in London in 2012.
It’s Damian Warner winning the Decathlon in an empty, echoing National Stadium in Tokyo in 2021.
The Olympics is people. The more people you can remember a month after they’re finished, the more successful your Olympics was. This isn’t about records. It’s about creating moments that reflect a nation’s self-conception. It sounds corny, but you’re a winner if you think you are.
Once you know you’re going to win a few, winning stops mattering so much. Then, you can move on to the higher plane: competing.
Own the Podium didn’t change Canada by turning a nation of losers into one of winners. We were already winners in every way that counts, and gold medals aren’t one of them.
Own the Podium’s ethos gave Canada permission to compete without having to worry that anyone was going to be embarrassed. It allowed us to take ourselves a little more seriously – an under-discussed Canadian fault, and one reason we produce so little culture of international value. We don’t value what we do. We don’t read our own books, or watch our own shows, or admire our own art.
It still feels weird whenever a Canadian goes around talking about being world leaders at anything that isn’t peacekeeping, but we are that at the Olympics now. It’s the one area of Canadian cultural output that we haven’t destroyed with our hypertrophic humility.
At the Olympics, Canada is a nation that consistently produces athletes who’ve got something to say and know how to put on a show. They even win a few.
So, what does a successful Olympics look like for Canada now?
Like whatever we’re about to see.