'Own the podium' or stay at home
The Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Page: A13
Section: News
Page Name: Arguments
Byline: Alex Hutchinson
Column: Alex Hutchinson
Source: Citizen Special

The beauty of the World Cross Country Championships lies in
its simplicity: Everyone runs the same race. From marathoners to milers and everything in between, the top distance runners in the world put aside their specialties every March and face off against each other in the toughest race in the world.

This year, though, will be a little different: it will be everyone
except the Canadians. Last week, Athletics Canada revealed that it will only be sending teams in the junior (under 20) category, marking the first time in more than three decades that Canadians won't toe the line in either the men's 12K race or women's 8K race.

The evolution of this decision was long, tortuous, and occasionally comical. There was an initial announcement that no teams would be sent, threats of an athlete boycott, a reversal of the decision accompanied by dire warnings about the endemic malaria and crippling jet lag involved in travelling to Kenya, where the championships are being held -- and so on back and forth.

It's a perfect reflection of the new direction in Canadian sports
policy, which amounts to this: Fund the winners and screw the rest.

That's the ethos encapsulated in the Own the Podium 2010 program directed toward the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and it was codified (not in those exact words) as government policy for all amateur sports by then-federal sport minister Michael Chong in November. Funding for national sports organizations is now heavily dependent on the number and proportion of medals and top-12 finishes achieved -- a situation that creates a disincentive to send athletes to international competitions unless they're potential winners.

"This is a real businesslike approach," a Canadian Olympic
Committee (COC) official explained when the policy was being
developed in 2003. "In business, if a certain unit is not
performing, you cut it off."

This may seem like a perfectly sensible approach to take. We are,
after all, considering the upper strata of international sports, not
field day at the elementary school where everyone gets a ribbon.

But the execution has been fundamentally flawed. In the run-up to the Athens Olympics in 2004, the COC instituted a "top-12" policy: Instead of simply meeting the international qualifying standards in their sports, athletes would have to demonstrate that they were among the top 12 in the world to be selected to the Olympic team. As a result, a number of athletes who would have qualified to represent other countries -- the United States, for instance -- were left at home. None of those athletes was a gold-medal favourite -- but neither was Simon Whitfield, triathlon gold medallist at the Sydney Olympics, who would have been left off the team had the policy been in place in 2000.

The decision to skip the World Cross Country Championships this year was by no means simple. In addition to the difficulties of travelling to Kenya, the championship schedule was altered this year to eliminate the short-course event, where Canada has traditionally been strong, winning a team bronze medal in 2004. Canada's best runners are also falling further behind the dominance of east African runners, a factor that has led several European countries to scale back their teams at the championships.

But whatever the specific reasons, the decision not to send a team could only have been made in the environment created by a funding policy that values international competition entirely as a function of medals winnable.

It's not the money -- cross-country teams have been partially or
fully self-funded for a decade now, and the juniors competing in
Kenya will pay $3,500 from their own pockets for the privilege.

The same is true of the move to smaller teams at the Olympics:
While funding for developing athletes is legendarily scarce, there
is no shortage of sponsorship money to send athletes to the Olympics once they've qualified.

Even if you accept the questionable premise that setting tougher
standards will force athletes to raise their games (and eliminate
all those silly athletes who used to lie awake at night plotting how to finish 13th), the policy ignores some key differences between sports. Being among the top 12 in women's skeleton, an event that had entries from exactly 12 countries in the last Olympics, is a little different from being a top 100-metre sprinter -- something that virtually everyone in the world has taken a crack at. Skeleton, not surprisingly, produced three medals for Canada in Turin: As a "business unit," it's performing.

Cross-country running -- and, on the Olympic stage, track and field -- is having a harder time performing. "There's no real room for across-the-board development. That's long gone," national team head coach Les Gramantik said after last summer's national championships in Ottawa. "We have to produce medals. If not, we pay the consequences."

But many of the sport's struggles simply reflect how universally
accessible it is -- surely a positive, since government sport
funding is often justified as a way of creating role models to
encourage children to be active. There are also those who argue that international sport should pit the best from each nation against each other -- that "the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well," in the words of Pierre de Coubertin's Olympic Creed.

If we reject those arguments, and decide that the colour of the
medal should be the sole criterion by which we judge our athletic
pursuits, then we still owe it to ourselves to ask one question
before we sign the cheque: How many trampoline or synchronized diving medals would you trade for a repeat of Donovan Bailey's 100-metre triumph at the 1996 Olympics?

Alex Hutchinson is a Toronto journalist. He represented Canada at the 2001 and 2002 World Cross Country Championships.