Further to all our handwringing over "Own the Podium", as it turns out, Canadian athletes competing at Vancouver 2010 did just about that:
How to describe Canada's shocking success at the 2010 Winter Olympics? Here's one way: Canada won more gold medals in Vancouver than the United States and Russia … combined.
Going into these games, Canada had never won a gold medal on home soil. But by the time Sidney Crosby's wrist shot beat Ryan Miller in the overtime of yesterday's glorious men's hockey final, we'd won 14 — more than any other nation in the history of the Winter Olympics. This newspaper would like to add its voice to those congratulating our Olympic athletes for their stunning accomplishment.
The all-too-Canadian irony of it all is that many pundits have spent the last two weeks wringing our hands over Canada's supposedly disappointing performance.
The slogan "own the podium" — along with the declared goal of beating the world in total medal count — was mocked as arrogant and unrealistic. (By this tally, we came in third, behind the far more populous nations of United States and Germany.) Yet as far as most of the world is concerned, “owning the podium” is exactly what we did. A focus on total medal count is a unique quirk of North American sports culture: In the rest of the world, the currency of a national squad’s Olympic success comes in only one colour.
No doubt, Canadians are feeling especially jubilous this Sunday, especially given how the men's hockey turned out.
Was this all money well spent? Are we better off today for having witnessed Canadian athletes soar to new heights at these games?
Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner asks some difficult questions:
But why are we proud? That question brings me to the hard way to criticize the Olympics.
A legion of analysts has crunched the numbers to figure out what factors determine a country's medal haul at the Olympics. The evidence suggests four factors matter most.
Not surprisingly, the size of the country's population makes a big difference. So does the country's gross domestic product. There's also a small bump from hosting the Games. And lastly, "the best predictor of success in winning medals is the absolute amount of funding allocated to higher performance sports," writes Peter Donnelly, director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies at the University of Toronto.
Spend more money and, other things being equal, you will get more medals. It's that simple. Analysts and officials know this. They even make dollars-per-medal calculations.
(...)Stand back and look at Olympic funding around the world and it's obvious that nations are locked in an arms race. Each seeks to beat the other by boosting funding but they find it is harder and harder to pull ahead by spending more. Worse, "it costs more and more money even to stay in the same place in the medal tables," notes Peter Donnelly.
Now, does any of this sound like a fair athletic contest? Not really. It's a funding competition. The "winners" are those countries most willing to take money from health care and jobs and other national priorities and spend it on the Olympics.
Canada could win this competition, if that's what Canadians want. We're a rich country. We could outspend the Chinese. For a while.
But would that be something to be proud of? No. It would be foolish. And shameful.
A national conversation worth having - once our collective hangover wears off.
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