It is interesting to note that Own The Podium has actually succeeded: Canada is currently #1 in gold medals (#3 in total medals). Now let's debate the merits of ranking by golds versus ranking by total medals...
No, Own the Podium has failed. That's why Chris Rudge said ""You don't want to do the autopsy while the patient is still alive," Rudge said. "We will eviscerate this program to the nth degree when we are finished. We have a responsibility to the athletes to do that, to say this is what we did right, this is where we might have let you down. We have a responsibility to the Canadians that funded this program."
No apologies are owed because our athletes are doing an amazing job, but the goals and funding schemes of our Olympic program will be revisited.
To be honest, I only focused on your criticisms. Looking back I agree though with your assessment of what should happen regarding funding and how its spent.
And going back a bit, the reason I referred to Klassen was simply because I bet when they did the Own the Podium medal assessment 4 or 5 years ago, they thought Klassen would still be an impact player. The fact is iit took one extraordinary multi-generational athlete to single handedly take us from 19 medals to 24, and 3rd place to 5th. If not for her injuries and what happened to her sister, would she have won another 5 in this Olympics? That would have a pretty significant impact on our perception of these games, wouldn't it? Considering we will probably match Turin's medal total without those 5 medals, (which essentially means more athletes won medals this time than last time) you have to see Vancouver as an improvement over Turin. To ignore Klassen's impact but to say "ya but McIvor won gold and she wasn't there last time" is somewhat perplexing.
She single-handedly won 4, and two were bronze. Eric Guay alone missed two medals by fractions of a second. If even a few athletes had gotten 3rd instead of 4th, our medal total could be much higher...and that was the explicit purpose of Own the Podium, to literally buy our way from 4ths to 3rds. It didn't work. If the funding boost is going to receive credit for bronzes, it must receive 'blame' for not turning 4th place finishers into impact players...that's the outcome when the sole purpose of the program is podium performance by designated elite athletes. Meanwhile, we won a gold and got two 4th places in events that weren't even held four years ago, which would bump our podum/top 5 success up by about 5% right there over Torino.
The point isn't whether our overall performance is better than Torino, it's whether or not Own the Podium worked. It clearly didn't, and that's a fact. With more events being held, with this being a home games with home crowds and comfortable surroundings, with Canadians being given extra spots, of course we're gonna do better. It's impossible to weigh the effect of the funding boost against the influence of competing at home...officials will have to see what happens in 2012 as well as compare Canadian funding against that of other countries.
Agreed. But for general fitness promotion, the summer games are more feasible. Winter sports are more facility-dependent and Canadians are spread out pretty thinly compared to other nations, so access would be an issue. But stuff like track, cycling, martial arts...those can be done anywhere with relatively minimal investment.
Cross-country skiing requires ski and snow and little else...no more than cycling, really. There's almost as many arenas as tracks in Canada, but skating--->hockey for most people. The question is should we nudge more people into the skating--->speed skating path, or how much should we spend to get recreational snowboarders into streams that lead to medals, and so on. Should Canada expend resources trying to foster a cross-country skiing culture? As far as balancing Olympic and fitness goals, the ideal might be to push for involvement in sports that are relatively easy and cheap to support and have medals at stake...the lowest hanging fruit might be cross-country skiing since it - and biathlon, which requires good skiiers - has many medals up for grabs and is something Canadians could respond well to. It's much harder to make a national fitness program argument for ski jumping, or archery, or luge, or sailing, etc., even though pumping money into those more niche sports could yield many medals.