Canada s Alexandre Bilodeau celebrates after winning the final of the Men s Freestyle Skiing Moguls event at Cypress Mountain during the Vancouver Winter Olympics on February 14, 2010
Your correspondent writes from old Quebec City, snowed in beneath a low white sky, snug against winter’s ice on the drift down the Saint Lawrence River. The snow came hard overnight and morning brought a brief sun and the news from the far west that a 22 year old waif of a skier, Alex Bilodeau, had thumped his way down the moguls to win Canada’s first Olympic gold medal upon home ground.
In victory he didn’t holler, whoop, punch air, hold a finger to the sky or engage in any of the other victor’s passages of self that we have come to accept as easy ritual. He looked down and instead thanked his wheel chair bound older brother whose long and stoic acceptance of his cerebral palsy has provided the champion’s inspiration.
His grace was in stark contrast to the Canadian-born Australian, Dale Begg-Smith, whose chilly antics after coming second in the same event have seen scorned as a sore-losing sourpuss.
The triumph of the Bilodeau family enlarged this nation - which appeared to greet the one Gold medal it had been told it must, at the very least, win in Vancouver, not with a release of noisy nationalism but rather a coy relief and a clap. Within the soupy, steamed up cafes and the old timber bars in Quebec it seemed the victory offered more an opportunity for Canadians to quietly show two fingers to those among them who’ve wanted the urgers and boosters to this time step up, shoulder aside a nation’s temperament and plunder medals with a patriotic blood-lust.
The urgers came, as always, in corporate dress.
After Vancouver, in 2004, won the bid to stage this year’s Winter Olympics, they set out to convince Canadians that they should despair that they were the only nation to have hosted the Olympics – Montreal in 1976 and Calgary in 1988 - not to have won gold. Corporate and Government money began to pour into new athletes’ training facilities, coaches and technology. They found a name for the effort that swaggered; Own The Podium.
Glittering coaches from Europe were brought in on puffed up salaries. Athletes were showered with ramped up cost-of-living-allowances .Soon the Canadian Olympic Committee began to speak of the expected outcomes which it said would be no fewer than 35 medals - and 12 of them gold. Canada would be expected to come first overall in Vancouver. Even Dick Pound, Canada’s eminence on the International Olympic Committee, spoke of those Canadian athletes who would fail to ascend the podium as tourists.
Indeed, their Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, urged Canadians to rise up and shout down the world at Vancouver even if he refined the act as “an outburst of uncharacteristic patriotism.”
Canada’s Olympic hierarchy began to show a new flintiness.
The Own the Podium chiefs banned the United States speed skater Catherine Rainey from practising on their new Olympic oval in British Columbia. They managed to cast aside the fact that Canada’s skaters had happily trained alongside Rainey for years. We now know they also tightly restricted practice for foreign teams on the new luge run at Whistler. That might have contributed to the death there before the opening ceremony of Georgia’s 21 year old Nodar Kumaritashvili who appeared to misjudge the potency of the track, lose control and slam into a metal column.
In that country in which the heroic loser has no high place – the United States – such a determination to succeed would not be questioned. And, hardly, the less so in Australia, which the supporters of the Own The Podium movement are keen to point out, has long outspent Canada on the preparation of its Olympians with grand results.
So it is the more remarkable to see and feel in Canada, even as the Winter Olympics begin with the possibility that the boosters and urgers will triumph, a foreboding over what turn and what path the country has chosen by elevating the trample to win over the joy to compete, the big-mouthed bravado of the boosters over the quieter dignity of supporters.
Has something been lost?
The Montreal Gazette’s elegant columnist, John Freed, was among those who at the weekend pricked the outsized chests of the Own The Podium movement with Canadian self-deprecation.
Freed wrote: “As a nation, we’ve always been conditioned to accept defeat graciously and even revel in it. Like many, I root for Canada during most events, but the calm, confident inner knowledge that we won’t win gold – or if we do, we will fail the drug test.”
Various Canadian Olympians have also emerged to question the Own the Podium swagger.
Champion skier Sara Renner said at the weekend that while the extra money had brought her added training time, she and her colleagues never thought about owning the podium – just about skiing better.
Bruce Kidd, a runner, who won gold for Canada and later ran in the 5000 metres as an Olympian – he is now Dean of physical education at the University of Toronto – went further, saying: “I am embarrassed by ‘Own the Podium’ to this extent: we’re saying, ‘World, come to Canada so we can beat the shit out of you.”
It is true that here in Quebec, I am some 3500 kilometres from Vancouver and in a part of this enormous and diverse country that sees itself as removed from Canada’s mainstream.
But over here they still know that those who’ve set out to Own the Podium have also set themselves up for an enormous bite on the arse. And meanwhile the snow will still paint this world, the ice flows still mesmerize and a cripple in a wheelchair still inspire. Medals or not.
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