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The passing of the guard: Alpine Canada and the changing face of skiing

"Accountability to an independent group which measures your progress and evaluates your plan prior to advancing funding is a very important component of the Own the Podium process." - ACA president, Gary Allen I've always loved ski racing.
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"Accountability to an independent group which measures your progress and evaluates your plan prior to advancing funding is a very important component of the Own the Podium process."

- ACA president, Gary Allen

I've always loved ski racing. The speed, the danger, the excitement: those qualities have always played large in my imagination. Indeed, back when I was a kid, the arrival of the planet's best skiers at Quebec's Mont Ste. Anne for World Cup Week was cause for great celebration.

And why wouldn't it be? Among the ski racing grommets I hung out with back then, the pleasure of hosting such a prestigious event was nearly unbearable. It was almost like Christmas all over again; there was something magical, exotic - quasi-religious - about the week. And we took full advantage of the racers' stay.

During the whole week they were in town, our little pack of club racers would follow the likes of Gustavo Thoeni and Piero Gros and Patrick Russell and slavishly copy their every move. If Gustavo's little pinky shot out from his pole at some strange angle, you can be sure that all of us displayed that exact same angle for the rest of the season. If Russell's avalement technique got a little radical on the steeps, so be it. We all sat back and got radical too. And willy-nilly, more by osmosis than anything else, we slowly became better skiers.

To say that ski racing would dominate my life for the next 20 years is but a slight exaggeration. Racing, coaching, travelling the globe - my obsession with competitive skiing served me well. I got to work in a variety of countries, managed to ski in every major alpine nation, and made lifelong friends around the world. I even got to watch one of my former young charges win a World Cup downhill in his own backyard.

Remember Rob Boyd's victory 21 years ago? People can talk about this year's Olympic "celebrations" all they want, but in my books Boyd's party that evening was easily the most fun victory celebration ever organized at Whistler.

Why? Because every one in town got into the swing of things. It was a Whistler party run by Whistlerites. And we didn't need 5,000 cops to make sure we all partied safely.

But I'm getting sidetracked. Where was I? Oh yeah. Downhill racing. Back when Boyd won at Creekside, ski racing was still pretty much the only sports game in town. Sure the freestylers were already playing in the bumps and this thing called snowboarding was beginning to turn heads. But they still didn't measure up. Wicking gates was still considered by Whistler locals to be wickedly cool.

Flash forward another two decades. In a post-modern alpine world fragmented into dozens of sub-tribes - from nouveau freestyler to skicrosser to big-mountain freerider to all the various one-plank disciplines - ski racing is no longer the only game in town. In fact, among North American teenagers, it's not even considered among the top five...

And it's beginning to show. Ask a Vancouver grom what she'd like to be when she grows up and chances are pretty good she isn't going to say, "a World Cup ski racer."

As for its exalted status within the Olympic family, look out! According to most broadcasters, the Games' ski racing segments fared poorly with spectators last month compared to the "kooky sports" (as the Brits call them) like boardercross and skier cross. Even Canada's own Darren Dutchyshen at TSN had trouble getting excited over the men's giant slalom. "I just watched the women's skicross finals," he ooh'ed on-air. "And there's no comparison. Conventional ski racing is bo-o-o-ring..."

Interesting...

But it gets even worse for the Canadians speedsters. Remember the last time a Canadian ski racer won an Olympic medal?

You're forgiven for forgetting. That was back in 1994 when Edi Podivinsky won bronze in Lillehammer. Since then - nada. Indeed, in what can only be described as slim pickings, the Canadian Alpine Team has managed to collect a grand total of five Olympic medals since Nancy Greene's heyday in 1968. Got it? That's five medals in 42 years. Two bronze for the men (including Steve Pod's in 1980) and three for the women (gold for Kreiner in '76; bronze for Percy in '88 and gold for Lee-Gartner in '92).

Contrast that to Alpine Canada's poorer cousins, freestyle and snowboard. Together, these two federations accounted for SIX MEDALS at Cypress last month - two gold and one silver for the freestylers and the same (two gold and one silver) for the boarders.

Now these statistics would all be moot if this was the same ol' Canada we were talking about. But things have changed. Canadians, as it turns out, are more infatuated with Olympic success than anybody could have predicted. And politicians have been quick to twig to this new national obsession. That's why Prime Minister Harpoon and his crew of merry pirates made so much of the additional OTP funding in this year's budget.

But there's a catch. If you want more government money, say the pols, you're going to have to prove to us you can win medals. Consequently - one could assume at least - the freestylers and snowboarders are assured of getting a bigger piece of the Own The Podium pie than ski racers.

But will they? Alpine Canada still holds big sway with federal money men. No matter how well the snowboarders do on the international stage, no matter how popular our skicrossers are with TV viewers, the bulk of OTP funds - at least in the past - has always been reserved for the gate-bashers.

You can probably thank Ken Read for that. With the tireless zeal of the true believer, the former Crazy Canuck has pulled in every favour from every contact he's ever had (including his close friendship with outgoing OTP president Roger Jackson) to make sure that the Canadian ski racing family continues to be the beneficiary of government largesse. But it's not all Ken's doing. The ski racing lobbyists are highly effective. However they've managed it, vast public funds continue to flow into ACA's coffers.

And that's created a climate of serious mistrust among the various disciplines. "It really doesn't matter how well we do in competition," says a long-time coach with the Canadian Snowboard Federation. "Alpine Canada always seems to have the inside track when it comes to public funding. And yet their athletes are doing nothing with it! At least, if they were winning medals I could understand..."

Can it continue this way? Can ACA blithely expect to pull in the kind of government support it has been able to attract in the past with such sparse results? I don't think so. After an extremely poor showing at the Whistler Games - where they were even outshone by our woefully under-funded Nordic skiers - Alpine Canada has some serious soul-searching to do.

But they've been there before. After yet another medal-less Games in Salt Lake City, ACA brass fired the bulk of their coaching staff. "We're on a totally different path now," the program director announced in the spring of 2002. "This will not happen again." And yet it did four years later in Torino. Still, the promises kept coming. "We're getting closer," they said. "Just wait another four years. We won't be denied." Alas, even on its own turf the team could not improve on its winless record.

I know. I know. Old School racing proponents will counter with Eric Guay's historic super G crystal globe and Manny Osborne-Paradis's winning downhill ways on some of the toughest course on the globe. But that's just not good enough anymore in this new "get gold or go home" environment. For every Guay on the alpine podium, you see, there's a Maƫlle Ricker or a Jenn Heil or even a Justin Lamoureux atop theirs. For every Manny Osborne-Paradis there's a Matthew Morison and a Mike Robertson.

Let's face it. Alpine Canada failed to deliver the goods during the Olympics. And now the team has to face the consequences. For far too long now, ski racers have benefited from a near-mythical status in this country. Now it's time to put up or shut up. As far as federal funding goes, the formula should be simple: "Improve it or lose it." Anything less would be dishonest.

But it goes even further than that. Ski racing has been irrelevant in the bigger snowsport picture for years. Yet its crippling training costs and high-budget events have been draining dollars from initiatives that could actually inspire the global snowsport population to stay involved. Ski racing desperately needs to re-invent itself. It needs to get sexy again. Exciting rather than tiring. And Alpine Canada has to help. But do they have the orbs? Only time will tell...