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Dismantle the five-ring circus

There's an eerie calm that settles over the spot you're standing on just before a certain kind of summer storm wallops you.
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There's an eerie calm that settles over the spot you're standing on just before a certain kind of summer storm wallops you. Sunlight disappears, replaced by a yellow-brown, translucent glow; the air gets suddenly thick, breathing takes on a quality of gulping warm liquid oxygen, notwithstanding such a thing doesn't exist. In that eye of the maelstrom moment, the wind dies down, everything becomes still, a slight ozone smell begins to replace whatever came before it and you know one thing for certain - all hell's about to break loose.

Summer storm or Canada's Olympic mood, it's about to break loose again.

Call it citius interruptus , premature evacuation or simply Canada's national knack for winning aluminum and pewter in a race that stops awarding medals when it gets to bronze, but these Olympics, CAN-A-DA's Olympics, are spreading discontent from sea to sea to sea like a wave of cheap red mittens.

While likely a case of over-amped expectations, the root cause of much of the anguish can be laid at the door of the ineptly-named Own the Podium program. Smacking of uncharacteristic bravado, OTP attempted to leverage the kind of attitude former Crazy Canuck Ken Read brought to Alpine Canada when he took over that moribund program in 2002. Borrowing a page from Vince Lombardi's playbook, Read worked hard to shatter the placid Canadian belief that simply showing up and doing your best was good enough. "We're here to win," was the spirit he instilled throughout the ranks of the program. OTP picked up on that.

That spirit was reflected in the pre-Games press conference held by a handful of Canadian hopefuls. They swaggered in and told the collected media scum, er, scrum what everyone wanted to hear - their collective performance was going to make British Columbia's last gold rush look like a midnight raid on a downtown dental office. They came to win.

Unfortunately, so did everyone else. Week 1 of Canada's Games put the boots to any hopes of the Great White North owning the podium and gave rise to the taunting sobriquet, Loan the Podium... which, being polite Canadians, we did... to every other country, so it seemed, but particularly to the U.S. In the ultimate twist of identity-trashing irony, the U.S. team simply went about their business - dominating many of the competitions - quietly, almost humbly, while Canada's athletes, press and particularly Canada's "fans" came off as boastful, loutish and, in many cases, downright obnoxious.

The bizarro-world identity switch was complete when, flipping channels, I discovered NBC's coverage, particularly Bob Costas' commentary, more even-handed, less jingoistic and, truth be told, a great deal more entertaining than CTV's vacuous, nationalistic, tub-thumping. The only coverage that lived up to its admittedly low expectations was CBC's also-ran, sour grapes, everything's-swirling-the-bowl commentary. Peter Mansbridge is truly Canada's national icehole.

But at the end of the day, the national angst belongs to the country's Olympic "fans." Fans in name only, the Five-Ring Circus quadrennially jostles the unconscious masses from their slumbers and reminds them once again that sport embraces more than simply hockey. Like groundhogs looking for their shadows, people see things vaguely reminiscent of winter, more or less. Alpine and Nordic skiing, sliding extravaganzas, gender-biased ski jumping performed by men who look more like women than the women who'd likely out-jump them, thus raising grave gender identification issues with the old, grey men who make up the IOC, all dance across the flickering screen. The opiated masses are left pricked and bleeding all over their sofas, wondering how an upstart like Korea can pass our best short-track speed skaters like they were standing still, robbing "us" of another shiny trinket.

Canadians growing ever fatter through inactivity and the siren song of commercials shilling Big Macs and the beer out here feel cheated "their" team isn't owning the podium. Talking heads fuel the feeling by repeatedly posing the question, "What went wrong?" as though it was this week's twist on the ever-numbing quest to discover what makes Canadians Canadian instead of northern Americans.

An ever-louder chorus is beginning to call for a new Scrap the Podium initiative, so deep is their psychic wound. While I'd be happy to see all funding for elite athletics disappear in this country, I'd rather see it happen as a rational act of intelligent choice than a lynch mob reaction to a perceived slight. There are any number of good reasons for this nation to engage in a dialog on why we should give a damn about how Canadian athletes perform at the Olympics and exactly what lies at the root of our national disappointment when they do poorly. Is our ego really so primitive and fragile that being a reasonably well-run nation with a tolerant acceptance of other cultures, an adequate national healthcare program, a sound banking system and an envious social safety net isn't enough? Do we really need a boost from winning a race to make us feel good about ourselves?

What seems to elude the disappointed masses and the media commentators is the fickle nature of a one-shot, winner-take-all athletic competition between the very best athletes in the world. Jennifer Heil's heartbreaking, second-place finish was an athletic tour de force. Unfortunately, on that soggy night in Vancouver, it was eclipsed by the slimmest margin by an even more spectacular performance. C'est la vie. It doesn't change the fact she's dominated women's moguls for almost as long as she's competed. And it doesn't change the fact that fewer Canadians were aware of any of her accomplishments between her gold four years ago in Torino and her silver last week than remember how to derive the square root of 2010 without the aid of a calculator.

And that is the perniciousness of the Olympics. The IOC's über hype machine makes people who spend four years in blissful ignorance of all things sport genuinely - if only for two weeks - care about athletic performance. Okay, not exactly athletic performance but an overinflated sense of national pride as embodied by athletic performance. It's the hallmark of the Games. It's the legerdemain that keeps your attention focused on the left hand while the right hand picks your pocket and transfers the wealth not to the athletes, but to the rich and privileged who suck money with the same gusto leeches suck blood.

The single best reaction Canadians could have to these Games is not to dismantle OTP - whose budget for the past four years has been smaller than the likely cost overruns on the $900+ million security budget for this exercise in wretched excess - but to, symbolically, dismantle the Olympics and return sport to the realm of sportsmen and women. We don't need this international dick measuring contest any more than we need the financial black hole it is destined to leave behind.

Own that.