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First Person: Marion Lay

Lessons learned from Athens

To be ready for 2010, LegaciesNow president says funding, athlete support programs have to start now

As an Olympic medallist and the president of 2010 LegaciesNow, Vancouver’s Marion Lay knows how important it is to give athletes a head start, while supporting the sports organizations that foster the development of world class athletes.

With Canada bringing home one of its lowest medal tallies in recent decades from the Athens Games, Lay hopes that politicians, corporate leaders, and others in positions of power are waking up to the same reality – Olympic hopefuls need help today to have a chance of winning tomorrow.

Pique:

The reaction to Canada’s performance at the Athens Olympics has been pretty strong in the media, people criticizing everything from funding to the selection criteria, and they want to do something. From a LegaciesNow standpoint, is there a short-term fix? Can we be ready by 2006 or 2008, and can we be ready for 2010?

Marion Lay:

I think we absolutely can be ready by 2010. I think we have strong winter sport development because of our legacies from Calgary. In our performance on the winter side we’ve been in the top five nations, and since 1988 we’ve always won gold medals, so I think that our development is there.

We have the Canadian Olympic Committee, who’ve done in partnership a review of winter sports, called Own The Podium, and all the national sports (organizations) have gone through that program to look at what they can do between now and 2010, and what they believe they can achieve. That report is in and we’re waiting for feedback both from the COC and from the federal government, so I think we have time.

That said, we have to do something soon, so I think in LegaciesNow, the "now" part is really apropos. I think having Athens, where our expectations were above what we could deliver – and I don’t think it has anything to do with athletes, I think they were totally committed and they did the best they could do – but we do not have the coaching support. Imagine having a gold medal potential athlete and we couldn’t even have their coach there to be with them.

We have to invest, strategically invest, in playground right through podium. Everybody is saying do we invest in participation or do we invest in excellence, when we need the whole thing. That’s why it’s called a system, it’s not called a one-off. We have a sports system, we have some investments, but we need to increase some of those.

And it’s not all for government either. It has to be from me and you to support our athletes, it has to be from corporations through sponsorships, and like all those countries that are winning 25 medals or more, we need to put a long-term investment plan together to ensure we have a systemic development plan in place… that takes you at young age that allows you to make choices, either to high-performance sport, or participation sport, or sport as a lifestyle.

Other western developed countries can do it, so there’s no reason why we can’t do it. We’ve studied it, we’ve talked about it, we’ve analyzed it, we’ve got bookshelves of papers on it – what we haven’t done is make a financial commitment and get started.

Pique

: So you think that Athens could actually be a positive thing in the long run by calling more attention to these sorts of things?

ML:

Fabulous. Just the discussion alone to come out of it was invaluable. Sports are on the radar, we’re on the political radar and the corporate radar, and having 2010 here, we can’t talk away from it. The federal government is talking about it. And having the IOC saying they want to come and talk to us about increased investment in sport was huge for us. I mean we have to do something about it, and we’re going to do something together.

Of course we’re going to have to talk about priorities, and where to put the investments, but I don’t think there can be a bad announcement at this point, personally. If they say we’re going to do something with school programs, like Minister (Stephen) Owen wants to do, great, we need money there.

If we’re going to do something with the next generation of athletes, great because we need money there too.

And if we’re going to do something with high-performance, then great. Wherever the government invests, we can supplement that through private sector investments and donations. I suggest that we do it through a lottery in this country that gives back to sport – we’ve got the Olympics, we need the money, governments are saying they don’t have the money, so let the people decide. They said the lottery for the Canucks wouldn’t sell, and it sold out, they had to print, print, print to keep up with it. Give people the option.

Pique

: Do you think it’s just a matter of putting more funding into sports programs, or do the programs themselves need to be altered to be successful?

ML:

If you look at what we do on the little bit of resources we have, I think we’ve got quite a good system. There are some gaps and some overlaps and I think we’ve identified a lot of those in our studies. And I think that we definitely – through the Games and the bid phase we have created a lot of new partnerships, we have sports working together at the national level, we have sports working better with the provinces than ever before.

I think there needs to always be a reassessment and realignment and tweaking of systems, but I think fundamentally with some new investment and with the leadership I see, especially with VANOC (Vancouver Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games) and John Furlong and some of the commitments they have made, I think we’re ready, and we’re ready to make some changes.

Pique

: Obviously some funding is needed for sports organizations, but it seems at the last Olympics that a lot of our medal contenders and favourites didn’t come through. There’s obviously a huge psychological element to sports that we haven’t been addressing – will it be easy to get funding for those kinds of things, even if we do increase funding for sports?

ML:

Right now, no. Wherever we put in investments we need to say "how do we get better coaches?" Because our coaches are under-resourced now, and if you look at what we did in sports like diving, there’s lots of Chinese coaches in diving so we brought some of them in to help our own coaches and help our athletes, but we really don’t pay competitively to attract those kinds of top coaches.

So we need to invest more in coaching here and more in sports science and sports medicine. I would say most of our athletes don’t have access to sport science or medicine – which includes sports psychology – to help them.

I think with many of our athletes, because we tried so hard, they just overtrained, they just weren’t sharp and a lot of that has to do with what you don’t do as much as what you do. With most of our athletes (they) don’t have real science support around them, so either we start to provide them that or just say go for it, in which case a lot of them will overtrain – at least that’s what we’re hearing from a lot of the athletes in Athens, those are the reports coming back to us.

Pique

: Is there a dollar figure you’re looking at? Canada’s funding was $90 million, and they raised it by another $30 million this year and it looks like that is going to be permanent, but is that enough?

ML:

SportMatters has tried to co-ordinate a lot of the presentations and advocacy at the national level, and what everyone has agreed to in principle around the SportMatters table – and they probably have 50 or 60 of the national organizations but individuals can participate as well – and right now we’re going for one per cent of the national health care budget, which is $180 million for high performance sport and $100 million for participation. Because participation will always be concentrated within the provinces and the municipalities.

If we could get $280 million into the system I think we would be listed in performance with the countries I think we would be proud to be listed with, the U.S., Japan, Spain, Italy, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands. We wouldn’t be listed with Poland and Kazakhstan.

We’re usually listed in the top eight to 10 countries in the world and I think with that kind of investment we could get back into the top 10 to 12 countries anyway. Being 22 nd or 19 th or whatever the end number is, is not acceptable. We have definitely let our athletes down in the country.

Pique

: Are the politicians and corporate leaders getting behind those numbers? After Athens this issue of funding has been given a lot of attention, but is there a public and a political will to get behind this kind of change?

ML:

I think it’s all about setting our priorities, and I think we only really look at sport every four years. It’s been in the media a lot more now that we’ve got the Games, but it’s never been a high priority. We’re starting to hear more and more discussion – if you look at all the federal campaigns, this is the first time sport was mentioned in history in all of the campaigns.

I know this province is committed, but they also have fiscal issues, so sometimes the money just isn’t there the way we’d like to see it.

But I think at the federal level, for sure there could be an increased commitment to funding.

And we can be creative too. If we can’t increase federal funding, then maybe we give corporate incentives so they invest. There are ways to do this – maybe we do a lottery again.

People are wondering, how do we create partnerships and a level of funding that is realistic.

People are talking about it. I haven’t seen the political will exactly, but I can see today that the prime minister has asked the new minister to start to look for funding rather than saying there is no more funding at the high performance level.

The intent is to put a system in place with the resources that allow us to be in that category of top nations where we pride ourselves in being.



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