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Pique n' Your Interest

Surviving the Games

After a rough first week it appears that our Canadian athletes will be coming home from Athens with a few medals after all – probably fewer than the 2000 Olympics, but more than Eritrea, Cameroon and Kazakhstan combined. Stick that in your opium pipes and smoke it, Azerbaijan!

As usual the debate is raging in Canada about our low medal tally and the state of sport and athlete funding. Money equals medals in the modern Olympiad, and we’re spending the bare minimum to get by.

So what are we prepared to do about it – Do we want to win, or should it be enough to merely participate? And if our goal is to be competitive, how much money are we talking about? And should Canadian taxpayers foot the bill?

G.D. Maxwell, Pique’s columnist extraordinary, waded into the debate at a staff retreat last Saturday night sitting firmly on the "no" side.

He explained why his tax dollars wold be better spent on things like education, health care and potholes than helping a handful of Canadian athletes follow their Olympic dreams – why should athletes who are naturally gifted expect support when everyone else is left to fend on their own?

Whether an athlete wins gold or gets eliminated in the first round doesn’t affect his life in any way, he said, so why should he have to pay for it?

And if Canada’s national pride hinges on the gameday performances of a few exceptional athletes, then we’re in deep trouble to begin with.

I’m paraphrasing of course – I’d been knocking back beers all day – but that was the gist of his argument.

He was right of course. On paper it makes little sense for the average Canadian to care about the Olympics, much less demand that a portion of their tax dollars go towards Olympic athletes. Win or lose, our lives really don’t change all that much. At the end of the day, does a momentary boost to our national pride justify the costs?

Right now we spend about $90 million a year on our national sports programs. Sport gurus like Dick Pound would like to see that funding increased to $150 million, which is more on par with the successful Australian program. While that additional funding may seem like a drop in the bucket for Canada – we compensated B.C chicken farmers $60 million following the outbreak of Avian Flu this spring – in this age of social service cutbacks and Medicare worries it’s still a lot of money. Someone will always argue, and rightly, that every penny spent on sports is a penny taken away from child care, from seniors, from doctors and nurses, from schools and from paying down our debts.

There are powerful emotional arguments for wanting to do well at the Games, but those aren’t exactly rational either – medals don’t matter unless we choose to make them matter, if you subscribe to Maxwell’s Zen approach to Olympic appreciation. If we get all worked up over a loss, then it’s our fault for caring so much in the first place – just don’t expect him to feel the same way. He’s got better things to do than agonize over a rowing team drifting into the wrong lane, or stress out about Perdita’s Felicien’s prospects in the women’s 100 metre hurdles, or be concerned with our low medal tally.

I had two days to think of a good rebuttal to his arguments, and I still don’t have one. These were the best I could come up with:

• Health care is a money pit anyway – you could divert every cent out of every other federal and provincial program and put it into health care, and we’d still come up short. At the same time we’re facing an obesity epidemic in this country that will only drive up our costs even more, so it makes sense to push sports any way we can. To do that we need to have athletes that inspire kids to put down their potato chips and remote control and go outside.

• Our tax dollars go to worse places than sports. In 2003 we spent $41 million to fly our ceremonial Governor General around the world. Billions of dollars were squandered on the faulty federal sponsorship and gun registry programs under the Liberal government. We spend more than $43,000 a year to feed and house a prisoner in a Canadian jail, compared to just $1,100 a month for our top athletes. By way of comparison, athletes seem like a far more deserving investment.

• Canadians need to feel proud about something. Eaton’s is gone, the Hudson Bay Company is being bought out, our oldest brewery merged with a right-wing American company, Jim Carrey’s career is in decline, our vaunted health-care system is in trouble, the last two Hip CDs were sub-par, and the Stanley Cup hasn’t gone to a Canadian team in 11 years. A few more Olympic gold medals would go a long way to getting our hearts pounding with pride once again, whether it’s rational or not.

• We’re hosting the Olympics, for better or for worse in 2010. There’s no way out of it at this point, so we might as well make the best of it by supporting our athletes and giving them a fighting chance to win at home.

• They’re going to raise sports funding eventually, so we might as well get on the ball now and shoot for some medals in 2008. The last time we tanked as badly at an Olympics was back when we hosted the Games in Montreal in 1976 (and we should be done paying that debt off next year). The point is that the very next year, after being embarrassed at home, the public and politicians were overwhelmingly in favour of boosting sports funding. After boycotting the Games in 1980, we won 10 gold medals in 1984. We were 17 th in the medal race in 1988, 15 th in 1992, 11 th in 1996 and 18 th in 2000. We’re obviously on a downward slide right about now, so it’s only a matter of time before the public outrage makes sport funding a campaign issue.

The biggest reason to support our athletes is the irrational feeling that it actually means something to be Canadian, that we’re all a part of something that’s bigger than ourselves. The athletes embody that feeling with their determination and sacrifice, while the Olympics bring us together as a country. It’s nice to be a small country and produce world champions.

The Olympics may no longer be pure, but the idea still is. I may not have agreed with the war on Iraq, but it was incredible to watch the Iraqi’s and Afghanis march on the field with the other athletes during the opening ceremony. They weren’t just there to participate, but to win – the gutsy performance of the Iraqi soccer team will attest to that.

I know I’ll never get a shot at Olympic glory, but if I can give someone else a chance with a small percentage of my tax dollars, I say let’s go for it.

It’s not the smartest way to spend my time or money, I’ll admit, but then neither is spending an entire Saturday afternoon drinking beer at Maxwell’s summer home.