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I n February a Canadian athlete will probably, for thefirst time, win an Olympic gold medal on Canadian soil— an event that will be widely and justifiably celebrat-

ed. Failure to win gold medals in Montreal (1976) or Calgary(1988) marks Canada as the only country never to have wona gold medal when hosting an Olympics.

Canadians have won plenty of Olympic gold medals inother countries, and failure to win gold medals in Montrealor Calgary was not a concern for most Canadians. In gener-al, Canadians approved of an implicit social contract withOlympic athletes: “We don’t give you lots of money, but ifyou achieve Olympic qualifying standards we will send youto the Games.” Under that contract, Canada achievedremarkable results at the Olympics, at a cost per medal farlower than for many other nations.

In 2004, the Canadian Olympic Committee unilaterallychanged that contract. A number of young Canadian athleteswho had achieved Olympic qualifying standards and were look-ing forward to their dream of going to the Games in Athens weredenied their places on the team. The COC had increased thequalifying standards following a decision to send only athleteswho were believed to have a chance of winning a medal.

T he new qualifying standards emerged as governmentsand sport leaders began to fetishize “‘the medal,” espe-

cially “the gold medal.” Under a growing climate of busi-nesslike government in Canada and other countries, ofobjective-led management, performance measures, account-ability, monitoring and evaluation, investments in high-performance sport came to be seen as having only onemeasurable objective: medals.

Critical comparisons of Canada’s Olympic medal totalswith those of Australia, the US or some European countriesbegan to contribute to a sense that Canada does not do verywell at the Olympics. This was especially the case in 2000,during the Sydney Olympics. Australia, a country withmany similarities to Canada and a smaller population, didparticularly well at its home Olympics, and many in theCanadian sport community pointed to the high levels ofgovernment funding enjoyed by Australian athletes.

In some ways the comparison with Australia and thefocus on only the summer Olympics was unfair. UnlikeAustralia, Canada is a multi-sport nation, sending full teamsto both summer and winter Olympics. A more accurate com-parison of Canada’s Olympic success emerges using the com-

OWN THE PODIUM OR RENT IT?CANADA’S INVOLVEMENT INTHE GLOBAL SPORTING ARMSRACEPeter Donnelly

Canada has never won a gold medal at the Olympics it has hosted — in Montreal in1976 and in Calgary in 1988 — but that is expected to change in Vancouver inFebruary, partly because of a $110-million investment in the Own the Podiumprogram over the last five years. But Peter Donnelly, director of the Centre forSports Policy Studies at University of Toronto, suggests there is a downside to anarrow focus on winning, including the creation of two classes of athletes — theelites and the others, not to mention a very un-Canadian attitude about braggingrights. Among other things, the bar of expectations is being set very high.

Le Canada n’a remporté aucune médaille d’or lors des Jeux olympiques qu’il aaccueillis à Montréal en 1976, puis à Calgary en 1988. Une situation qui devraitchanger à Vancouver, en partie grâce aux 110 millions de dollars investis depuiscinq ans dans le programme À nous le podium 2010. Mais selon Peter Donnelly,directeur des politiques sportives à l’Université de Toronto, cette focalisation surla victoire pourrait notamment avoir pour effet négatif de créer deux catégoriesd’athlètes : ceux de l’élite et tous les autres. Sans parler d’une attitude crâneusefort peu canadienne. Chose certaine, on a haussé très haut les barres desattentes.

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bined medal totals, from both summerand winter Games, during each four-year Olympiad. Canadian athletes dowell at the Olympics, but Australianathletes have been doing better:

R ecent newspaper reports inCanada cite a prediction from an

“Olympic guru,” Luciano Barra, thatCanadian athletes will win the mostmedals in Vancouver (29). The art andscience of “medal projections” hasgrown out of some 40 years of academ-ic research attempting to understandwhy athletes from certain countrieswin so many medals and, conversely,why athletes from certain countrieswin so few medals.

Correlations with medal successhave been found with, for example,religion (athletes from Protestantcountries win more medals), politicalideology (accounting for the success ofathletes from the former socialistcountries), population size (with someobvious exceptions such as India) andGDP (with some obvious exceptionssuch as Cuba).

More recent researchindicates that the best pre-dictive models combine thelast two factors. Success isproportional to population— the higher the popula-tion of a country, the moremedals are won; and the richer a coun-try (as measured by GDP), the moremedals are won — richer countrieswith large populations (e.g., the US,China, Germany) win the mostmedals. Hosting an Olympics also hasan effect, accounting for approximate-ly 2 percent more of the medals thanwould be predicted by population andGDP. Australian success in Sydney(2000), US success in Salt Lake City

(2002) and Chinese success in Beijing(2008) may all be related to this home-team advantage.

But these factors do not explainwhy Australian athletes have consis-tently outpaced Canadian athletes inmedal performance since 1992. In addi-tion to population, GDP and the host-ing advantage, it is now apparent froma European comparative study that thebest predictor of success in winningmedals is the absolute amount of fund-ing allocated to high-performancesport. The nations that have investedthe most in high-performance sportachieve the best results.

G iven the evidence that moremoney leads to more Olympic

medals, what do they cost? The few fig-ures that are available vary widely inhow they were calculated and signifi-cantly underestimate the true costbecause they measure only nationalgovernment spending. Not included isfunding from provincial/state andmunicipal sources, corporate/sponsor-ship funding, free labour provided bysport volunteers, various forms offundraising or even the costs borne byathletes and their families.

Given these limitations, conclu-sions about the cost of medals areproblematic. However, it is importantto have some sense of the cost permedal in order to have any meaningful

high-performance sport policy.Australian studies have provided themost data on medal costs, and theirestimates vary widely. For example, inthe period before the Sydney Olympicsone study suggests that each goldmedal cost Australians A$37 million.(or about A$8 million for each medalin general). In two studies of the costof Australian medals at the SydneyOlympics, the first estimated that each

of the 58 medals Australia won inSydney cost C$4.82 million; the sec-ond divided the total reported cost ofhosting the Olympics by the numberof gold medals won, estimating thecost of each gold medal at A$40 mil-lion. Finally, two recent calculations ofthe cost of Australian medals at theBeijing Olympics achieved similarresults. The first study estimated thatAustralia’s 14 gold medals each costA$15.6 million. The recently pub-lished Crawford Report consideredonly Australian government spendingon Olympic sports in the four yearsleading up to Beijing, and estimatedthat each medal cost A$4 million, andeach gold medal cost A$15 million.

In Britain, the National AuditOffice reported that each medal won byBritish athletes at the Athens Olympics(2004) cost the British government £2.4million. And an estimate of the mostexpensive medals ever was reported forChina, which spent US$3 billion onhigh-performance sport in the fouryears leading up to the AthensOlympics — its 32 gold medals eachcosting some US$100 million.

In two calculations for Canada, onedivided the total reported cost of the1976 Olympics by the number of medalswon, estimating that each medal won bya Canadian athlete in Montreal costC$37 million. The other study estimatesthat each medal won by a Canadian ath-

lete at the Sydney Olympics cost the fed-eral government C$4.42 million. CraigMitton, at the University of BritishColumbia at Okanagan, stated that “on aper capita basis, Australia spent overseven times more on its Sydney Olympicteam than Canada, to win four times asmany medals.”

Regardless of how they were calcu-lated, two things are evident fromthese figures. First, it costs a great deal

Peter Donnelly

Under a growing climate of businesslike government inCanada and other countries, of objective-led management,performance measures, accountability, monitoring andevaluation, investments in high-performance sport came tobe seen as having only one measurable objective — medals.

Total medalsWinter and summerOlympics Australia Canada

1988 14 151992 27 251994/96 42 351998/00 59 292002/04 51 292006/08 48 42

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of money to win an Olympic medal,and gold medals are especially expen-sive. Second, when hosting costs areincluded in the calculation of medalcosts, the 2 percent home advantage isextraordinarily expensive.

Calculations of success vary wide-ly. Luciano Barra predicts that Canadawill be both first, and tied for fifth atthe Vancouver Olympics. He explainsthat Canadian athletes will win themost total medals, but will be tied forfifth in the number of all-importantgold medals. Under some calculationspoints are assigned to medals (e.g.,gold = 3, silver = 2, bronze = 1) and thatcan lead to a different ranking of coun-tries. Other calculations of successmeasure the proportion of medals tothe population of a country — coun-tries such as the United States tumbledown the rankings in these calcula-

tions, while countries such as Jamaicaascend to the top of the medal tables.

W hile medals and the differentways that they are counted pre-

dominate in terms of national rank-ings, other metrics may be employed.For example, Canada often uses “top-eight finishes” to determine its rank-ing; and calculations sometimesinclude the number of athletes whoachieved “personal best” performancesduring an Olympic Games.

The sometimes conflicting aims ofnational sports policies — to achieveinternational success in sport and toachieve significant increases in broad-based participation in sports (for rea-sons of population health, socialinclusion and so on) — have resultedin sport participation increases becom-ing a part of definitions of success in

countries such as Canada and Britain.Hosting major sport events such as theOlympic Games is so expensive thatfurther justification is often needed totake on that task. For example,Canada’s Federal Policy for HostingInternational Sport Events (2004,2008) mandates various legacies thatare expected as a result of hosting theevents — these include economic stim-ulus and “social, cultural and commu-nity benefits, including enhancedvoluntarism, active citizenship andcivic participation, cultural programsreflecting Canadian diversity, physicalactivity and healthy communities.”

London won the right to host the2012 Olympics in part because TonyBlair promised that the event would beconnected to substantial increases insport participation, not only in Britainbut also in low-income countries. And

Own the Podium or rent it? Canada’s involvement in the global sporting arms race

The Canadian women’s hockey team celebrating their gold medal victory at the Torino Games in 2006. Canadian athletes are undertremendous pressure, as part of the Own the Podium program, to win medals, especially gold ones, at Vancouver.

CP Photo

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there are now signs that countries suchas Australia are beginning to reject nar-row definitions of success based onlyon medal counts, and are exploringways to include the health and well-being of the population in new defini-tions of sporting success.

I n 2001, Ben Oakley and Mick Greenin the UK coined the term “global

sporting arms race.” Just as the globalarms race involved superpowersattempting to outspend each other in

weapons development, Oakley andGreen observed that an increasing num-ber of nations are prepared to investmore and more money to achieve theirgoals of winning more Olympic medals.Governments are apparently engaged inthis “race” in order to make symbolicstatements about national identity,pride and virility.

The funding strategies are oftenlinked to target-setting campaigns — e.g.,China’s Project 119 (referring to the num-ber of gold medals available in the sportsbeing targeted by sport strategists inChina) and Britain’s Mission 2012.Canada stepped up its involvement inthe global sporting arms race in 2003when the Own the Podium campaign wasplanned, shortly after the announce-ment that Vancouver would host the2010 Olympic Games. The campaign seta target of 35 medals for Canadian ath-letes in Vancouver, and budgeted $110million — some $22 million a year inadditional funding for Olympic wintersports for the five years leading up toVancouver. The federal government iscontributing $66 million, and theremaining $44 million is from provincialand corporate sources.

There are clear arguments infavour of Own the Podium. Canadaclaims that its high-performance sportsystem is athlete-centred. In such a sys-tem it is appropriate to support athletesrepresenting Canada (in terms of train-

ing, equipment, competition opportu-nities and so on) to at least the samelevel as many of the athletes they willbe competing against. Thus, one pur-pose of the additional funding is togive Canada’s athletes a chance to win.

Own the Podium helped to producepositive results at the Torino Olympics,and in international competition since2006. But there is something about thecampaign that makes many Canadiansfeel a little uncomfortable. It’s brag-ging, for gosh sakes! With reference to

Canada’s well-established reputationfor Olympic hospitality (in Montrealand Calgary), Bruce Kidd wryly sug-gests that there is something vaguelyun-Canadian about inviting the worldto BC so that we can kick ass. And thereis a nagging sense that we may be set-ting ourselves up to fail. Isn’t it betterto manage expectations rather than toset the bar so high?

There have also been complaintsabout the program. It is expensive, at atime when such additional expensesseem unreasonable. It is divisive: sincemost additional funding goes to ath-letes who are expected to win medals, anumber of national team athletes feellike second-class citizens. And it maybe promoting a win-at-all-costs attitude— an attitude that Canada came toregret in the late 1980s following theBen Johnson scandal. Reports thatinternational athletes have not beengiven adequate training time at thenew facilities may or may not be true,but it is clear that Canada is pushing itshome-team advantage to the limit. Forexample, Own the Podium helped tofund the installation of 32 camerasalong the luge track at the WhistlerSliding Centre. The cameras are forsafety, but they also help coaches toprovide instant feedback to the lugers.Those cameras were turned off recentlywhen international lugers came totrain at the track.

I n the final analysis, there are noguarantees that Own the Podium will

work. This is sport — every athleteknows that on any given day, anythingcan happen; and we know thatCanada’s winter sports athletes areabout to face an extraordinary pressureof expectations.

Canada has stepped into theglobal sporting arms race now, andeven our nemesis, Australia, is begin-ning to recognize that it costs moreand more money even to stay in the

same place in the medaltables. Competitorsinclude countries thatseem both willing and ableto outspend Canada inorder to win medals:

wealthy centralized economies suchas China; countries that rely primari-ly on corporate funding such as theUS; or countries that use national lot-tery funding to sustain their high-per-formance sport programs such asGermany and Norway.

Own the Podium represents a par-ticularly narrow strategy based on anextraordinarily narrow definition ofsuccess. After their unprecedentedsuccess at the Sydney Olympics,Australians were left with debt, and apopulation whose only measurableincrease in sport participationinvolved attending more sportsevents and watching more sports ontelevision. Better planning and abroader definition of success alongthe lines now being considered inAustralia would link Canadian medalswith the possibility of all Canadiansbeing able to participate in the sportof their choice, and with improve-ments in the health and wellbeing ofthe population.

Athletes representing Canadashould be well funded. May they winlots of medals in February. But, in theglobal sporting arms race, no one canown the podium. At best, Canada maybe able to rent it for a short time.

Peter Donnelly is director of the Centrefor Sport Policy Studies at the Universityof Toronto. peter.donnelly@utoronto.ca

Peter Donnelly

Canada has stepped into the global sporting arms race now,and even our nemesis, Australia, is beginning to recognizethat it costs more and more money even to stay in the sameplace in the medal tables.