Canada Reborn

Photograph by Brian Howell

For God’s sake don’t change the name.

Whether the Own the Podium program makes sense in overall policy terms can still be debated. The case for governments paying athletes to play games is far from clear, and it is easy to imagine all of the other uses that might have been made of the program’s $117-million budget.

But in terms of athletic excellence—winning medals—the program is an indisputable triumph. Do I need to rehearse the results? The most medals ever for Canada at a Winter Games, good for third place overall. The most gold medals of any country in these Games—indeed, more than any country has ever won at a Winter Games in their history.

As impressive was the breadth of the Canadian achievement. We medalled in nine different sports, spread amongst two dozen different athletes or teams. And lurking just off the podium, 23 fourth- or fifth-place finishers. All told, Canadians placed in the top five in 37 of the 86 events at these Games. Can any country match that?

It is difficult to convey how much of a change this is from the past. Until about 15 years ago, Canada had never won more than a handful of medals at any Winter Olympics, rarely even cracking the top 10 in the overall medal counts. And gold? Put it this way. The three gold medals Canada won on the last Saturday of the Vancouver Games was as many as it won in the entire 1994 Games. It’s as many as it won in the 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, and 1980 games combined.

Yet we now wake up to the reality that we have suddenly become a winter sports superpower, on par with such traditionally dominant nations as Germany and the United States, with many times our population. We aren’t just beating the world at hockey. We’re beating it at speed skating, at curling, at snowboarding and freestyle skiing and a bunch of other sports besides. Canada. Us.

It wasn’t just money that marked Own the Podium’s contribution to this change. It was a philosophy, an attitude, best expressed in that deliberately provocative name. We were going to shoot for the top, and we didn’t care who knew it—including ourselves. This seems elementary. Before you can achieve anything, you have to imagine yourself in the role. You have to see yourself as the kind of person who does that sort of thing. The point of Own the Podium was to get Canadians to see themselves as the kind of country who could finish first at the Olympics—to build a culture wherein Canadian athletes would see themselves as potential medal winners. It wasn’t enough just to hope it. You had to say it. Out loud.

Indeed, perhaps the surest sign of Own the Podium’s necessity is that it was controversial—as it remains, in some circles. It was too boastful, too arrogant, too…American. We were being disrespectful of our guests. We were setting ourselves up for failure. We were flying too close to the sun.

We can dispense with the last objection first, even without reference to our astonishing performance at these Games. It is true that we did not attain our stated objective of winning the most medals of any country. But does falling short of a goal mean we should not set one? How is failing an argument against trying? When was it decreed that no goal should be attempted that was not certain of success? The whole point of setting goals—worthwhile goals, at any rate—is that you might not achieve them.

As for the delicate sensibilities of other nations: come off it. Do we imagine that Germany, or the U.S., or the other sporting powers did not come to Vancouver with the intention of “owning the podium”? Maybe they didn’t say it in quite the same way. But they certainly meant it.