No, what really bugs the critics is not what Own the Podium says to other nations, but what it says to us: the picture it reflects of ourselves. For a country that succeeds so spectacularly in one area will be less forgiving of mediocrity in others. And mediocrity, for many Canadians, had become a balm. That, too, is changing: Own the Podium didn’t come out of nowhere, after all. It reflected a change in attitude as much as it produced it.
But it wasn’t so long ago that this was a country that feared free trade; that apologized to separatists for its existence; that freeloaded off others for its defence; that could not balance its budget or conquer inflation because, after all, it was just too hard. Afraid, ashamed, we sought solace in our own insignificance. At least we were nicer than other nations.
Even before the Olympics, there had been a great deal of gnashing of teeth over Canada’s supposed changing image abroad. People in other countries don’t like us as much as they used to, the critics wailed. But to the extent that’s even remotely true, we should understand why: they preferred us as doormats. Our “popularity” was strictly to do with our ineffectualness. We didn’t get in anyone’s way. We weren’t a threat. We were the milquetoast of the town.
But that never was the real Canada. The country that aimed for the middle, that dared to be modest, that coughed before it entered the room: that was a comparatively recent invention. Go back to the first half of the last century, before the nationalists started remaking us in their own image, and you see a different Canada: the Canada of Laurier and Leacock, when it was not just a goal, but an assumption, that this country, two steps out of the woods though it was, would be the next great power. By the end of the 20th century, the “century of Canada,” we would have 100 million people. World leaders? Top of the medals? Of course. This is what we were supposed to be.
“Before the year 2000,” the literary critic William Arthur Deacon wrote in 1933, “Canada’s world dominance will be as undisputed a fact as any commonplace of history.” Not only foremost in commerce and in culture, “she will exercise undisputed intellectual leadership . . . she will have the undiluted respect of the world, not only for the excellence of her own institutions, but also for the example of intelligent justice in both internal and external dealings. This will be the characteristic by which her golden age will be remembered, as Rome is acclaimed for her organizing ability.”
That brashness, that cockiness, never really went away. It just went underground. Even when, as in the national sport, it was staring us in the face, we ignored it when it did not fit our stereotypes of ourselves. But it is harder to ignore it now: not after these Games, and the massive, almost cathartic banshee yell of national pride it has brought on. Own the Podium? Hell yeah!
For me, this Olympics, and its effect on our sense of self, is summed up in two of our first gold medal winners, Alexandre Bilodeau and Jon Montgomery: the ego and the id of our national psyche. Bilodeau, with his manifest decency and humility, whose first thought on winning was of his disabled brother, is who we would like to be. Montgomery, the muscle-flexing, beer-swilling skeleton daredevil, who only took up the sport as a way to get to the Olympics, is who we are.
Or maybe there’s no contradiction between the two. Maybe what we have learned is this: that we can hold fast to those traditional Canadian virtues of compassion, generosity, and fairness, and still be aggressive, ambitious, and competitive as all get out. If that offends a few visiting British sportswriters, that is just a chance we are going to have to take.
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