Patching it up for gold

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Jeff McIntosh/ Canadian Press

On television, it was the medal race a lot of people missed: all across the nation, channels were tuned to Team Canada’s rout of the Russians. But up at the Whistler Sliding Centre, one of our women’s bobsled pilots was contending for gold, while another was about to prove that on this controversial sliding track, with its sharp twists and treacherous slopes, anything can happen.

The race’s outcome—Canada 1 pilot Kaillie Humphries, backed by brakeman Heather Moyse, broke the track record in three of four heats to win gold; Canada 2’s Helen Upperton, with Shelley-Ann Brown, secured silver—lent the Canadian podium spots the weight of parable, a story of the fragility of friendship and its occasionally remarkable strength. In the case of 24-year-old Humphries, the gold proved too that you can break just about every bone in your body, go on to have your heart broken by sport, and then come back to reverse it all.

That story starts with the difficult relationship Olympic bobsled pilots, in particular on the women’s side, frequently have with the athletes who back them. The women get just a single shot at the podium (men have both a two- and four-man option) and each pilot gets two brakemen: a main and an alternate. Only one is selected to compete (coaches choose in consultation with the driver)—a circumstance that leads to crushed hopes and frequently shattered friendships.

Thanks to that dynamic, the four women who stepped onto that Olympic podium were all linked; more, the bonds between them were in various states of health and disrepair. Canada 1 pilot Humphries had once been fellow driver Upperton’s brakeman, but had been dropped prior to the Turin Games in 2006 in favour of Moyse. “Yes, Helen and I have a history. And yes, we are competitors,” Humphries told a reporter in December. “But we’re on the same team and we do respect each other.”

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They almost had it

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Tannen Maury/EPA

Cheryl Bernard has been curling for a very long time. Since she was a little girl, in fact. But not until her final match as a 2010 Olympian did she understand the true meaning of a steal.

The gold medal was hers. Everyone in the building sure thought so, clanging their cowbells and chanting her name. In the tenth end, when she was still up by two, Bernard was caught flashing that unmistakable smile, the one athletes get when they know they’re about to win, but are trying not to gloat.

And then she lost.

It didn’t happen in a blink of an eye. It actually took quite a few minutes for her gold to melt into silver, right there in front of 5,600 screaming witnesses. But even Anette Norberg, the Swedish skip who ended up with Bernard’s medal, had trouble putting into words exactly what she saw. “It just happened,” she said. “I don’t know how.”

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My New City

By Steven Galloway - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Marcio Sanchez/ Associated Press

First, this admission: I was wrong.

Let’s back up. In 2003, there was a referendum in the city of Vancouver asking, “Do you support or do you oppose the City of Vancouver’s participation in hosting the 2010 Olympic Winter Games and Paralympic Winter Games?” Approximately half of the city turned out to vote, and 64 per cent of Vancouverites were in favour. I was one of the people who voted yes. I hoped it would result in an improvement in the transit system, and that it would force the various levels of government to do something lasting and productive in the Downtown Eastside, Canada’s poorest and most addicted neighbourhood. Plus, the idea of a hockey gold on home soil was irresistible.

In the intervening seven years, I slowly became less and less enthusiastic. A magnificent SkyTrain line did get built from the airport to downtown, and a few other much-needed improvements were made, but absolutely nothing was done in the Downtown Eastside, and the cadre responsible for the Games’ organization, VANOC, behaved in a seemingly inept and callous way toward those who disagreed with them, and the citizens of the city in general.

Perhaps the most representative incident was VANOC’s use of a clip from Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia in its torch-relay promotional video. In the original film, the torch triumphantly enters into a stadium to a crowd of “Heil Hitler” salutes. In VANOC’s version, the salutes have been obscured, as though that solves the problem. It’s hard not to feel deceived when someone’s literally using Nazi propaganda on you.

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Hot Pursuit

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Todd Korol/Reuters

You can forgive Denny Morrison for rubbing it in. Fresh from the podium, with the country’s 11th gold medal of the Games dangling from his neck—a wire-to-wire besting of the United States in the men’s speed skating team pursuit—he stopped to make a point. “We’re not just doing this for ourselves. We’re doing this for all of Canada.”

He and teammates Lucas Makowsky and Mathieu Giroux were among the few to believe they had a shot at hitting the top of the podium on the final day of the Olympic long-track competition. But in the preliminaries, the trio laid low defending champions Italy, in an Olympic record time of three minutes, 42.38 seconds. In the second round, they went even faster, beating Norway in 3:42.22. And when it was all on the line, they left a formidable American squad—including five-time medallist Chad Hedrick—eating their dust, crossing the line in 3:41.37, grabbing gold by a margin of 0.21 seconds. It was the first, and only, medal for Canada’s male long-track speed skaters at the 2010 Games. (The women won four despite failing to medal in the team pursuit.) And for Morrison, at least, it was sweet relief.

Olympic redemption doesn’t usually come so quickly. Those who crumble under the immense pressure of the sporting world’s brightest spotlight often have to wait four more years—and sometimes forever—tormented by their own failure, and the media’s insistence on reliving it. Another teammate, Jeremy Wotherspoon, for example, retires after Vancouver 2010 as one of speed skating’s all-time greats, the winner of more World Cup races than any man ever. But his stumble at the starting line in Salt Lake City, and subsequent inability to ever improve on the silver he won as a 21-year-old buck back at the 1998 Nagano Games, became the defining story of his career.

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The Star Rookies

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

For more than a decade, Hayley Wickenheiser has dominated women’s hockey the way Wayne Gretzky once did the men’s game. But something unexpected happened in Vancouver: Wickenheiser and the rest of Canada’s star veterans—Jayna Hefford, Caroline Ouellette and Kim St-Pierre—were shut out from the tournament all-star team. Honours, instead, went to three standout rookies: 23-year-old goaltender Shannon Szabados, who blanked the Americans 2-0 in the gold medal final, 18-year-old phenom Marie-Philip Poulin, who scored both goals in the game, and Meghan Agosta, 23, who set up the second goal and was named tournament MVP, with 15 points including nine goals—a single-Olympic record. It was a symbolic, yet striking passing of the torch.

In some ways, the final—with a crowd as loud, at points, as it was during Canada’s men’s quarter-final a day earlier—foreshadowed the future of the women’s game. For Canada, it’s in good hands. Yet it’s precisely the deep and growing talent pool that may prove the game’s undoing in the Olympics. Just hours before the Canada-U.S. showdown, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge indicated that his patience with the women’s game is wearing thin. Unless the competition gets serious, and fast, it seems Rogge will see to it that the women’s game joins softball on the Olympic discard heap.

Currently, Canada and the U.S. stand alone, head and shoulders above the competition; that was never in question ahead of these Games. But Canada’s third-straight Olympic gold sure was. Less than a year ago, at the World Championships in Finland, Canada suffered an embarrassing 4-1 loss to the U.S.—the second straight year Canada handed the world crown to its archrivals. After the loss, Mel Davidson, Canada’s head coach, pinned the blame on herself. “Coaching is coaching, and if you don’t perform, you don’t go on,” she told reporters in Hämeenlinna. When you fail, “you have to look from the top down,” she later told Maclean’s. “Maybe Hockey Canada has to look at a change.” At the time, just nine months until Vancouver, Team Canada, famed for its machine-like precision, seemed to be coming undone.

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And the winners are…

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Nations twist the final medal tallies to suit their own results. That’s why Americans focused on total medals while Canadians boasted about winning the most gold (the most in Winter Olympic history, in fact). What’s easily lost in the nationalistic posturing are the outstanding individual performances. Four Canadians went home with double medals. Short track’s Marianne St-Gelais won two silvers while her boyfriend, Charles Hamelin, picked up two golds on the same ice, and teammate François-Louis Tremblay got gold and bronze. And speed skating’s Kristina Groves was awarded bronze and silver. But the most decorated athlete of all at these Games was Norway’s Marit Bjørgen. The skier dominated the Whistler cross-country course and went home from Vancouver with three golds, a silver and a bronze.

An economy under the weather

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Kevin Lamarque/ Reuters

During the first week of the 2010 Games, Vancouver’s winter weather—or more precisely, lack of it—was a hot topic. In the end, though, the spring-like conditions proved no match for a determined army of snow-shovelling workers. But while Olympic organizers were able to temporarily wrestle Mother Nature into submission, the bright minds charged with running the giant U.S. economy weren’t nearly so lucky.

In the United States, harsh winter storms pounded the densely populated eastern seaboard in February, and are blamed for taking the steam out of the country’s economic recovery. Washington, for example, was buried under more than half a metre of snow during a blizzard dubbed “Snowmageddon,” which disrupted the entire region and was followed by an encore performance less than a week later. The storms disrupted government and air travel and caused many Americans to stay home instead of going to work or to the mall, putting a dent in everything from consumer spending to employment. “This February marked the first time in recorded history that each of the 50 states had measurable snowfall in the same day,” according to UBS, a Swiss bank. “It is therefore likely that this unusual weather played at least some role in the recent string of weaker-than-expected [U.S.] economic data”

It has been a different story north of the border—and not just in Vancouver. In Toronto, the country’s financial centre, bankers and lawyers have gone nearly the entire winter with nothing but bare concrete under their leather-soled dress shoes. Meanwhile, GDP numbers shot through the roof in the fourth quarter and talk has suddenly turned to taming the recovery, instead of stoking it. Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney will likely hike interest rates to cool any overheating, but praying for a few more snowflakes couldn’t hurt.

The Greatest one

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 3 Comments

Photograph by: Adrian Wyld/CP (left), Friso Gentsch/Keystone(middle), Christophe Ena/AP(right)

There’s home-ice advantage, and then there’s having your home just metres from the ice. A year and a half ago, Clara Hughes, one of Canada’s most decorated Olympians, rented an apartment with her husband a short walk from the Richmond speed skating oval. The move let her train on the very ice she would race on during the Olympics, while providing her with all the creature comforts of home—her own bed, her own kitchen, and more importantly, her own espresso machine. It worked. In the final race of her long and shining career, a beaming Hughes took home the bronze in the 5,000-m race.

But living in the Vancouver area all this time did something else for the 37-year-old skater. Last summer, while out for a drive downtown, Hughes took a wrong turn and found herself in the heart of the Downtown Eastside, the gritty neighbourhood that’s home to thousands of souls who’ve taken their own wrong turn in life. The sight shocked her. “I couldn’t believe I was in Canada, that this reality exists in our country,” she said the day after her race. “People were just shells of themselves. It was surreal.” So Hughes, who suffered her own problems with alcohol and drugs as a teen, announced she will give her $10,000 winner’s bonus to the Take a Hike Foundation, a sport group that helps troubled youth. “I feel like I can leave town now, that I didn’t just come and skate in circles, because it always meant more to me than that.”

Only Hughes could win an Olympic medal on home soil and chalk it up to skating around in circles. But that’s Hughes. She is someone who can say “I don’t focus on medals” and truly mean it, yet at the same time channel all her energy to push her body to the limit in competition. As role models go, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better one, a quality she strives for. There’s a reason Canadian Olympic organizers selected her to carry the flag during the opening ceremonies.

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We were best when it counted

By Ken MacQueen and Jonathon Gatehouse with Jason Kirby - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Mark Ralston/ AFP/ Getty Images

There are tides and rhythms to an event that spans 17 days and includes 82 countries—an event so large it is capable of altering the emotional climate of a city, a province, a nation; indeed, the moods of many nations. Rather like the weather at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, which flip-flopped time and time again from monsoon to shorts and sunshine.

From a Canadian perspective, the run of these Games—from early stumbles to triumphant conclusion—went a bit like speed skater Christine Nesbitt’s 1,000-m race on the first Thursday at the Richmond Oval. At the start gun, 24-year-old Nesbitt later said, “Instead of skating I kind of panicked. I had a slip after two or three steps.” Sometimes when that happens it’s hard to regain control. Just 200 m into the race Nesbitt was in a dismal 15th place. At 600 m she had clawed back to ninth, and the podium seemed an impossible reach. But she prepared mentally and physically for such things. The only way forward is to draw on your training, stick to your plan and to make sure no one can accuse you of giving up. And so she raged through the last lap, throwing herself across the line to win Canada’s third gold medal by two one-hundredths of a second—still scowling at herself for not having run a perfect race.

It was later that night, after the medal presentation ceremony at BC Place, that Nesbitt finally unclenched. Yes, she allowed to a couple of Maclean’s reporters, she was feeling better now. It’s just that she thought she could do better, she said. “I don’t want to regret anything, right?” Then the smile grew bigger. “But if you don’t have the race of your life and you still win gold, it’s pretty sweet.”

Writ large, these Games followed a similar path to a “pretty sweet” conclusion. The organizational and emotional equivalent of those first 200 m were indeed the worst: struggling through the tragic death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili hours before the opening ceremonies; warring against the elements for control of Cypress Mountain; fighting premature claims the Games were hell-bent for disaster; staring down international rants that we were too hungry for medals, and domestic bleats that we weren’t hungry enough.

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‘Old Bear’ has his day

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Morry Gash/Associated Press

The crowd didn’t bother waiting for the podium ceremony. Halfway through the final end, with Kevin Martin’s rink up by three in the gold-medal match, a few fans started singing O Canada. It spread slowly at first, section by section, but by “God keep our land glorious and free,” the entire place was belting out the anthem. Even Martin—Mr. Serious—couldn’t keep from smiling.

Eight long years after a heartbreaking silver medal in Salt Lake City, the best curler in the world had his Olympic gold, beating Norway and their diamond-checkered pants in the men’s final. The 6-3 win capped off Canada’s best day at the Vancouver Games (three gold and one bronze) and marked a raucous return to glory for the country’s other national sport. “Finally,” Martin said, the invisible monkey gone from his back. “It’s been a lot of work and a lot of years, and it feels really good. I said to the guys when we were coming to the podium: ‘It’s like we’re walking through a dream.’ ”

It was certainly a dream tournament for the Martin rink, which didn’t lose a single match on the way to gold. Their play in the finale was equally dominant. Third John Morris had the game of his life, landing one double takeout after another, and the skip sealed the deal in the seventh end with a perfect freeze in the circle that set up two points and a commanding lead. After both sides exchanged singles in the eighth and ninth, it was anthem time. “You get tingles and jitters up the spine,” said Marc Kennedy, Martin’s second. “You’re up three, you have a home crowd in the Olympic Games, and they’re singing the anthem. It just doesn’t get any better.” Thomas Ulsrud, the Norwegian skip, actually leaned over to Martin and said: “You’ve got to love this crowd, don’t you?’ ”

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On top of the World

By Charlie Gillis with Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Chris O'Meara/Associated Press

After the Golden Goal, when jubilant members of Team Canada had finished mobbing Sidney Crosby, when the sticks had been gathered and the players made their way to the long blue carpet for their medals, a pleasing sight unfolded in Canada Hockey Place. The crowd began bobbing, twisting, to the rhythm of the Black Eyed Peas, and for a moment, you could look around at thousands of red maple leafs—on flags, placards, T-shirts and jerseys—brought to life simultaneously, as if by a gust of wind.

Down on the ice, the man of the moment looked up and smiled. Minutes earlier, Crosby had slid the puck under U.S. goaltender Ryan Miller for what will surely count among the greatest goals in Canadian hockey history—right up there with Paul Henderson’s in 1972. Now, as he stood at the end of the line awaiting his Olympic gold medal, the crowd began chanting his name. “Cros-by! Cros-by! Cros-by!”

There are moments in sports that define an athlete, and some that define a country. But seldom do the two converge as neatly as they did in the men’s hockey final at the 2010 Winter Games, where Canada defeated the U.S. 3-2. Crosby’s goal seven minutes, 40 seconds into overtime cut short an improbable comeback by the Americans and unleashed four years’ worth of pent-up emotions, dating back to Canada’s ignominious defeat at the Winter Games in Turin. Those feelings had only deepened in the early days of these Olympics, as Canadians had been alternately pitied and mocked for various glitches, not to mention our disappointing medal haul that first week.

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An Act of Courage

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Paul Chiasson/ Canadian Press

It was late; 11 p.m. had come and gone, and Joannie Rochette, the bronze medal around her neck, was still lingering at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum, talking about the sudden death of her mother Thérèse. “It feels good for me to talk about it,” she said. An empty arena can be a chill and spooky place, but for Rochette, any rink echoes with memories of home. The audience of almost 12,000, at turns boisterous and weepy, had long since filed out, doubly blessed by two moments of Olympic magic.

First, they had witnessed four minutes of near perfection in the gold-medal skate of Korea’s Yu-Na Kim, the 19-year-old prodigy coached by Brian Orser, one of the finest male skaters Canada has produced. It was fluid and strong and so self-assured that even those unschooled in the intricacies of the sport could see Kim operated at a different level. As the last strains of Gershwin’s Concerto in F faded, and the crowd roared, Kim surprised even herself: she started to cry.

Later, the 19-year-old Kim seemed almost embarrassed by this weakness. She never cries, she said. “Watching previous figure skaters, I always wondered why they cried after their performance,” she says. “I’m really happy. I don’t know why I cried.”

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Quite an introduction

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Photograph by: Amy Sanchetta/AP (left), Tannen Maury/EPA/Keystone (top right), David J. Philip/AP (bottom right)

Careful what you wish for. For two weeks, armchair pop-spectacle producers from coast to coast indulged in one of the most popular events of this Vancouver Olympic season: critiquing the opening ceremonies. Too morose. Too much weird symbolism. Too many Aboriginal dancers.

And, this being Canada, everybody had their own checklist of the excluded. Not enough Ontario (said the Ontarians). Not enough spoken French. Not enough youth, humour, urbanity, what have you.

But what would happen if some cosmic joker actually wrote down the sum of all the kvetching and produced a show that gave Canadian audiences what so many had complained was missing? Okay, you nation of backseat drivers, we’ll give you rappers and phonetic French and rock bands and Michael Bublé until you beg for Aboriginal dancers.

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Can any country match that? No, actually

By Andrew Coyne - Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 11:45 PM - 58 Comments

To me, the most startling measure of Canada’s Olympic performance, eclipsing even the 14 gold (the most ever for any country) or the 26 medals (the most ever for Canada), was this: We placed in the top five in 37 of 86 events contested. Nearly half. In my Olympics wrap, I asked, quasi-rhetorically, “Can any country match that?”

This caused some snickers in the comments. The US won 37 medals, it was pointed out. So obviously they more than matched our top-5 record.

Well, no. If the question was, which country had the most top 5 finishes, the US would seem to have us beat: the 37 medallists, plus however many fourth- and fifth-place finishes they turned in. But the statement was not about how many top 5 finishes we had, but the number of events in which which we finished top 5, a measure of the breadth of our success.

I’ve now checked the results, and I can report that indeed, no country matched us in this regard. We placed top 5 in 37 events. The Americans were top 5 in 34. The Germans were top 5 in 33. No one else, I’m going to guess, eyeballing the results, was even close.

The seeming paradox is resolved by the fact that the Americans had more than one top 5 finisher in several events. But their success was concentrated in a narrower range of events than ours.

But wait, it gets better. Go back to that initial question: which country had the most top 5 finishes? The US, right? Well yes, but also Canada — the two countries were tied at the top, with 49 top 5 finishes each. (Germany had 46.) The US had more medallists than we did (37 to 26) but fewer 4ths and 5ths (12, to our 23).

So not only did we beat the world to the very top of the podium, we also were on or around more podiums, more times, than anyone else.

Thérèse Rochette (1954-2010)

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:39 AM - 4 Comments

Thérèse Rochette was born in Lanoraie, Que., a town 60 km northeast of Montreal on the St. Lawrence River, on June 6, 1954. Her father, Arthur Guèvremont, was a lumberjack; mother Antoinette stayed home with Thérèse and her brother Michel, who was older by four years. Michel remembers Thérèse as a determined child who, “once she had a goal, had to succeed.” She loved being outside, and skating was one of her favourite activities: every winter, when parts of the St. Lawrence froze over, the Guèvremont family would take to the river, which Michel calls “our skating rink.” But it was dangerous, he adds: the ice could crack, and sometimes, people drowned.

As a teenager, Thérèse struck up a relationship with Pierre, a local boy who was friends with Michel from school. The two fell in love, and talked of marriage, but their plans were cut short when, in 1975, Pierre was killed in a car crash. “She had a very hard time,” Michel says. To comfort herself, Thérèse would listen to Édith Piaf’s L’Hymne à l’amour, a song of love and loss.

It was about a year later that she met Normand Rochette, a kind-hearted man from nearby Île Dupas, Michel says. The two were married, and settled in Normand’s hometown; Thérèse took a job working with the elderly in a senior citizens’ home, and Normand, in construction. “We grew up along the St. Lawrence and we’ve never been able to leave,” says Michel, a welder, who now lives in Berthierville, just over the bridge from Île Dupas and up the river from Lanoraie.

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Canada Reborn

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:38 AM - 48 Comments

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?

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The Best—and Worst

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:35 AM - 31 Comments

Passing judgment on various elements of the Vancouver Olympics using a numerical ranking from zero to 10, with zero being a complete disaster and 10 being utter perfection, would be a crude and highly superficial way of looking back on the XXI Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.

So what are we waiting for?

11.0 Men’s. Hockey. Gold.

10.0 Canada vs. Russia. I’m sure there have been louder places to be than Canada Hockey Place for the men’s hockey quarter-finals—inside a jet engine, for instance, or across from Kirstie Alley at dinner. It was so loud I could hear the noise with my pancreas. Team Canada’s total domination over the Russian side was nice, too.

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'Go Canada Go'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 11:22 AM - 46 Comments

The prepared text of the Prime Minister’s reply to the Speech from the Throne.

“Thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to respond to the Speech from the Throne, which was delivered last week by Her Excellency the Governor General.  But before getting into the details, I’d like to say a few words about Canada’s extraordinary results at the recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler.

“And, of course, I want to talk about more than just the marvellous staging of the Winter Olympics by the organizers and the warm embrace given to athletes and visitors alike by British Columbians.  I think none of us who know the west coast were surprised by that.  But, as we all know, our athletes, our young men and women, went out and set a new record for the number of gold medals ever won by any nation at a Winter Olympic Games.  Fourteen golds, Mr. Speaker.  And, of course, along with seven silvers and five bronze, 26 medals in total, that’s the most ever won by our country at the Winter Olympics.  Indeed, out of 80 countries, our athletes garnered 10 per cent of all the medals awarded.  That is an extraordinary performance.  There is no doubt that we are proud of our athletes.

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Therese Rochette laid to rest

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 5, 2010 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

On Thursday afternoon, Joannie Rochette laid her Olympic figure-skating bronze medal on the lid of her mother’s coffin. Therese Guevremont-Rochette died two weeks ago, just after arriving in Vancouver to watch her daughter take to the ice in the women’s figure skating competition. Today, hundreds of friends and family members gathered at a funeral in Berthierville, Quebec. Joannie delivered a eulogy, focusing on her mother’s positive accomplishments. “I’m happy today because we’re celebrating the life of my mother Therese,” she said, “a short life but a very intense one.” Rochette, 24, captured Canadian and international hearts by winning a bronze medal just days after her mother’s death.

Winnipeg Free Press

BUDGET 2010: The unemployed, youth, and families

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 4:45 PM - 2 Comments

Ottawa plans to lean on changes to the Employment Insurance system to help Canadians cope with a job market that remains tough in several sectors. The government most notably expects manufacturing job losses to keep mounting, albeit at a slower pace, due to weak U.S. demand and the rise of the Canadian dollar. So in addition to previously announced reforms that extended the length of time unemployed Canadians could remain on EI by five weeks, the government is now expanding its work-sharing program, at a projected cost of $106 million over the next two years.

Under the work-sharing program, employees whose workweeks have been cut are entitled to collect EI payments to make up the shortfall in income. Thursday’s budget extends the amount of time individuals can take part in the program to 78 weeks from the previous maximum of 52 weeks. The move is a temporary one, though, and will be eliminated on March 31, 2011. The government estimates its combined EI-related measures will create or maintain 24,000 jobs by then end of 2010, at a cost of $2.7 billion over two years.

Thursday’s budget will also facilitate access to EI for workers who take a leave of absence from work after losing a family member as a result of a crime. The cost of the program is pegged at $6.6 million over two years.

Investments targeted at youth job creation include a one-time contribution of $10 million to the Canadian Youth Business Foundation aimed at young entrepreneurs, and $30 million to encourage businesses to hire recent college and university graduates. At-risk youth will benefit from an extra $30-million committed to skills development programs.

Meanwhile, single parents of children under six can expect to see their tax bill cut thanks to changes in the way $100 per month Universal Child Care Benefit is taxed. Under the current system, the benefit is added to a single parent’s income and taxed at their marginal tax rate, meaning single-income two-parent families, who are allowed to add the benefit to a non-working parent’s income, may pay less tax than their single-parent counterparts on identical UCCB payments. Ottawa now plans to allow single parents to add the income from the UCCB to that of their child, effectively eliminating the tax on UCCB. The change is expected to cost the government $5 million a year.

After much public deliberation over the value of Canada’s Own the Podium Olympic program during the Vancouver Games, the federal government has announced it will top up funding for elite athletes by $44 million over two years. The new funding is part of an overall boost to federal sports programs, such ParticipACTION and the Paralympics and Special Olympics, worth $62 million over two years.

While increases to benefits for families, youth and the unemployed are meager, they appear to be safe from the government chopping block. The budget includes an unequivocal pledge not to cut them in the future. The federal deficit fighting plan, the budget documents promise, will include no cuts to “major transfers to persons” nor will it feature cuts to transfers to other levels of government.

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 1:27 PM - 8 Comments

As noted by the Crawford Report, one of the dilemmas in funding elite sport is demonstrating that it has some impact on the activity and health of the general public. Keith Martin, who just sits around most days thinking up ideas, actually came up with a way to address this last November.

An elite athlete health ambassador program (EAHAP), created and funded by the federal and provincial governments, could be that legacy. This program would employ our Canadian athletes to adopt a series of schools that they could visit on an ongoing basis. The athletes would teach children how to live healthy, active lives; give workshops on making healthy food choices; improve literacy by encouraging reading; speak about the destructive impact of smoking, illegal drugs and alcohol abuse. As they are young role models, their message would be a powerful one for the students to hear. This program would provide children with the knowledge and encouragement they need to lead active, healthy lives.

More human

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 12:39 PM - 3 Comments

In light of Parliament’s proroguing and subsequent rescheduling, with a plea from Liberal MP Michelle Simon in mind, Glen Pearson suggests a delegation of MPs to show support for the Paralympics.

So, in light of Michelle’s leadership, here’s my request to the Prime Minister. At the opening ceremony today you stated just how important these upcoming games are and how vital it is that the athletes know we are with them.  Vanoc president John Furlong stated that these upcoming games will be different because they will be more “human,” and who would deny it?  So Mr. Harper, let’s select two MPs from each party to travel as a delegation to show that we mean what you said.

Unlike the torch festivities from the historic Olympic Games, the paralympic flame is lit initially in Ottawa, right in front of Parliament, and then carried to the venues in British Columbia.  We started something special in Ottawa today, sir, right under the shadow of the Peace Tower.  Let’s make peace today, Prime Minister, and for the next ten days let’s permit our House leaders to work out a pairing arrangement so that we too in Parliament can show our own humanity.

The risk of aiming high

By Ken MacQueen with Nancy Macdonald, John Geddes and Jason Kirby - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Throughout this premature Vancouver spring, The Question has preoccupied Canada’s sporting press: can this country still “own” the Olympic podium by topping the medal count? The medal performance anxiety issue is raised daily, in all its variations, to the increasingly tense executive of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC), and to the frustration of some athletes.

On Sunday, an exasperated COC president Michael Chambers said this, in steering the question into more favourable winds: “We’re going to win more medals. Canadians aren’t all mathematicians or accountants, they’re not just counting up medals. They’ve embraced the wave of the Games.”

By Monday, after a disappointing weekend—a men’s hockey loss to the U.S., and unexpected medal shutouts in men’s ski cross, men’s speed skating, and men’s short track—reality set in: top spot was impossible. Canada entered competition Monday tied for fourth—four gold, four silver and one bronze—15 behind the leading U.S. Our ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir added a gold that night, and Ashleigh McIvor won another on Tuesday in ski cross, but Canada was still far back of the U.S. “We are going to be short of our goal, I readily admit that,” said Chris Rudge, the former Quebecor executive who serves as CEO of the Olympic committee.

Continue…

The one and only Zamboni

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Poor Zamboni. The California maker of ice resurfacing machines—the ones that swoop around the hockey rink after each period—has a brand so strong that most people have simply assumed that’s what the tractor-like vehicles are actually called. In fact, the word “Zamboni” is even listed in the dictionary. It’s a burden that’s also borne by the makers of Kleenex tissues and Chap Stick lip balm, which also enjoy top-of-mind brand awareness for their products, drastically reducing the need to spend millions on marketing.

But even such enormous competitive advantages can occasionally have unintended, unwelcome side effects. Zamboni lashed out at media outlets who mistakenly reported that delays in Olympic speed skating events were because of broken “zambonis.” That wasn’t technically true—the machines in question were Olympias, made by Ontario-based rival Resurfice Corp., which outbid Zamboni for the contract. “It was widely reported that these machines were Zamboni machines, which in fact they were not,” Zamboni said in a recent statement, adding that it had “deep concern” about the negative portrayal of its brand.

While it’s understandable that Zamboni wants to clear up the confusion given the high-profile nature of the Games (although it did benefit from positive coverage when an actual Zamboni was shipped in from Calgary to save the day), the company is walking a fine line between protecting its valuable brand name and creating a popular backlash. Zamboni appeared to tread close to the edge with a letter to the Calgary Herald in which the company lectured the newspaper on the difference between adjectives and nouns (They claim Zamboni is a “capitalized adjective”). A similar lesson was given to Jalopnik, a popular automotive blog covering what some have called the Zambonigate fiasco. Their response? “Relax, having your brand synonymous with the product you’re selling is a positive.”