The nonsense part of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics needs to stop. All talk of first or bust and medals as the new religion has gone on long enough.
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On second thought, let's disown the podium
- February 16, 2010 10:49 PM |
- By Noah Love
Story provided by
By Jeremy Sandler, National Post
The nonsense part of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics needs to stop. All talk of first or bust and medals as the new religion has gone on long enough.
Time to disown the podium, if just a little bit, in favour of a more holistic approach to what exactly these Games should mean for Canada.
This is not just one man's opinion, but also that of someone who should matter: Pierre de Coubertin.
The founder of the modern Olympic movement said as much when he expanded a Bishop's address from the 1908 Games into an Olympic creed.
"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle," it reads. "The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well."
Now read it again.
Could "Own the Podium" run more counter to the official Olympic creed?
So few creeds exist these days, it's easy to see how the Canadian Olympic Committee folks might have forgotten to read it.
Like making sure you have enough floppy disks or writing about Tiger Woods without using the word "fidelity," creed-checking is something of an anachronistic process.
And it's not just Canada's Olympics honchos that seems to have caught this sickness.
Monday's front page of this very newspaper celebrated Alex Bilodeau's moguls gold on Sunday - the first by a Canadian on home soil in Olympic history - as ending more than three decades of "mediocrity" dating back to the 1976 Montreal Summer Games.
Mediocre like being the second richest person in the world?
That guy who owns Ikea must feel terrible about not being able to crack the top three.
By that standard, one of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant is the best player in the NBA and the other is no better than Bill Wennington, Cedric Ceballos or World B. Free.
Forget for a moment that the sum total of that 34-year "streak" without gold represented two Olympics and barely more than a month's worth of actual competition.
Forget about how many races were lost to countries that systematically treated its athletes as human pin cushions, creating organized systems of steroid use while employing the field of play as a proxy in the war of conflicting political ideologies.
Was Elizabeth Manley trouncing Debbie Thomas for silver in Calgary a "mediocre" moment? Ditto for Karen Percy's pair of bronze medals in the downhill and the Super G in 1988.
There is no way our collective self esteem should come down to the 24 hundredths of a second - less time than it takes to open a soda - that separated Erik Guay from a podium finish in Monday's men's downhill.
Similarly the hair's breadths separating mogul skier Jennifer Heil on Sunday and snowboarder Mike Robertson on Monday from gold should hardly tarnish the silvers both took home.
This is not about the tragic death of 21-year-old Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili last Friday, for whom unlimited practice time may have prevented his tragic death last Friday or who, with unrestricted access, simply may have slid on his final run earlier in his too-short life.
Nor is it about tossing aside so-called Canadian traits of being nice and polite.
Anyone who has tried to cross the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver during rush hour or waited in line behind the perpetually dissatisfied customer at a Yorkville coffee shop in Toronto knows the fiction of portraying Canada as a nation of 1950s gas station attendants.
(Of course, ideas like "Own the Podium" allowed U.S. snowboarder Nate Holland the perfect opening to gently poke our preferred self image and some members of the international press had an opening to out-and-out savage it.)
This is about what is reasonable and rational.
Sure, gold medals are nice. But they are not the fabric of a nation.
What makes Canada great are the soldiers who put themselves between both sides of an armed conflict for the most Canadian of concepts: peace keeping.
What makes Canada great is the collective will to follow a deadly earthquake with record levels of donations.
What makes Canada great is that our national values dictate everyone is entitled to equal opportunity, even if the practice lags a fair bit on the theory.
What makes Canada great are a million things big and small that certainly do not depend on being faster, stronger or higher.
We should want to win gold medals.
We should not need to win them.
About the Author
- Bruce Arthur Bruce Arthur is the National Post's national sports columnist. A Vancouver native, he has been with the Post since 2001, and a columnist since 2005. He is covering his second Olympics, after the 2008 Games in Beijing. He expects these Games to be slightly less propagandistic, and for China to win slightly fewer medals.
- Joe O'Connor Joe O'Connor is a roving sports feature writer with an open-ended beat. He joined the National Post in 2002, and has spent the past seven years bouncing from sport to sport, offering fresh perspectives and delivering unique stories wherever he goes. Whether it has been getting Don Cherry to open up about his love life; George Chuvalo to talk about heartbreaking loss; or racing down the side of a mountain with former Crazy Canuck, Dave Irwin, the veteran Postie chases a story wherever it leads. Before joining the newspaper he was a two-time silver medalist at the National Magazine Awards. Vancouver will be his first Olympics.
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