Vancouver Now - Owning the podium comes with a steep price

EMAIL | PRINT | REPORT TYPO | SEND YOUR FEEDBACK |

Owning the podium comes with a steep price

February 26, 2010 9:58 PM |
By Erin Valois

Story provided by

In 2003, when Vancouver 2010 was just a bid, a journalist asked then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien how the "Canadian way" might point to victory.

By Joe Brean, National Post

In 2003, when Vancouver 2010 was just a bid, a journalist asked then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien how the "Canadian way" might point to victory.

His answer -- "We're not flashy, we're not bulls---ters. We're competent." -- seemed controversial at the time only for its vulgarity.

But to judge by the criticism of the Own the Podium program's brash and broken promise of global dominance, and the Canadian Olympic Committee's plan to "eviscerate" it with an "autopsy," these Games have left the impression Chrétien was mistaken.

The Canadian way in Vancouver was to promise a first-place finish that, as Own the Podium CEO Roger Jackson said Friday, was "probably unachievable," and therefore, on Chrétien's analysis, un-Canadian.

This failure to live up to posturing and bluster has cast a faint shadow of disappointment over the as-yet second-best Winter Games medal count in Canadian history, which in some ways, such as the record number of golds, already outstrips more scientific statistical predictions.

With the historical exception of Canada, host nations tend to do well at Olympics, with an average boost of three medals in Winter Games, and 25 in Summer.

This is partly due to the universal impulse to launch programs like Own the Podium, according to Daniel Johnson, a Canadian professor of economics at Colorado College whose Olympic medal predictions based on economic factors have shown better than 90% accuracy over the past decade or so.

But there are other important factors over which governments have less control, such as climate (temperate zones are better than tropics), political structure (democracy is positive, with exceptions), population (the more the merrier), and national gross domestic product.

Sub-Sharan Africa, which has a large population but only 2% of historical Olympic medals, is an extreme illustration of these trends, and there are countries, such as Australia, which for some reason tend to beat the projections.

This year, the data says Canada should see a repeat of the 24 medals in Torino, plus three for home field advantage. With 17 medals, of which eight are gold, as of press time last night, that total now seems unattainable, and a first place finish is impossible.

But it gives an opportunity to evaluate a program that is at risk of being unfairly seen as a failure simply because, by its own wildly optimistic measure, it failed.

Studying the effects of national spending on Olympic programs is difficult, because most numbers are not public.

"They're worse than invisible. They're only partially visible. It's like knowing the salaries of some of the [New York] Yankees," Prof. Johnson said.

But the available data shows a clear positive effect to higher spending on elite sport, and "if there is a limit, it's really high," Prof. Johnson said.

Eastern Bloc countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia illustrate this nicely, because they won many more medals than would be expected based on income.

"They were throwing enormous resources at a particular problem -- how do we win medals?" Prof. Johnson said. "Contrary to superficial perception, it's actually good for medal counts to be a communist nation."

In democratic countries, the question of whether government programs to boost medal counts are worth the expense makes a crucial and controversial assumption -- that sporting greatness can be bought in the first place, that medals have a price.

In Prof. Johnson's theory, it turns out that they do, and it is about $1,700 in gross domestic product per capita. A gold is a bit more, at $5,000.

Capitalizing on this simple theory poses a problem for governments, though, because it is not clear what they should spend their money on. A country cannot just buy more GDP, but if social welfare is such a strong predictor of medal success, perhaps the answer is to do as some protesters have suggested, and spend the Olympic money on social programs. But if medal counts follow such predictable trends anyway, why spend anything at all?

In Canada's case, the solution to this dilemma was Own The Podium, a program funded with $117-million over five years, of which just over half came from the government.

"The limiting factor here was time," Jackson, the CEO, said in an interview Friday.

Own the Podium did not have enough time to guide a solid amateur up to international level, he said, and so the spending was focused on athletes who were already "in the system," and especially in sports with an already deep talent pool, such as curling and hockey.

There also remains the sheer uncertainty of athletic competition at the highest level. A well-funded training program can develop far more medal contenders than one that lacks such finances, but a podium finish is ultimately dependent on a host of factors -- sometimes as intangible as grace under pressure or just plain bad luck -- and the difference between first and fourth can be sometimes measured in fractions of seconds.

Christine Nesbitt, the speed skater from London, Ont., won gold in the 1,000-metre race last week, edging a Dutch skater by two-hundreths of a second. Then yesterday, she was on the heavily favoured Canadian team that was beaten -- by five-hundreths of a second -- in the quarterfinals of the team pursuit, ensuring it would not win a medal.

The difference between success and failure in each case was the blink of an eye -- and yet the former was a victory for Own the Podium and the latter was an indictment of it.

"This debate is fantastic," he said of the sometimes harsh criticism. "We have never had such a debate in Canada about excellence, and suddenly it's at the political level, the business level."

Despite a secretive scientific program, one of Own the Podium's most controversial expenses is the cash payments to medallists, which Jackson called "a reward more than an incentive." A gold medallist gets $20,000, a silver $15,000 and a bronze $10,000.

"I find it unlikely that [these payments] have much of an effect, in the sense that these athletes are supremely committed to their athletic performance to begin with," said Prof. Johnson. "They chose something for the love of the endeavour. It's not as if you're going to take up bobsledding for the chance of a one-time $20,000."

One curious aspect of medal-count economics is that gold medals are special. The relative weight of each of the five factors -- climate, politics, GDP, population, and home field advantage -- is different when it comes to crowning an Olympic champion, as opposed to a mere top-three finisher. The home field advantage, for example, becomes especially important.

It is tempting to be sentimental about this trend, and attribute it to the inspiration of a supportive audience.

"That would be the story my heart would like to tell, that it's the cheering that boosts a silver to a gold," Prof. Johnson said. But he thinks the answer is less about emotion than the unpredictable vagaries of elite sport performance.

The numbers say Canada should have 7 golds by now, but in fact Canadians have already won 8. That puts Canada tied for second place behind Germany's nine, and as of last night, there remained several possibilities for more gold.

Clutch performances over the past week resulted in a late rush of medals by OTP-sponsored athletes like Jon Montgomery, which helped to rescue Own the Podium's credibility from its optimism.

"We told media that at least half the medals would come in last five days of the games, and that's what's happening now," Jackson said.

Heading into the final weekend, lagging the predictions of total medals, but with more Olympic champions than the cold economic theory would predict, it seemed possible that Chrétien was in fact correct, and competence was going to win out over bull---t.

Owning the podium comes with a steep price

About the Author

Recent Entries

Archives

Canadian Athletes

CBC Commentators

National Post Contributors