Should we worry about Canada's winter sports decline?

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In early 2004, the people in charge of Canada's "high-performance" sports ecosystem met in Calgary to decide how to stop their worst nightmare from coming true.

Vancouver had recently been awarded the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. And these folks — including officials from the government, the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees and the various winter national sport organizations (NSOs) — wanted to avoid the humiliation of Montreal 1976 and Calgary '88, where Canada did not win a single gold medal. In fact, they set a far more ambitious goal: to put Canada on top of the medal standings in Vancouver.

In order to achieve this, the people in that room knew they would have to raise a lot of money from both the federal government and corporate sponsors. But a simple increase in funding would not be enough. They had to break from the traditional just-happy-to-be-here philosophy expressed by modern-day Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin when he said "the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part."

So, rather than continue to dole out support pretty equally across the dozen or so NSOs, a ruthless new system was devised: Canada would decide which sports and athletes had the highest potential to deliver medals and funnel the most money and other support (coaching, equipment, research, etc.) to them. This became known as the Own the Podium program, which officially launched in January 2005.

In terms of delivering on its core promise, OTP was a smashing (and immediate) success. At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, Canada's athletes won 24 medals — up from 17 four years earlier in Salt Lake City and, at the time, a national record for any non-boycotted Games (winter or summer). That paved the way to Vancouver, where Canada achieved its dream of topping the medal standings by winning 14 golds and 26 total medals — both national records — in what's widely considered the greatest Olympics in Canadian history.

Own the Podium continued to pay dividends as Canada finished third in the standings at each of the next two Winter Olympics, winning 10 golds and 25 total medals in 2014 in Russia before climbing to 11 and 29 in 2018 in South Korea. At the Covid-impacted 2022 Olympics in Beijing, Canada fell to just four golds but still racked up a healthy 26 total medals to finish in the top four in that category for the fifth straight time since the birth of OTP. Meanwhile, Canada placed third in golds and no worse than fourth in total medals at every Winter Paralympics from 2010 through 2022.

Own the Podium had its critics. Some claimed that a "win at all costs" mindset damaged athletes' mental health, while others lamented a lack of funding and attention for certain niche sports, perhaps costing them a chance to grow. But you couldn't argue with the bottom-line result: OTP turned Canada into a winter-sports powerhouse.

Unfortunately, two decades after the program's creation, things are trending in the wrong direction.

Looking back, the 2022 Olympics may have been the canary in the coal mine. At the time, Canada's paltry four gold medals (its fewest since 1994) were handwaved away as an unfortunate side-effect of the pandemic or just plain bad luck. But, last month in Milan-Cortina, Canada won just five golds and 21 overall medals — a decrease of five from Beijing and the lowest total of the Own the Podium era. The Paralympics were a disappointment too as Canada fell from eight golds and 25 overall medals in Beijing to just three and 15 this month in Milan-Cortina.

Those with skin in the game are mostly blaming Canada's struggles on a lack of funding — or at least a flattening of it, as the country has been unable or unwilling to keep pace with rival nations (like recent Olympics hosts China and Italy) who have upped the ante and reaped the rewards in their medal counts.

Canadian Olympic Committee CEO David Shoemaker said prior to the Games that there's "an immense funding gap" in the country's sports system, and Canadian Paralympic Committee head Karen O'Neill added last week that investment needs to rise in order for Canada to "continue to be competitive on the world stage." Veteran Olympic speed skater Laurent Dubreuil, who won a bronze in Milan, warned that Canada is "heading straight for disaster" if nothing is done to address athlete funding, which he says has been dwindling with each passing Olympic cycle.

Help could be on the way as Prime Minister Mark Carney said last week that Ottawa is planning to revamp its athlete funding model, which is in a state of disarray. But Carney and Secretary of State for Sport Adam van Koeverden, a former Olympic kayak champion, both indicated that the focus will be on grassroots-and-up, "playground to podium"-type initiatives, which sounds different than Own the Podium's approach.

We'll see how that shakes out. But I also think we've forgotten something amid all the hand-wringing over the country's Winter Olympic struggles, which is that Canada has improved dramatically in the Summer Olympics.