August 3, 2006
Government on wrong track
Feds have to lose the “if you’re not on the podium, you’re no good” mentality and invest in Canadian athletes, writes Rob Brodie
The thought was planted in Glenroy Gilbert’s head a few months back and, even today, it’s still a bit much to fathom.
Ten years since Atlanta? A decade really gone by since his greatest moment – and perhaps Canada’s best fortnight ever – in track and field?
“I was really shocked when I heard,” Gilbert said about the 10th anniversary of the Canadian 4x100-metre relay team’s gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
“It’s amazing to think that it’s been 10 years already.”
They will celebrate the achievements of Gilbert, Donovan Bailey (also golden in the 100 metres in Atlanta that year), Bruny Surin, Robert Esmie and Carleton Chambers on Saturday, the middle day of the Canadian track and field championships at the Terry Fox Athletic Facility. And once the moment has passed, attention will again turn to the present of track and field in this country.
It will be a return to a rather sobering reality.
Ten years since Atlanta? It might as well be a hundred, given the tattered state of athletics in Canada these days. Years of federal government budget slashing have ravaged the sport, and now it is far too much about surviving – rather than thriving – if you’re a track athlete.
Talent isn’t the question. It’s about keeping it in the sport.
“We have the athletes,” said Gilbert. “We just need to support them.”
Easier said than done. Today’s grim reality is something the doomsayers in amateur sport have been predicting for years. The financial gravy train from federal government coffers started running off track a decade ago, or right around the time Canadians were rejoicing about their heroes taking down the vaunted Americans right in their backyard.
It has been a downward spiral ever since.
“(What happened in 1996) was still a product of the '70s and '80s, when sport had value and it had money and the wheels hadn’t come to a stop yet,” said Andy McInnis of the Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club, the meet director for this year’s nationals and the coach of the Canadian athletics team in Atlanta.
“I think they came to a stop by the end of the '90s. Certainly before Sydney (in 2000), they came to a dead stop.”
Make no mistake about it. Canadian track and field has produced its moments since Sydney. Sprint hurdler Perdita Felicien of Pickering was a world champion going into the 2004 Athens Olympics, where an unfortunate fall in the final cost her a shot at gold. Tyler Christopher of Edmonton is the reigning world bronze medallist in the 400 metres.
Yes, it’s possible to be a Canadian track and field athlete and succeed on the global stage. But McInnis, for one, believes the current amateur sport funding philosophy in Canada is limiting those opportunities to an elite few.
“Podium is the new catchword. I hear it from all the sport bureaucrats,” said McInnis, also the director of programs for the Lions.
"If you’re not on the podium, you’re not any good. If you can’t convince us that you have the potential to be on the podium, then you’re not very good. There’s no room for the road warriors that we used to have on every team that would run and participate for a decade … the wonderful guys that made the teams what they were. Now, you almost have to prove you’re good and we’ll give you a chance. But if you fail, you’re out. That’s it, you had your chance.
“What Canadians are doing painting a picture like that, I don’t understand. It’s caused by tying funding to success. We are restricting funding, getting less and less, and it’s a big toilet bowl. It’s spinning and slowly going down.”
Canada sent only 40 track and field athletes to the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in March (it has sent 75-100 in the past). The number for next year’s Pan Am Games in Brazil might only be 25.
“Where do you get relay teams out of that?” asks McInnis. “You don’t. You can’t have relay teams (with those small numbers). But if the criteria (for making the team) is podium individual and there’s not enough individuals because of that, then there’s no relays.”
McInnis even goes so far as to suggest that in today’s environment, someone like Gilbert – the man whose blazing second leg set the table for the relay gold in Atlanta – might not have had that chance.
“There are several cases in Glenroy’s history where, had we not had options to add people for relays, he wouldn’t have been on the team,” said McInnis. “And can you imagine that? I can’t imagine it. There would have been no team.”
The knife has cut even deeper at the development levels, where athletes are regularly asked to fund their own trips to major competitions. Five Lions competitors leave next week for the world junior championships in Beijing, each one of them having paid $3,000 to get the experience. The tab started out at $5,000 per athlete, but Athletics Canada secured a sponsor to defray some of the cost.
“Athletics Canada has no money to send a junior to China,” said McInnis. "They have no money to send the under-17s to the youth championship … anything under 20, (athletes) have been told you pay your own way. It was never like that before.
“I need a carrot to drive my kids and there’s no carrots. Nothing. The bowl is empty … We need carrots where, if you make a team, you don’t pay $3,000. That’s their reward.”
It is against that backdrop that Gilbert, AC’s sprint and relay coach, has been charged with trying to recreate the magic of Atlanta.
In March, he was heartened by the performance of Nathan Taylor, Emanuel Parris, Charles Allen and Anson Henry, who teamed up to bring home sprint relay bronze in Melbourne (Hank Palmer was the fifth member of the team; another top sprinter, Nick Macrozanaris, missed the meet because of a hamstring injury).
“That was a huge, huge improvement and a huge stepping stone,” said Gilbert. "The last time we’d won a medal (at a major Games) was when I was running with Donovan and the other guys.
“Now we just need to continue to build on that. A lot came out of that group in Melbourne, but now we have to continue to support them, and provide opportunities to get together and compete against each other. And then, obviously, to compete against the best in the world.”
Gilbert believes building a team that can at least reach the final at next year’s world championships in Japan, and then again at the 2008 Games in Beijing, is “completely doable.”
McInnis doesn’t disagree, but admits more funding is vital.
“With money, it could happen in two years,” he said. “It takes a year for people to see that it’s there, and a year for it to start making a difference. But it needs to come for the coming year, for 2007.”
Failing that, he said, the relay team faces a climb that might be just too steep.
“Is Beijing possible? I don’t want to be a total pessimist, but I’d say it’s going to be a really hard row to hoe,” he said. "You need a certain amount of people to call it a team. We just don’t provide that opportunity anymore.
“It’s all squeezed down from the top, but we’ve squeezed beyond a level of acceptability,” he added. “We’re just squeezing way too hard. We’ve squeezed everything out.”
