Shitty administration is a constant in every country - including the UK, Canada, USA and Jamaica!
Individual coaches drive the sport. Don’t get me wrong, we have lots of shitty coaches in Canada. Most of them make my skin crawl. A few of them think “professional development” is hiring a prostitute while on a training camp. The same likely goes for other countries as well.
A few years ago, I attend the USATF podium project conference in Vegas. I was shocked at how much knowledge was lacking by the coaches in attendance - with very little background knowledge on basic sport physiology, recovery and regeneration and even technical execution.
Talent will go a long way to make bad coaches good, and mediocre coaches great. But don’t assume that Canada is brimming with lots of natural talent that cannot be developed by our coaches. Our sports culture is moving away from sport such as Track and Field. Kids want to play soccer, hockey, football, basketball and other sports popularized in the U.S.A (I also forgot to mention Playstation and Xbox). But we only have a fraction of the population of the US and our talent pools get watered down. Jamaica doesn’t have to worry about their fast guys going into ice hockey or football. They may want to play soccer, but I would guess that most of the kids want to be a world class sprinter.
I’m starting to think that more and more people are anti-sports in Canada. I can’t believe how many dip-shits are protesting the Olympics and trying to tackle the torch-relay runners. A recent article came out indicating how our sport funding will be slashed post-2010 (see below).
So you can see why I’m a little sensitive to comments that insinuate Canada is ripe with talent, but with no direction… Try freakin’ living here as a coach!
Canadian Olympic funding model in danger of collapsing
BY CAM COLE, CANWEST NEWS SERVICE
NOVEMBER 11, 2009
VANCOUVER – He speaks of Vanoc CEO John Furlong’s 80-to-90-hour work weeks as though his own 70-hour contributions to the cause are paltry by comparison.
But sometime in the near future, if any of the momentum from Own The Podium (OTP) is to be carried forward for the next generation of Canadian athletes, let alone the one after that, Roger Jackson will have to be recognized as an Olympic MVP in his own right.
Because he will have done the impossible.
In a recession-whipped economy, when every government expenditure is micro-analyzed, bitched at and protested over, the 67-year-old Olympic gold medal-winning rower — with Canadian swimming legend Alex Baumann guarding his flanks — has gone before a parliamentary finance committee and argued for millions in “replacement funding” to sustain the snowball that Own The Podium has been rolling down the hill for the past five years.
All I know is, it’s a good thing Jackson is already in the Order of Canada, because making that sale is not going to win him many popularity contests.
But the arithmetic is plain.
From an apex of $32-million in the 2009-10 season — that’s the amount of money Own The Podium has been able to direct to high-performance Winter Olympic sports through contributions from the federal government, Vanoc, the Canadian Olympic Committee and Sport Canada — Jackson says the available funds for 2010-11 could drop as low as $13-million, once the five-ring circus has moved on and everyone’s euphoria faucet gets turned off.
So even as Part One of the project Own The Podium’s CEO signed up for in 2005 — providing the mechanism to put Canada atop the 2010 Winter Olympic medals table — nears the final examination with a slugger’s chance of success, Part Two is hanging by a thread.
Making it last: There’s the rub.
The Calgary Olympic Oval and the sliding centre at Canada Olympic Park, two major legacies of the 1988 Olympics that have allowed our country to even dare to dream about the top step of the podium, are in danger of being shuttered because the 1988 endowment fund isn’t spinning off enough interest any more to keep them running.
And unless something dramatic happens in the next three months to change OTP’s financial outlook, the shrinking budget is going to result in dozens of high-performance coaches, technicians, support staff and, yes, athletes surveying the landscape and deciding they need to move on.
“Everything we’ve done for five years will collapse after the Games, if we don’t have replacement funding,” Jackson said Tuesday. A large percentage of what OTP and Vanoc have been able to cobble together “will lapse once the Games are over, because the corporate sponsors, participating provinces and Vanoc itself, through the Red Mittens campaign, etc. — all of that is terminating next spring.”
Jackson and Baumann have made their pitch in Ottawa, and so have all the other major stakeholders, and they think the government is in the mood to listen. But it is, on the surface, a big ask.
Not only does Jackson say that OTP requires an annual $22-million in replacement funding to bring the winter sports budget up to $33-million (summer sports get $34-million), he and Baumann are asking for another $60-million per year, to be divided among four regional summer and winter sports institutes which are to be established in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver now that Toronto has won the right to stage the 2015 Pan-American Games.
“You can raise your eyebrows, but when we go to London, their annual budget is $300-million a year to prepare their team for the (2012) Olympics,” said Jackson, who was a key consultant for the London bid committee before returning to head up OTP in 2005. “I’m dealing with $45 million — and that’s summer and winter, not just summer. Australia (with a negligible winter sports component) has a budget that is almost double ours.”
No one can say that the OTP folks haven’t held up their end. What seemed like a pie-in-the-sky notion when it was first proposed is not even a longshot any more. Canada might not win the most medals, but it’s going to be in the conversation.
But who’s kidding whom? Jackson knows that an Olympics on home ice and snow is the only reason the door is even ajar at the government level, just as it has been the catalyst for all kinds of corporations to jump aboard in the years leading up to the 2010 Games.
So if a shot at a sustainable future for athletic excellence is ever going to be taken, now is the time.
The federal budget comes out in February. That’s Olympic month. Two plus two equals …
“What would be incredibly positive for all concerned would be the federal government saying (OTP) has been a great success and we’re fully committed to it,” said Jackson. “The timing is up to the government, but … it just happens to be a great moment for an announcement that we think would be very well received.”
And so it might, if the athletes perform up to their potential, and the country is enthralled by the Olympics.
Jackson doesn’t think the government would be cynical enough to wait and see what our Olympians do in February, before making up its mind about the money, but as unpatriotic as that sounds, it’s not out of the question.
And the “nay” side hasn’t got its licks in, yet, either.
Jackson is optimistic. Professionally so. But it will be a close call.
at York U as an athlete, coach, and beloved fan Ontario track and field. So I agree with A LOT of what you said and I’m certain we share a lot of the same gripes. When I speak of leadership by no means am I attacking the coaches as they are, in a lot of ways, the life blood (good or bad). So again I’m not refering to the coaches just those that manage the resources and direct it’s use.