4/26/2022 0 Comments Excerpt From My Thesis ProjectFormer Toronto Mayor David Miller still vividly remembers his experience at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. He still remembers watching Finnish runner Lasse Virén winning gold in the 10,000m event, running into East German rowers on the Montreal subway, and he still gets chills when he remembers being in the stadium for the ovation that Israeli athletes got during the opening ceremony – four years after terrorists killed eleven members of the Israeli delegation and a West German police officer at the 1972 Games in Munich. He still remembers being one of several people chosen to run alongside the torch relay, carrying a smaller torch up Mount Royal, and he still remembers the “impossibly giant television screen” at the Olympic Stadium, one of the first of its kind. “I've got 17-year-old eyes, and there's the Olympics, and there's this stadium, and there's a velodrome, and bikes go in circles incredibly fast…,” Miller recalled. “And there was Nadia Comăneci, and Greg Joy got a medal for Canada on the last day. Those are my memories. “At its very, very best, sports – like great art and great music – can bring out the common humanity in everyone and it's a force to bring people together.” he said. “Somehow, the experience is about you and them. It's not just as a spectator, at its best sports involves both things. You get to be part of it too.” This is the effect that sport can have on people. There are physical legacies that come with hosting a major sporting event – things like stadiums and other infrastructure – but the way that sports can make people feel, and bring people together, can’t be measured in dollar figures or in square feet. Faster, higher, stronger “The International Olympic Committee has the honour of announcing that the 21st Olympic Winter Games in 2010 are awarded to the city of … Vancouver.” Those twenty-four words from then-IOC President Jacques Rogge on July 2, 2003 changed Canadian sports forever. Beating Pyeongchang, South Korea (who would end up hosting the 2018 Winter Games) by just three votes, the result was mostly met with cheers across Canada. After hosting the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada was getting another shot at welcoming the world for one of the biggest sporting events on the planet. “I was quite excited, it would have been [announced] a year after 2002, which was my first Paralympics. I think at the time, I probably didn't necessarily appreciate the magnitude of it,” said Para alpine skier Lauren Woolstencroft. “I grew up in Calgary, so I was pretty young in 1988, only six I think, when the Games were on. I didn't remember all the details, but remember it had been a pretty fun experience.” The then-21-year-old skier, fresh off two gold medals in Salt Lake City in 2002, had also just graduated university. She had considered retiring to focus on her career, but the prospect of a home Paralympics in 2010 was too good to pass up on. “It was just a complicated time to figure out what was beyond, but I think having the idea that it was going to be a home Games was pretty special and definitely motivated me to keep going,” she said. “I was working as well. So it was a lot of balancing between making sure I was still employed and making money to live, but then finding hours to train, so it was quite intense. We had such a fantastic team that organised all of that and did all that. I was the one who had to show up and do the work, which is hard, but I didn't have to focus on planning it. It was definitely very busy.” After failing to win a gold medal on home soil at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary – the only host country ever to not win a single event (they did win 25 gold medals at the 1976 Summer Paralympics in Toronto, however) – there was a lot of weight on Canadian athletes’ shoulders to finally get it done in Vancouver. There was an external pressure, especially for the athletes deemed Canada’s best medal hopes, always looming in the leadup to the Games. Boasting some of the top winter athletes in the world, that pressure is always on Team Canada, but it was multiplied many times over to win at home. Programs like Own The Podium, created to fund athletes and do exactly as its name suggests, maximise the number of medals won at home, were launched – and were important to ensure that Canadians were able to compete at their best. The program was a major talking point in the leadup to 2010. Created in 2004, it had an immediate positive effect. The way Own The Podium operates is that it allocates money to the different Canadian national sport organisations (like Canada Soccer, Hockey Canada, and Swimming Canada), with the funding varying based on which sports Own The Podium decides have the best medal potential. “The funding is not specifically earmarked for individual athletes, it's about supporting the high-performance program of the National Sport Organisations so that they can develop and implement a number of key elements that are essential for athletes to be able to eventually get on the podium,” explained Own The Podium CEO Anne Merklinger, who has been in that role for about a decade. “Those key elements include the National Sport Organisation being able to hire world leading coaches and technical staff, a world leading daily training environment, optimal competition environment, sports science and sport medicine support, and research and innovation. So it's all of those areas that are components of the sport’s high performance plan that we provide a funding recommendation for.” The program has obvious benefits on the field of play – athletes are able to maximise their potential. But along with that increased funding comes increased pressure, especially when Canada was trying to overcome that hurdle of never winning gold at home before. “I know there was a lot of pressure in the media about that first gold medal. I didn't feel that pressure within, I think it was just an artificial pressure that we hear from people,” said freestyle skier Alexandre Bilodeau, who would end up winning Canada’s historic first gold medal at Vancouver 2010 in the men’s moguls competition. “The pressure of winning for me came more from me than the media. I knew I had maybe a chance for the first gold medal but it's not something you control because I was the second day, I could have been the second week and I wouldn't have any chance, so for me it's just a timing thing and I wasn't putting any energy into it.” Entering Vancouver as one of Canada’s medal hopes after winning the 2009 overall moguls title on the World Cup circuit, he delivered on Cypress Mountain, skiing to a final score of 26.75, beating second place by a narrow 0.17 points. The scenes of him celebrating with his older brother Frédéric, who has cerebral palsy, are one of the lasting memories from the 2010 Olympics for many people. “It's unreal to just spend time with your family and in your own country. Just living the experience of having just won the Olympics, it's an unreal feeling to just share that with your family,” Bilodeau said. While he didn’t know most of them personally, the more than 20,000 fans that piled into BC Place the next day for the medal ceremony, and the thousands more celebrating from coast to coast, were right there celebrating with him. “It gives me goosebumps still to just have a flashback… [being] on that podium, walking on, and when you hear ‘Olympic champion’, it gets to you,” he added. “And then you see the Canadian flag rising with like 20,000 people singing O Canada, and at home…. It's something very special.”
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AuthorBenedict Rhodes is a sports writer and podcast host from Ontario, Canada. ArchivesCategories |