China topped the official medals table at the Beijing Olympics, the first
country since the Soviet Union in 1988 to break the 50-gold-medal barrier.
What lesson can Canada take from this, as it accepts the torch and runs all the
way to Vancouver with it, for the next time the giant cauldron has to be lit,
two years hence? Simply this: With a little hometown pluck and ingenuity,
anything is possible. Especially if there's a spare $43 billion lying around to
finance the project.
No?
Well then, there could be some challenges.
It's not that we need fear a repeat of Calgary in 1988, when Canadian athletes
en masse succumbed to the pressure and - for the second Olympic Games in a row
on home soil, following a shutout in Montreal in 1976 - failed to produce a
single gold medal.
We're well beyond that now, especially in winter sports, where our NHL
professionals are handling the hockey chores (think Salt Lake City, not Turin)
and the Games program has expanded to include curling (think Brad Gushue, not
Mike Harris) and short-track speedskating, freestyle skiing, the X-Games and a
whole bunch of other pursuits at which the rest of the world hasn't completely
overtaken us, yet.
Plus, our skill set has expanded.
Like China, which blew past the rest of the world by targeting, for the past
seven years, medal-rich sports at which it had not traditionally been a player,
Canadians are no longer just downhill skiers and skaters.
With several years of Own The Podium incentives having gone into the coffers of
sports in which we have even a snowball's hope of medals, we have become
threats in all the sliding sports - bobsled, luge and skeleton - and
cross-country skiing and snowboard, and it's a simple fact that the more places
the pressure gets spread around, the less there is on any one athlete.
That makes it easier for all of them, and China, with medals just about
everywhere the Olympic flag was flying the past few weeks, showed conclusively
that many hands make light work.
The dominant faces of China's hopes coming into the Beijing Games - basketball
star Yao Ming and hurdler Liu Xiang - may not have delivered as hoped, but Yao
was a delightful presence on an outclassed Chinese team, and Liu, trying to
come back from a hamstring injury, was felled by a strained Achilles tendon.
Pressure was not the issue in either case.
That doesn't mean Canadians won't suffer the odd crack-up.
Other than hockey players, few of our athletes will have experienced the size
and fervor of the crowds trying to will them to victory in their home country,
and there is something about those rings and those Canadian flags that bring
out nerves even experienced athletes never knew existed.
What Vancouver will discover, if it hasn't already, is how the Olympics will
transform the city.
Not just the infrastructure - the new rapid transit line, the fixed-up
Sea-to-Sky Highway - but the mood of the city will change. It happened in
Calgary, which by comparison to Vancouver sprawls all over the landscape.
In a city bracketed by mountains and sea, the Games will move in and take over.
And with any luck - if we've learned anything from China - we're going to try
very hard to be a little less reserved, a little friendlier, and a whole lot
more welcoming to the tens of thousands of visitors who'll be crowding hotels
and bars and restaurants, looking for directions, trying to get through the
language difficulties.
That, truly, was the great revelation of China during the Beijing Games: A
cheerful willingness to help that pervaded every experience, whether it was
Olympic-related or not.
We'll be hard-pressed to pull that off, unless we also plan to have seven
people assigned to every volunteer's job.
But on the sports front, we should be in the game.
Own The Podium has no wiggle room in its charter: Canada is supposed to be the
No. 1 medal-winning nation in 2010. Every twitch of every muscle in every
winter sports federation has been pointed that way since January of 2005, when
the program launched, and $110 million has been poured into the effort.
It seems kind of small, by comparison to what China invested in the all-out
mission to overtake its ideological rival, the United States.
But that was a higher mountain to climb.
The winter world is smaller, and a smidgen less intense.
But ours is still high enough that whether we get all the way to the top or
not, we're going to be standing a littler taller coming out of the Games - as a
city and a country - than we were going in.
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