What a country.
I'm almost always a very proud Canadian. I qualify this entry with "almost always" because there are times when I'm really quite embarassed - and it usually happens once every two years, during the Olympics.
Now let me qualify that statement a bit. I'm very proud of our athletes, the brave individuals who train for years and years and years for one single performance - something that must take a level of commitment and courage that I honestly can't understand. This alone makes me proud of the athletes we send to the Olympics, as being an athlete of that caliber is of course very impressive. And I'm also very proud of the accomplishments that we as a country have achieved at the Olympics (Can we say, uh, "Final Score: Canada 5, USA 2"?).
But what embarasses me is the fact that overall, our country performs very poorly at the Olympics. Especially when compared with other nations - often those smaller than Canada. A population of 30+ Million people should be able to put together a fantastic Olympic team, be it the Summer or Winter games, that is competitive at all levels and in close to all events, and comes home with a significant medal count.
This, however, is not the case. Our governments (Municipal, Provincial, and Federal) all go on and on about how we should be proud of our athletes, and how important it is to send a good Olympic team to the games, yet the levels of funding that are provided to the athletic organizations across this country is absolutely pathetic. It is so poor that this year we are sending our smallest Olympic team ever to the games - a team that is not expected to perform very well at all.
In fact, our team is expected to perform so poorly that the Minister of Sport has claimed that Canadians should not expect our athletes to win many medals (going so far as to subtly imply he's not expecting even a single medal), but "I think at the end of the day, if we didn't win a medal but we found that the quality of life, measured by the amount of physical activity and health of the Canadian public, was increased, that would be a really good thing." (Read the whole thing here)
Actually, what would be a "really good thing" would be to have an Olympic team that was able to command respect at an international level. I'm sorry, but while he's certainly right that a good measure of a nation's health is the level of physical activity in which its population participates, it is still utterly embarassing that we have to send a team to the Olympics which is so devastatingly underfunded that they are not really expected to do anything but be an also-ran.
And that, I'm sad to say, is something that I'm not proud about being a Canadian.
Now let me qualify that statement a bit. I'm very proud of our athletes, the brave individuals who train for years and years and years for one single performance - something that must take a level of commitment and courage that I honestly can't understand. This alone makes me proud of the athletes we send to the Olympics, as being an athlete of that caliber is of course very impressive. And I'm also very proud of the accomplishments that we as a country have achieved at the Olympics (Can we say, uh, "Final Score: Canada 5, USA 2"?).
But what embarasses me is the fact that overall, our country performs very poorly at the Olympics. Especially when compared with other nations - often those smaller than Canada. A population of 30+ Million people should be able to put together a fantastic Olympic team, be it the Summer or Winter games, that is competitive at all levels and in close to all events, and comes home with a significant medal count.
This, however, is not the case. Our governments (Municipal, Provincial, and Federal) all go on and on about how we should be proud of our athletes, and how important it is to send a good Olympic team to the games, yet the levels of funding that are provided to the athletic organizations across this country is absolutely pathetic. It is so poor that this year we are sending our smallest Olympic team ever to the games - a team that is not expected to perform very well at all.
In fact, our team is expected to perform so poorly that the Minister of Sport has claimed that Canadians should not expect our athletes to win many medals (going so far as to subtly imply he's not expecting even a single medal), but "I think at the end of the day, if we didn't win a medal but we found that the quality of life, measured by the amount of physical activity and health of the Canadian public, was increased, that would be a really good thing." (Read the whole thing here)
Actually, what would be a "really good thing" would be to have an Olympic team that was able to command respect at an international level. I'm sorry, but while he's certainly right that a good measure of a nation's health is the level of physical activity in which its population participates, it is still utterly embarassing that we have to send a team to the Olympics which is so devastatingly underfunded that they are not really expected to do anything but be an also-ran.
And that, I'm sad to say, is something that I'm not proud about being a Canadian.
1 Comments:
you should be proud: the only people who win are the ones using drugs anyway. the fact that canadians lose horribly only proves they are clean.
yeah, that's my excuse for only having one medal.
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