Money translates to medals; there’s simply no way around it. Elite athletic performance requires tremendous dedication on the part of the athlete, as well as the trainers, coaches, staff, and lots of facilities.
That said it should be noted that Canada’s increasing medal tally has a lot to do with the changing nature of the Olympics. Note that the first nine medals Canada’s won at this Olympics were in events that did not even exist in 1988. In 2010, of the 14 gold medals Canada won, 11 were in events that had not existed in Calgary in 1988. Most of our improvement is because they’re adding events our athletes are good at.
Own the Podium still works, of course. After all, 3 gold medals in 2010 is a lot more than zero in 1988, and it’s likely Own the Podium has had a lot to do with Canadian athletes stepping up and winning new events and sports - especially freestyle skiing disciplines, where Canada has spent a great deal of time and money and has collected an absolute bumper crop of Olympic and World Cup glory. It is not a fluke that Canada won four out of six moguls medals this year; it’s absolutely a targeted sport that Own the Podium put a crapload of effort into. Logically, it’s to be expected that Own the Podium would have a much greater impact on newish sports where you can blitz the sport with money and talented athletes ahead of other nations that do not have a long history of tradition, skill, and knowledge to draw from. You would also expect such a program to have far less of an impact in very well established sports that other countries have dominated for generations - like Norway in cross country skiing, or the Netherlands in speed skating, since no reasonably possible amount of money is going to make up for the sheer cultural penetration and established infrastructure those sports have in those countries. And indeed that is precisely what has happened; Own the Podium has paid off in new sports but had relatively modest successes in old ones. (Conversely, China could put a billion dollars into women’s hockey in the next four years and we’d still destroy them in 2018.)
So the increased medal count is really a product of three things:
There are more medals being handed out now - there are about twice as many events at the Winter Games now as there were in 1988.
The new events are heavily weighted in favour of events Canadians are good at.
Part of the reason we are good at them is that Own the Podium specifically targeted many of those events, as the opportunity was there to get a jump start in new disciplines and establishe dominance in them.
In alpine ski racing, the Own the Podium approach is filtering down to the regional and local levels, which is moving more toward up-or-out rather than broad based inclusion. Lots of debate as to whether this is good for the sport in the long term, given that without a broad appeal there will not necessarily be a big enough talent pool of kids in the sport. Should funds be put into identifying potential high end athletes fairly early on (but not too young), doing a superior job at training them, and weeding out the ones who will not make it to the top fairly early on? Should funds be put into getting as many kids into skiing and into ski racing as possible, so as to have a broader base of skiers from which to be able to draw more talent (as opposed to the talented kids playing hockey or some such other sport)?
That truly sucks. There’s a highway like that in northern Alberta going to Fort Mac (so it’s always full of oil patch workers and big trucks) that kills people regularly, too. I think they’ve moved twinning that highway up to critical - I hope they do the same with yours. If you’ve got a known problem, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and fix it.
There was a similar stretch of the #1 on the Saskatchewan side of Sask-Alberta border; it was single-laned, and one of the most dangerous stretches of the #1 in Canada. The government put the money into twinning it.
God, I remember driving that fucking stretch. I cursed the Saskatchewan government every time I drove through it - cough up the money already! Twin this melonfarming road!
Well, the accident occurred at 8:20 AM Friday, right at Chalk River. I passed that point at 8:10. There’s a truck parking area off the highway just before Chalk (as the locals call it) and a transport truck was pulling out of the parking area onto the highway just as a car decided to pass another on a solid line both ways.
Obey the solid lines folks, they’re there for a reason.
I think the transport driver had looked to his right and determined all was fine, and then was probably looking in his side mirror as he pulled onto the highway. Simultaneously someone in a hurry decided to pass on the double solid line. Whammo.
A 23 year old, and an 18 year old. The fact that life can be extinguished so suddenly, unexpectedly, and without reason has always scared me. I’m a very nervous carpool passenger on that highway. I feel much more in control when I’m driving.
ETA: On the third photo you can just see the lights at Plant Road where I turn in to AECL.
On Friday a couple of blocks from the end of Highway 61 during a winter storm (obviously not the New Orleans end of 61), a transport cab decided to turn left against a couple of lanes of traffic and spun out in front of me. A few minutes later on the highway, a full transport got it in its head to pass me and jackknifed, blocking three lanes. Today in a winter storm on 61 I had to pull off the highway due to a transport driving down the middle of the road toward and past me. Now I don’t know whether snow makes these transport drivers’ brains freeze up, or if they were born stupid in the first place, but I’m getting sorely tired of their dangerous driving.
I’m going to come to the defense of truck drivers again. I think I did that a few weeks back too. I’ve never experienced an aggressive, hostile or incompetent truck driver in my 4,000 or so hours on this highway.
I just wanted to put that out there. There has only been one fatal I can think of in 4+ plus years where the truck driver was at fault.
These guys are speed limited and professional. They are not the issue; car drivers are.
I’ll agree with you about 95%. The other five per cent (at a pulled-out-of-my-ass estimate) do indeed cause problems. I was driving on our local clusterfuck highway (#2/Deerfoot Trail) last year during heavy traffic time, and a couple of semis decided that that was a good time for them to drive side-by-side below the speed limit for miles and miles on end, causing a massive back-up behind them and lots of rage-filled drivers.
I’ll give you that it is probably 95% cars getting in the way of trucks most of the time (not understanding that they have different ways of handing hills, that they can’t stop on a dime, etc.).
35cm of snow, drifts up to 4 ft in the driveway, a 4ft by 3ft by 20ft wall of hard packed snow from the plow at the foot of the driveway and 3 hours of pushing snow around with the sleigh shovel. I think I’ve had enough of winter.
You know winter has been too long and cold when people start saying that a high of -18 C feels warm. Yesterday was the first day of above normal temperatures in three weeks :eek: .
