You forgot to add, “…where I buy each Canadian a large double-double and a maple-glazed.” 
We don’t have a problem.
- Canada actually does very well at the Olympics. It’s just that the sports we do well in take place at the WINTER Games, not the Summer games. Have a look at the 2006 medal standings; Canada won 24 medals, Australia won two. Canada won more medals than any country except Germany and the USA, and wasn’t far behind them, and won medlas in 10 separate disciplines, more than any country.
That a sub-Arctic country would do better at the Winter games is hardly surprising.
- Other countries pour bazillions of dollars into paying athletes to prepare for the Olympics; Canada doesn’t, at least not to the same extent. This is much bemoaned by the media and the sport lobby, but I really don’t see why that’s a bad thing.
Why should my tax dollars go to pumping up our medal count at one of the most transcendently corrupt sporting enterprises in the history of the world? If Australians are okay with pumping zillions of Aussie bucks into producing medal winners, well, hooray for them. Personally I don’t see how there’s anything to be proud of there. I’m vastly more impressed with someone who’s legitimately an amateur winner one medal than ten state-funded professionals winning ten.
- The “medal count” is warped by the fact that the Olympics hands out many medals to some sports, only one or two medals to others, and none to many. Swimmers can win many medals - Michael Phelps is a radical example, but multi-medal winners happen every time out in that sport, and a country that invests a lot of money in their swimming program can send dozens of athletes to compete for thirty-two gold medals - but a female softball player can only win one. Runners can often win medals in multiple events, but pole vaulters have one event. It’s already been mentioned that India doesn’t win many medals, but the most popular sport in India is cricket, which is not an Olympic event at all.
The one sport Canada most dominates in is hockey. Canada’s production of elite hockey players is ridiculously disproportionate to its population. But that only happens at the Winter Games and there’s only one event (well, one for each gender.) If the hockey lobby got a bunch more hockey events added - ringette, sledge hockey - open-ice hockey, air hockey, and various other made-up events - we’d dominate those too and win more medals.
That depends on what you mean by “hockey”. In the most recent game between Canada and Australia at hockey, Australia beat Canada by 6 to 1.
(Unsurprisingly, in Australia “hockey” means field hockey, just as in Canada, “hockey” means ice hockey).
Sure do. Get your ass off the couch and go compete internationally before you complain about our athletes. :rolleyes:
…but only because Norway ended up finishing FOURTH in EVERY BLOODY EVENT OF THE WHOLE FUCKING WINTER GAMES. Not that I am bitter.
(The fourth place doesn’t apply to ice hockey. We suck at hockey. This is because, given a flat expanse of ice, the Norwegian instinct is not to round up friends and get a puck and some sticks, but to drill a hole in it and (pretend to) fish for a few hours. I do not know why this is so, but it is so, and the result is that we let poor Sweden beat us at one event every winter 
)
Anyway. Every summer, as soon as the water gets soft, half the country heads for the coast and stays there as long as possible. In the month of July in particular, many kids are only dry when sleeping or eating, and resemble pink raisins for weeks at a time. And yet Norway just won its very first swimming medal ever. Why? For some reason, although the idea that Every Kid Needs To Learn To Swim is something approaching a national religion, there is very little investment in large pools, swimming competitions, and other things needed to get a kid from Swimming For Fun And Safety up to Competing On An International Level. On the other hand, rowing and sailing get a lot more attention, which in this case means money, and Norway has a history of doing well in them. Not a big mystery, it’s just another case where more money means more results.
Pfft. Norway benefits enough from crosscountry skiing having races in three different disciplines, 8 different lengths, solo and team for both genders, for a total of 96 gold medals (or so it seems). Now, I think we should put up boards along the crosscountry venue at Vancouver and allow bodychecking and then we’d see how well Norway does!
It so happens that I have competed internationally. I played football in Europe against the English and the Dutch.
“And in the road hockey preliminaries today, Canada dominated mainly due to their play, but also because teams from other nations had no idea what to do when the Canadians hollered, ‘Car!’…”
You played in the World Cup?
No, I didn’t get that far.
Exactly. The fact that merely being a host country puts you in the running for high medal counts is one of the many markers of corruption.
Why don’t we just dope up lab rats with whatever steroids are currently being pumped into Olympic athletes, and have them run races against each other for cheese? It would amount to the same thing and would be much less expensive.
I’ll admit I’m not overly impressed by some of the swimmers achievments. Multiple Golds for basicly the same damn thing!
That would be like a dart player getting gold for 301, 301 double-in, 301 double-in double-out, 501, 501 double-in, 901 etc. (I don’t want to hear it, so don’t bother!)
Point being, Yeah, okay. You swim real fast. Have a gold medal or two. But 9?
Yes, but the question was specifically about the Olympics, and there’s absolutely no doubt that Australia’s Olympic performances have been dramatically influenced by government funding.
And that’s precisely because New Zealand is, pretty much, obsessed with that one sport. Sure, they have an international cricket team, a soccer team, etc., but rugby is the one sport that just about every sports-loving Kiwi is obsessed with. Playing for the All Blacks is the childhood dream of every New Zealand kid who pulls on a rugby jumper to play for his school or his local team.
Also, the fact is that rugby is a fairly limited sport internationally. Sure, countries like Canada and the United States have some rugby, and also field national teams, but i’ve lived in both of those countries during the Rugby World Cup, and the level of interest in their own teams hovers somewhere between complete apathy and total obliviousness. I’m sort of glad the Americans basically ignore rugby, because if they became as obsessed about it as Kiwis are, or as Americans are about NFL or baseball, they’d probably dominate the spot in pretty short order.
Probably not, but the Australian government, at the national level alone, spends over $200 million a year on the Australian Sports Commission, which is charged with recognizing and developing athletes, and oversees the Australian Institute of Sport. State and local governments contribute more money on top of that.
Also, in the period since the Australian Institute of Sport was founded, Australia has radically changed its funding procedure for higher education. Instead of providing university education for free, and funding it through general tax revenue, the government moved to a system (Higher Education Contribution Scheme, or HECS), where people who get a university degree incur a personal debt, which they then repay on top of their regular taxes. I’m not complaining about this; i actually think it’s a good system.
But, in that same period, government support for elite athletes has continued to balloon, and these athletes, some of whom become multi-millionaires as a result of their sporting abilities, are not asked to repay the government for any of the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of training and assistance that they receive. If a school teacher or an engineer or lawyer has to reimburse the government tens of thousands of dollars for money invested in their education, why shouldn’t a similar system apply to sports stars? Why do they get a massive free ride at the very time when everyone else is being moved to a user-pays system?
If you had actually read my original post properly, you would know. It’s the Australian Institute of Sport, a government-created and government-funded institution which, as its own website states:
That institution.
Just how far did you get?
I also like the idea of having boards and body-checking in the skiing events.
I too don’t care about the Olympics. I’d like to see Canada focusing athletically on games that aren’t such a huge corrupt mess. I think the members of the Commonwealth should all opt out of the Olympics and turn the Commonwealth Games into the new, hopefully less corrupt version of international spectacle sports. Although I have to admit, our double gold for hockey in the 2002 Olympics still brings a tear to my eye.
It would also identify medal contenders for Being-Eaten-By-A-Crocodile.
Cicero writes:
> New Zealand has always been rated one of the best Union teams in the world- with a relatively small population.
In fact, on this chart that I mentioned in my first post, New Zealand also does better than expected in the Olympics given its population and its average income. It’s supposedly almost as sports-obsessed as Australia.
Except when Canada is the host. Montreal 1976 was the first time the host country failed to win any gold medals at all. They repeated that achievement in the winter in Calgary in 1988.
Maybe 2010 will break the curse.
Ed
That’s more accurate than you might realize. No cite, but I’ve heard from athletes that a whole whack of funding for Olympic sports has been so earmarked for winter events that this year’s summer games was expected to have a much lower yield of medals.
I see a number of solutions if we want to dominate in the summer like the US or China:
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We could get a few hundred million more people to draw from. So start having sex. Remember, when they’re born, push them into olympic sports.
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Communism. If we remove this pesky democracy thing we have going for us, the government could pump millions upon millions into training and the populace couldn’t say shit. On top of that we could force people into sports.
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Convince private corporations to donate more money.
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Convince our fellow Canadians to pay higher taxes. Good luck with this one.
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Instead of having your kids pay hockey, have them join a track and field team or something.
Until any of these things happen we need to pick our spots. The winter Olympics is a safer bet. We do fine there.