They should have plenty of athletes and places to train. The northern Europeans blow them away.
They’re crushing it in hockey, which is Canada’s national winter sport.
Whereas, sports like skiing are being dominated by Scandinavian and Alpine countries, where those sports are particularly (and historically) popular and important.
Just because it’s cold and snowy and they have mountains does not mean that top Canadian athletes flock to, and excel in, every Winter Olympics sport.
I notice that Norway is doing really well in the Nordic skiing events, and an awful lot of top competitors in the Alpine events hail from Switzerland and Austria. Hmmm.
Canada is doing well in hockey, and had very respectable showings in figure skating. (And it sounded like the vast majority of figure skaters train in Canada. I was amused to notice that skaters representing an awful lot of countries were talking to their coaches on English.)
I note that in 2010 when they were held in Vancouver the Canadians led in Gold medals and 3rd for the overall medal count. So they are certainly capable of fielding some great athletes. I guess the push to excel at home is a strong incentive.
I think it’s a pretty well known phenomenon that host countries usually win more medals, gold in particular, than they normally do when they aren’t the host.
I was amused that the medal tally was at one stage showing that great (antipodal) nordic nation of Australia had been more successful than our glacial northern cousins. I mean, who needs frozen facilities when you can train in car parks with melting bitumen?
I’m obviously lacking in patriotic fervour as I was laughing in stitches at our own under performance at 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics when Australia collected less medals than the New Zealand rowing teams.
Part of the question can be answered by, “We shovel so many resources into hockey, that we ignore all the other sports.”
When I was a child, we had no Little League baseball, no Pop Warner football, no soccer of any kind. We could play pickup games of those in the park, of course, but nothing was organized. We did, however, have organized ice hockey starting at about age 5. I knew a few friends in childhood who skied on weekends, and a few figure skaters, but most kids’ real sport was … you guessed it, hockey. After-school road hockey games, using a tennis ball, were held on our street daily from September through June. Almost every kid on our street played organized ice hockey at a local rink. Hockey was what we were supposed to do; that was rammed into us from the get-go. Nothing else.
We are capable in other sports, as has been seen, but I’d suggest that if Canada is to do better in the Winter Olympics overall, we need to move the emphasis away from hockey (in which we are more than capable, so we can leave it alone, and as-is) to other winter sports where we need improvement.
Good point. We live in an enormously huge country, and no matter how a European (for example), looks at a map, the Rockies are most definitely not a daytrip from Toronto. There is downhill skiing in southern Ontario and Quebec, but nothing to compare with Banff, Lake Louise, and Whistler.
In other words, many if not most Canadians who ski never experience Rocky Mountain skiing: long runs with great drops in elevation, which is what the Olympics requires. Ontario’s Blue Mountain Ski Resort is—let’s face it—really just a hill.
I think this is the crux of all success in sports. If your national sporting bodies, backed by government cash, don’t funnel money into nurturing elite athletes in niche sports, then you’re basically waiting for some random sports genius to roll around every 20 years or so to win you anything.
I’ve read somewhere that a lot of the US skiers practice in New Hampshire, not the Rockies, because competitive Alpine skiing is done on icy slopes like they have in NH, not in powder, like they have in the Rockies.
There are Appalachian mountains in Quebec, too, although i don’t know how good they are for skiing, it how close they are to cities. Maybe not great? I used to see a lot of Canadian skiers when i skied in NH as a kid. (I skied alone, and went up the chairlift with a lot of random guys, most of whom told me where they were from.)
Depends somewhat on the sport though. Can’t you practice moguls, all the X-Games style stuff, and a lot of the slaloms on basically just a hill?
There’s also the matter of population. Canada just isn’t a very big country. If everyone has the same chance of becoming a great athlete, then you’d expect the number of great athletes from a country to be proportional to population. The UK and France both have half again as many people as Canada, and Germany twice as many. And of course, the US has far more, and China far more yet.
Canada usually does really well in the Winter Olympics, at least for the last quarter century or so. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
1998: Fourth in gold, fourth in medals
2002: Fourth and fourth
2006: Fifth and third
2010: First and third
2014: Second and fourth
2018: Second and third
2022: Eleventh and fourth
2026 ight be a down year but we’ll see.
Having said that, ranking countries by thin slice on medals won is just dumb. Olympic medals are not evenly handed out across disciplines or across the availability of talented athletes.
To use a really obvious case, Norway has already won eight Olympic medals in speed skating and the Netherlands has won TWELVE. Long track speed skating has 14 events, ten of them individual, and short track adds another nine events, five of them individuals; it is theoretically possible for one country to win 54 medals in speed skating. In 2022, the Netherlands won 16 speed skating medals. In 2018 they won 20, which is literally every medal they won. In 2014 they won 24 medals, every single one of them speed skating. Every Winter Games, the Netherlands is among the medal leaders, but it’s 98% speed skating and basically nothing else. I am 54 years old and in my lifetime, in every Winter Games played since and including 1972, they have won this many medals in winter sports other than speed skating:
So the Netherlands is only competitive in one sport, really, but because that sport offers an absolute mountain of medals, they can win many medals and be amongst the leaders. Canada, on the other hand, will win medals in MANY sports; in 2022 Canada won medals in eight different sports (counting long and short track speed skating as one) and that’s normal for Canada. But the one sport Canada is the best at, hockey, is one in which many athletes participate in - but you can only win two medals. That’s just how the Olympics works. Clearly, Canada is producing many world class athletes; they send many athletes who compete for medals in many sports, and in hockey Canada could send TWO teams and both would threaten to win the gold.
I was just at Mt. Sunapee yesterday.
I thought Canada was also good at curling. I just checked. They are tied for overall medals with Sweden but they have more golds.
I assume you mean two men’s teams and two women’s teams.
Likewise, Canada could probably send 11 men’s curling teams and 11 women’s curling teams: one for each province.
I didn’t even know that it was allowed for a nation to send two teams to the Olympics for the same event. What are the limits?
For team events, like ice hockey, it’s not allowed (except for sending a men’s team and a women’s team, which are separate events).
I think that @RickJay 's point is that Canada is so good at hockey that it could (if it were allowed) split its men (for example) into two separate teams, and both teams would still be favorites for the gold medal.
I don’t watch speed skating, so i hadn’t noticed that. But i bet that there’s competitive speed skating at the high school level in Netherlands. (There certainly isn’t where i live, although we do have little league and high school hockey.)
Some nations are in general better at winning medals in Olympics relative to the population of the country. Canada is not one of those countries. The Olympics are simply more important to those countries. They spend more of their time and money per capita than other countries on such things.