This story is an extract from Selena Hinds' thesis toward her Masters degree in journalism from Carleton University. DR. Peter Davis has advised Olympic organizations in more than 20 countries and has a reputation for delivering results.
He overhauled the system in his homeland, Australia, and watched his countrymen dominate the Games in Sydney in 2000.
Canada's Lindsay Alcock competes in her first Olympics, the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City. Since then, she's become a standout on the World Cup skeleton circuit and will be a medal hope at the Vancouver Games in 2010.
Now he's been hired to do for Canada, at Vancouver in 2010, what he did for Australia. And he is not sure he'll succeed.
When Davis first rolled into Calgary nearly two years ago, he looked at the state of Canada's high performance sport system and cringed.
"My first impression was that we were too late in getting this going. The very day Vancouver was announced (in 2003) or before that, there should have been a targeting program underway, but it took nearly two years," Davis said at the Calgary office of Own the Podium, the $110-million Canadian winter sports initiative.
"It's pretty tough for Canada. We're pushing hard to get Olympic medals and do all these things that should have been in place before, that we could have just built on," Davis said.
"Things are getting better every day, but whether they'll get better in time for 2010 Olympics, I struggle to see that. We'll certainly do better, but whether we'll hit the target? I don't know."
The target is to win more medals than anyone else in Vancouver. In its previous years as an Olympic host, the summer of 1976 in Montreal and the winter of 1988 in Calgary, Canada did not win a single gold medal.
Own the Podium is the winter initiative; its summer counterpart, Road to Excellence, got its most recent report card this month in Beijing. Canada won 18 medals and tied for 14th with Spain in total medals, hitting its stated goal of a top-16 finish.
Since OTP's launch in 2005, sport associations, ex-athletes, corporate officials and the public in Canada, have praised the bold initiative. But as the cheers build, with two years to go, a little perspective is warranted. Davis is one of the few people in the Canadian sport system willing to admit Canada might have bitten off more than it can chew.
There are signs OTP is working. Canadian athletes are recording their highest levels of World Cup competition success, led by Canada's long track speed skaters.
Jeremy Wotherspoon, for example, looks stronger than ever. The 32-year-old from Red Deer credits his American coach, Mike Crowe, for much of his success. Crowe started working with Wotherspoon in May 2007, and he is great example of what the OTP funding can do. Crowe's twice been the U.S. coach of the year and he led the U.S. speed skating team to 10 of the country's 25 medals at Salt Lake City in 2002.
"It's been good in a few ways to be training with Mike because he comes from a different background than my last coach. He has a different way of looking at skating and the technique and physiology that's required. It's nice to have a new perspective on things," Wotherspoon said.
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"He's been really big on preparing mentally and I think that's been something I did some of in the past, but not enough."
But it won't all be smooth skating for OTP and the winter athletes. Already, some cracks are beginning to show.
The quest began in 2004. The Canadian Olympic Committee put together a group of international sport experts led by Cathy Priestner Allinger, 1976 Olympic speed skating silver medallist turned sport administrator. Eight months later, it produced Own The Podium. Dr. Roger Jackson, a three-time Canadian Olympian, became CEO and lured Davis from Australia to drive the sport science, medicine and technology arm.
"The federal government of the day said this is great, if the corporate community will stand up and put up $55 million, we'll stand up and put up $55 million (over five years)," Jackson said.
It is by far the most Canadians have spent on athlete development in preparation for any Olympic Games. The 1988 Calgary Games warranted a $25-million federal injection.
Several sports saw their share of the funds grow in the 2007-08 season, including alpine skiing, curling, figure skating, freestyle skiing and speed skating.
Others sports, like hockey, snowboarding and bobsleigh received the same amount of money as last year, while biathlon and cross country skiing had their budgets cut. Ski jumping and nordic combined were left out in the cold.
The money is also financing "top secret" projects, which aim to give Canadian athletes a competitive edge through research in everything from maximizing equipment performance in different weather conditions to nutrition to biomechanical studies of athletes' techniques.
As the Olympics draw nearer, the funding becomes even more targeted.
"It's absolutely the right approach to be taking. Every country would do that. You got to pick your athletes, where your best investments are and say go, let's just go for it. Throw caution to the wind and go," Davis said.
The centre of Canada's efforts is Canada Olympic Park in northwest Calgary, where Jackson works. He's employed a team of enthusiastic high- performance advisers to keep watch over all the sports. Daniel Lefebvre, for example, left his coaching job at Biathlon Canada to manage OTP's relationships with alpine and freestyle skiing, short and long track speed skating, and hockey.
"Being a coach in the Canadian sport system, I know the frustrations. It's very bureaucratic, very political, very frustrating, very slow," Lefebvre said. "As a coach I wish I had a person that could do this, this and that for me. Now I am the person I wanted to have as a coach."
When Lefebvre first met with Max Gartner, chief athletic officer of alpine skiing, he was shocked to learn the men's ski team flies down Austria's infamous Kitzb ºhel course - at speeds of more than 100 kilometres per hour -- without a performance psychologist.
"They hadn't had one in 10 years. I told them, I know a guy, he was my performance psychologist in biathlon. We had him in Torino...he's very aggressive. He's up-and-coming. We'll fly him in and get him skiing with the athletes," Lefebvre recalled.
OTP brought him in, the athletes loved him and Lefebvre doled out the money for Gartner to hire the psychologist.
As an outsider looking in, Lefebvre says he is able to see where sports require improvement and offers solutions. He is at the heart of a new sport culture that's pushing sport organizations, coaches and athletes to produce better results.
"I say let's not look at what you're doing good, let's look at what you can do better," Lefebvre said. "Speed skating's shooting for 15 medals. Great! How do we get to 20?"
Over the past 20 years, with access to world-class facilities and a leadership team that's taken a long-term development approach, Speed Skating Canada has built a sport machine. In Torino, they captured 12 of Canada's 24 medals, led by Cindy Klassen who won five medals, one for every Olympic ring.
Jean Dupr ©, Director General of Speed Skating Canada, says OTP has made it possible for the organization to bring its high performance programs to the next level.
"The increased funding from OTP has made significant changes in the way we support and prepare athletes - where we use to share many support staff, now we have designated personnel at our two national training centres," Dupr © said. Wotherspoon's success with Crowe is an example.
But beneath the fanfare, there are rumblings of concern and discontent. Critics say there are flaws in OTP's design and its execution has been far from problem free.
On a cold, blustery March day in Winnipeg, Dr. Cal Botterill had just finished lunch with Jennifer Jones, the skip of the Canadian women's curling championship team. Jones' team won the title while Botterill, one of Canada's top sports psychologists, was in Europe, assisting Canada's bobsledders. Now, having got up to date with Jones, he was giving a candid interview about OTP's challenges.
"The timing of your inquiry is uncanny, because in my opinion, I predicted some of these difficulties when stuff was coming down a couple of years ago," Botterill said. "This season is over, there's a year and a half to go now. For me, it's really time to start to simplify and get the groups together that have a chance and let them go."
Botterill has been to eight Olympic Games. He helped speed skating superstars Catriona Le May Doan and Susan Auch collect gold and silver in at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. He worked with the New York Rangers the season leading up to their 1994 Stanley Cup victory - ending a 54-year drought.
Now he is preparing Canada's cross country skiers, curlers, bobsledders and skeleton athletes for Vancouver.
"I think we're 10 years behind Australia and we're trying to do all the same things. And we're trying to do them in too little time to get them all working in time," said Botterill. "My opinion is that there are some difficulties and some pressures being created that are not producing good psychological effects.
"For me, the first mistake OTP made was making the projections unilaterally, without the input from athletes. If you run a company, if you're smart, you do your goal setting with your employees," Botterill said. "You don't come in here and say, here's what we're going to do - do this, do that. I think the athletes would have set pretty ambitious goals."
Some of Canada's best athletes are already struggling with the expectations and demands of OTP, including veteran bobsled pilot, Pierre Lueders.
"Pierre Lueders basically came home from the bobsled circuit burned out. It appeared, and certainly what he reported, was that it was all the extra pressure of complex monitoring and evaluation and meeting all these criteria and what-not that kind of produced an emotional pressure that exhausted him," Botterill said.
"If you are a bobsleigh driver, you have one job that is to read the course. And if you have anything on your mind other than that, you're not going to perform well," he explained.
Botterill also thinks OTP has too many athletes listed as medal prospects. He warns there are real risks to dubbing athletes medal contenders before they are ready. As soon as success becomes "have to", rather than "want to", athletes are prone to fear failure.
"When you put people up as favourites before they are ready, it's often problematic because they haven't learned to be favourites. Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods, have learned to be a favourites," Botterill said.
"If we put all of our young amateur athletes in the same circumstances without the experience of being a favourite and learning to do that, we're doing a disservice to them."
Back in Calgary, Dale Henwood, president of the Canadian Sport Centre, was in his office, putting the finishing touches on a presentation on the legacy of the Calgary Olympics.
"If you go back and look at the number of legacies from '88, in addition to facilities, people, money, infrastructure in the city, I think it's been tremendous," Henwood said. "Canada's produced a steady stream of athletes over the last two decades who have delivered good performances internationally. That said, it's a long-term process. It's at least 10 years until you see the results of having facilities and having full time coaches with the athletes."
The former Team Canada goaltending coach has been at the helm of the Sport Centre since its establishment in 1994. Henwood's got more than 25 years of combined experience as a coach and administrator.
"The role of sport centres within the system is a partner, an important partner - but a partner. No one in this system has enough money to do everything on their own," Henwood said. "What our role, in my mind is, is to provide world leading programs and services (physiology, biomechanics) for the athletes and coaches."
Like Botterill, Henwood has some concerns. Although he supports philosophically the creation of an independent, high performance, technically-based, expert driven unit like OTP, he worries it has led to confusion and duplication in an already fragmented and bureaucratic sport system.
"I think we would have been better off to expand the mandate of existing organizations or expand responsibilities of existing people, as opposed to create another organization," Henwood said.
In Canada, there are many players - Sport Canada, the Canadian Olympic Committee, the Coaching Association of Canada, national sport federations, the sport centres, OTP, among others.
"In a business, when you're this fragmented, shareholders say merge, consolidate. We're not doing it in sport," Henwood said.
"I think there's, at times, a superficial willingness to work together. We say we will, but when it comes to a crunch, I'm not sure we do. There's still some protectionism there, and need for profile, need for credit. There are a lot of reasons why," he said.
Part of the problem with OTP, he says, is that the Games were the incentive for the investment.
"That's part of the concern I have with the focus of OTP or the focus on Vancouver at times. When you make short-term decisions, meaning decisions that are, maybe, going to give you an impact in two years, they are at odds with where we should be going long term," Henwood said. "Yes I want a great result in 2010, but I want a result in 2012, '14, '16, and '18. I'm very concerned, certainly in the eyes of some, we are just trying to get a result of 35 medals in 2010 and I think we've failed if that's all that happens."
Davis, the Australian hired gun, was interviewed in Calgary. He had just returned from Vancouver, where he spent a weekend meeting with coaches and sport administrators. Now he had a cup of coffee in one hand, a cellphone in the other and a tired look in his eyes.
"It's just beautiful out there," Davis says. "Calgary left a huge legacy for Canada. Just this facility (referring to Canada Olympic Park). Vancouver will do the same."
Davis and the OTP staff are working to ensure the sports and teams have good support staff and in the right mix. He says the coaches, massage therapists, physiotherapists, nutritionists need to become integrated and work like a pit crew. It's the biggest thing Canada can do in the short term, in his view, to make a difference.
"It's been the biggest struggle. Some sports just haven't got it. Most of the coaches understand they (the support staff) should be out there somewhere, but they don't want them too involved," Davis said.
Davis says it's critical for coaches to meet regularly with doctors, psychologists, and massage therapists to discuss progress, achievements, and shortfalls because the support staff collects a huge amount of information from talking to the athletes. If the coach doesn't capture any of it, they can't integrate it.
"Things can fall through the cracks. Suddenly the athlete has a shoulder injury and the doctor knows, but the strength guy doesn't know and in the meantime prescribes an exercise that's inappropriate for his shoulder injury. So you lose two or three weeks and if you would have talked to each other, you wouldn't have lost that time," Davis explains.
He, too is irritated by Canada's fragmented sport system.
"Whether it's the Olympic Committee, Sport Canada, sport centres or other agencies, it's all over the place," Davis says. "They have the same problem in Great Britain. They have multiple organizations that keep bumping into each other. If we can simplify the system here that will be a huge breakthrough, but I'm not confident. It's just too difficult."
Davis also chafes at OTP's having to make funding decisions on government budget timelines t. The government rigmarole, he says, slows processes down.
"A lot of our funding decisions - the timelines are totally screwed up because we're on the government-financed budget timing. It puts the whole thing completely out of whack for a number of reasons. To me, that's a huge problem."
For example, Davis says OTP completed annual reviews for sports and made funding decisions before some of the sports finished their season, had a chance to debrief, and come up with a strategic plan for the following year.
"We're asking them to present a plan before doing those three important things. Those things could change possibly in a month and yet we've already made a decision. It's not far wrong, but it's enough wrong to make a difference."
And he says Canadians need a killer instinct.
"You got to have this sense of belief we're going to get that medal. Canada doesn't have it, but they are starting to. A year ago when I came, there was this belief that we can do it and we should do it," Davis said. "There's nothing wrong with being aggressive and doing what you need to do in legal bounds. That's starting to change, but it takes a while. It took Australia years."
When Canada announced its goal of winning 35 medals in 2005, many inside the sport system, and outside of it, snickered. At the time, the best Canada had ever done at a Winter Olympic Games was 17 medals in Salt Lake City.
Three years later, the outlook is a little different. What seemed unrealistic in 2005 is now at least possible.
OTP has hit bumps since its inception, and more will come. If there is too much pressure in the system in the months leading up to the Olympics and at the Games, athletes could underperform in Vancouver.
Jackson says the biggest obstacle preventing Canada from hitting its target is that the rate of change is still too slow.
"We still have organizations that don't plan effectively. We still have athletes who are not training as world-class athletes. We still have new relationships with coaches and new people that have to integrate," said Jackson. "Having said that, all of these types of things we are worried about, we have seen enormous progress in every single sport."
Regardless of the challenges, both supporters and critics of OTP support the cash infusion. The big concern is that the funding will drop after the Games.
After the 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia cut spending on its "Olympic Athlete Program" and that hurt on the podium. In the aftermath, Australia lost a lot of expertise, including Davis, to other countries. At Athens in 2004, Australia's medal count dropped to 41 - from a high of 58 in Sydney.
Australia has since boosted its investment, but it has taken time to rebuild. Canada could end up on a similar path. Davis says it is critical Canada build after 2010 on the progress made to date. But he's concerned that won't happen, and Vancouver will just be a one-off deal.
As it stands, Roger Jackson is scrambling to come up with a plan. He's persuaded the federal government to maintain the $11 million a year it is contributing now - but admits there are no guarantees of corporate funding, which should equal the government investment.
"They will not, in their own way, make decisions about whether they want to continue until they evaluate what has happened," Jackson said.
That's the dilemma. The funding never would have materialized without the event. It was only because Vancouver won the bid, that the debate about whether to embark on such an initiative even got started.
"The Canadian public only pays attention two weeks every two years," said Alex Gardiner, the senior director of Olympic Programmes at the Canadian Olympic Committee. "Two weeks in the winter, two weeks in the summer."
In 2010, it will likely be more of the same. Teary-eyed Canadians will watch the television screen with pride when the host country's team marches in. The displays of athleticism will inspire old and young. Canadians will cheer for athletes they've never heard of who are wearing the Maple Leaf.
Jackson, not surprisingly, says he is very anxious to demonstrate to the corporate community the value in maintaining their investment. How he will do that remains to be seen.
OTP has also exposed the extent to which Canada's fragmented sport system needs an overhaul. Some improvements can be undertaken without a whack of new money. Jackson, Davis and Henwood all suggest the provinces need to increase their financing and enhance their high performance programming.
The bold "Own the Podium" mantra marks a shift in Canadian sport culture. Canada has a long tradition of emphasizing participation rather than victory. It will be interesting to see if the "we're number one" attitude is something that rests comfortably on the shoulders of Canadian athletes.
"I want to do well regardless," said Winnipeg's speedskating star Shannon Rempel. "I want to win a medal whether or not they want me to or not. I don't want to disappoint myself. I would be more upset if I disappointed my coach because she helps train me, she's the one who knows what I'm capable of doing, so that's more important than anything."
Vancouver 2010 brings Canada to a crossroads. Canadian athletic success at the Games may prove to be the catalyst for long-term change and sustained international success, or it could turn out to be a false start on the much-anticipated course of reform.
selena.hinds@freepress.mb.ca
n its early days, Own the Podium staff estimated Canada would need to win 35 medals to become the top medal winning country in Vancouver. In 2007, the Canadian Olympic Committee backed off on the target, suggesting the goal was simply to finish first in overall medal count, not to achieve a specific medal count. But the initial breakdown is indicative of where expectations lie:
Predicted medals
Tier One "must win"
Long track speed skating 8
Short track speed skating 7
Ice hockey 2
Curling 2
Figure skating 3
Tier Two "high priority"
Alpine skiing 3
Freestyle skiing 3
Snowboarding 2
Cross-country skiing 1
Tier Three "targeted athletes"
Biathlon 1
Bobsleigh 1
Skeleton 1
Luge 1
Ski jumping 0
Nordic combined 0
TOTAL 35
Source: Own the Podium 2010 -- Final Report. Sept. 2004
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