Canadian 'Olympians' shut out of Games by London lapdogs

LONDON -- Canada has a great team of Olympic canoeists and kayakers, but our very best canoeists are not allowed to compete. If water can be set on fire, then Laurence Vincent-Lapointe does just that. In three years she has won four world-championship titles and countless world cups. Her C-2 partner, Mallorie Nicholson, is nearly as fast.

But there's no event for them at the London Olympics, which has been the case for nearly 80 years. Men's Olympic canoeing started in 1936 when Hitler added it to the Berlin Games. Somehow women -- in the eyes of the International Canoe Federation and the IOC -- haven't learned how to paddle or balance those sharply sculpted racing canoes well enough to be Olympians.

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But vacuums, especially those caused by inequality, are meant to be filled, so luckily for Vincent-Lapointe and Nicholson, Sam Rippington, the U.K. national champion in C-1, has done just that. A sprinter on flat water, as opposed to slalom on white water, Rippington told the local London organizing committee she would see them in court.

"All I am asking is that LOCOG answer two simple questions: Is it discriminatory for there to be five men's Olympic canoe events but none for women? And should that situation continue?"

She had asked for an equality audit -- literally an audit determining whether a government program will help reduce gender inequalities. Equality audits are mandatory under 2010 U.K. human-rights legislation. When Rippington sent her original request to the organizing committee for a copy of its gender-impact study, they sent back a self-serving letter saying they were a private company (despite the $14.7 billion of public funds they have chowed down) and have no control over what sporting events take place.

This didn't stop Rippington. It's too late for 2012, but the IOC will soon make decisions about events for Rio in 2016. Rippington and plenty of others who have worked on this issue for years want to make sure the IOC and the International Canoe Federation know what is at stake: probably more legal challenges. If there were medals awarded for challenging sporting giants, Rippington would win gold.

On Thursday, London's High Court granted permission for Rippington's lawsuit to proceed. In addition, "The IOC and the Olympic Delivery Authority have been ordered to be joined as interested parties. The case will then proceed through the usual preliminary steps," says professor Kathleen Lahey of Queen's University's Faculty of Law, who has been supervising a team of law students to tackle the same questions for the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games.

These local organizing committees are actually local lapdogs. First it was the ski jumpers who met the Vancouver committee's brick wall when they asked them to tell the IOC they could not finance, schedule and generally orchestrate the 2010 Winter Olympics as long as women ski jumpers were discriminated against. The lapdogs wrung their hands and said there was nothing they could do -- just following IOC orders. The local London lapdogs plead the same line. Oh please!

As at the Vatican, the IOC membership is mainly ancient, powerful, secretive men who issue edicts about what women's bodies can and cannot do.

Even though I haven't raced really seriously since 1983, I am as angry as ever over the Olympic road races. There is a quota against women. Some 145 men will line up for their race and the next day, a maximum of 67 women will contest the women's event. This, even though women's racing is alive, kicking and fast. Added to this is the IOC decision to not allow the top mountain-biking nations to send three women, even though their male counterparts will have three cyclists per top country racing.

Like our canoeists, Canada's women's mountain-bike team is ranked No. 1 in the world -- Catharine Pendrel won the 2011 World Championships, Emily Batty was eighth, Marie-Hélène Prémont ninth. But only two can ride in London. In 1996, when mountain biking became an Olympic sport, all three would have started. But the IOC backpedalled and cut the women's field back. This was purportedly to allow more developing women cyclists a spot, as if having more women flying through the woods on bikes is something that had to be curbed.

The latest is the Japanese women's World Cup-winning soccer team flying to London in economy while the mediocre men's team went business class. Ditto for the Australian men's basketball team (business) and the women's team (economy).

It's just the beginning of the Olympic excuses event and the local lapdogs will take gold, as they did in Vancouver. It's high time more women athletes join Rippington and make a date in court.

Laura Robinson is a former national-team cyclist. The London Games are her sixth Olympics as a journalist.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 21, 2012 A15