Own The Podium

Interesting reading at Roger Jackson's blog. He is the leader of OTP.

http://ownthepodium.wordpress.com/

XX1 Olympic Winter Games

Here we go!

Headline in the sports section of the Toronto Star this morning: "Feschuk: Snowboard Silver as Skiers, Skaters Fall short."

Come on, Feschuk. Let's drop the negarive stuff. Oh yes, Feschuk didn't write the headline; some poor underpaid, overnight intern did. Well STOP THE NEGATIVE!

XX1 Olympic Winter Games

Great Opening Ceremony.

Why all this talk about not winning a Gold Medal at either of the games we have hosted? It seems to me that all this blathering is just media hype. I haven't heard ONE person mourn that Canada didn't win Gold at either '76 or '88. Just media frenzy.

Not WAYNE GRETZKY

Now that would be one monumental mistake, to have WAYNE GRETZKY light the Olympic cauldron on Friday night.

All Canadians do NOT worship at his feet, do not consider him greater than sliced bread, and consider his departure from Canada to be (at best) very disappointing.

NO Wayne Gretzky to light the flame.

And, while we are at it, no BETTY FOX either. It was her son who demonstrated spirit and determination, not her.

Scotties

The final of the Scott Tournament of Hearts yesterday was a nail-biter. In the end, an extra end too, Jennifer Jones and her mates won. There were several very quesionable calls in the game, particularly by the O'Rourke team. In the final end, they left a Jones rock nearest the pin, and played other shots. Very strange.

There were many questions throughout the week though. The team had great difficulty "getting" the ice. It was strange, though, because Jones hasn't had that difficulty in other competitions.

Several other teams had strange weeks too. Saskatchewan? Ontario? The ice was a prblem for them on occasion too. TSN's commentators remarked on it, gently, when they really should have lambasted the ice makers, and some of the skips for the shots they called. They were too nice.

Olympian Forever

It's time the media stopped referring to Canadians as "former Olympians."

Once an athlete has competed in an Olympic or Olympic Winter Games, he/she is an Olympian. Period. Not a "former Olympian."

In Randy Starkman's column today, a reader refers to Debbi Wilkes who won a figure skating medal in 1964 with Guy Revell as "former Olympian Debbi Wilkes." She will NEVER be a former Olympian. She will be an Olympian "who competed in the 1964 OWG" but never a former Olympian.

Pretty well everyone knows that it is extremely difficult to represent our country in the OLys or OWG, so let's give these athletes their due.

Big media giants like Sun Media, or QMI it is called now (I think) perpetuate this error. If I could find out how to contact DAVID LANGFORD who is the chief sports person for Sun Media, I would give him my opinion on this. But he is harder to locate (e-mail-wise) than chicken's teeth. If you know his email, let me know!

The sports editor at the Kingston Whig Standard tells me that they just print what comes off the wire from their media giant. Well, folks, that just isn't good enough. If he cared about our Olympians, he would edit out the error!

This is Very Generous

Each Olympic Gold Medal Nets $100,000 for Athletes
by Randy Starkman
Toronto Star, February 4, 2010


Canadian athletes who strike gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics will be sparking more than just future dreams for younger athletes – they'll be making a financial investment in them.
Sprott Asset Management LP, known for its success with gold stocks, announced this morning in Toronto that in conjunction with The Sprott Foundation they will donate $100,000 for every gold medal won in Vancouver to the Canadian Athletes Now Fund, which raises money to help this country's athletes.
While Canada has never won a gold medal at a home Olympics, it's expected they could win as many as 10 at the upcoming Games.
“One of warmest feelings of all time is to see a Canadian athlete win a medal,” said Eric Sprott, ceo of Sprott Management LP. “It's stunningly exciting. I always realized these athletes winning the medals have worked so hard and there's so much dedication by those around them. I've always thought it was a huge accomplishment and should be rewarded.”
Sprott said it was of much greater benefit overall to spread the money out among athletes than have it go to the winner of the gold medal.
“We don't want to say that the person who wins gold is the only winner,” said Sprott. “There are a lot of athletes involved, not just gold medal athletes.”
Jane Roos, founder of the CAN Fund, said it was Sprott who came up with the idea.
“It celebrates excellence and fits in with our vision to have summer and winter athletles work together to support each other,” said Roos.
To that end, Olympic rowing gold medalist Ben Rutledge attended the launch of the fundraiser.
“I think it's great we've got somebody who is looking ahead to the future, especially knowing we face funding cutbacks going forward,” said Rutledge.
The Sprott Foundation has also made an initial contribution of $210,000 to help the CAN Fund cover funding for 35 athletes they still had on their books. The CAN Fund gives out $6,000 to each athlete to help cover training and living expenses. Roos said that 80 per cent of the athletes on the Winter Olympic team have received funds from their group.
Sprott Asset Management is also encouraging other corporations and the public to add to the total that will be donated for the gold medal tally at a website they have set up, sprottgoldpledge.com

The Fight Is On!

The discussion is hot in the media, and even hotter within the sport community. Virtually NONE of the sport federations want OTP to come under the COC, but for political reasons, they won't quite put it this way.

The fact remains: keep OTP away from the COC.
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COC, OTP fight for control of future athlete funding

By Cam Cole, Vancouver SunFebruary 4, 2010 3:02 AM

(no photo)
Own the Podium president Roger Jackson stands by the mural at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary on Feb. 2. Jackson hopes OTP remains independent after the Vancouver Games.

VANCOUVER — Before wading into the whole Canadian Olympic Committee/OwnThe Podium/federal funding brouhaha, a nagging memory from the days leading into the 1988 Calgary Olympics:
"The world does not end on Feb. 28," the Mulroney government's sports minister, Otto Jelinek trumpeted to reporters. "Future funding will not be tied to Canada's performance in Calgary. Sports federations need not fear. They can rest assured that the bottom is not going to fall out."
As far as he knew at the time, that was probably true.
But then Canada won zero gold medals in Calgary, only five medals in total, and . . . well, priorities changed in Ottawa. The world did not actually end on Feb. 28, it just felt that way to the next generation or two of elite Canadian amateur athletes.
Which brings us to the Harper government's sports minister, Gary Lunn, and the assurances he has given that Own The Podium's request for $22 million a year in "replacement funding" — to offset the loss of sponsorship money from the Vancouver organizing committee once the Games are over — is in the works, and everyone's in favour of it, and when the federal budget comes out on March 4, it'll be there.
The cheque, in other words, is in the mail.
But we've seen this movie before, and the niggling suspicion is that the report on the future of sports funding — written by the panel that Lunn struck to study it — is languishing in Ottawa due to some nefarious interference. Delayed, the conspiracy theorists say, by successful lobbying from the COC because the report as it sits is about to hand control of the federal dough to OTP.
Under this theory, the COC, headed by outgoing CEO Chris Rudge and incoming president Marcel Aubut, wants the feds to put OTP under COC control.
Meanwhile, OTP, led by CEO Roger Jackson, wants to stay independent because it views the COC as an unwieldy, bureaucratic sinkhole which doles out funds — through Sport Canada — so inefficiently that the athletes are badly served and high-performance objectives are constantly being watered down by internal COC politics.
If your eyes are already spinning in their sockets, you're not alone. Can't we all just get along?
Everyone loves Own The Podium. In its brief life, it has already demonstrated that it knows how to get bang for its buck, how to turn money into Olympic medals, efficiently.
Hurrah for Roger.
If he wants independence to continue doing that, what's the counter-argument?
"I'm wearing two hats here, because I'm also the chair of Own The Podium," said Rudge, the COC chief. "It's not a case of them being in opposition, it's a case of the evolution of a concept."
A concept, he rightly points out, that was born in the mind of the late Mark Lowry, the COC's former executive director of sport, who devised the idea of merit-based, directed funding at least a couple of years before OTP was formed.
"So if there's an issue about whether this could be done under the aegis of the COC, well, there's a precedent for it," Rudge said. "We had a program called the Canadian Sport Review Panel, and it dispersed the high-performance funds, co-ordinated with Sport Canada, and that was then handed over to OTP to do."
He said the COC acknowledges that, whatever the panel decides, funding distribution henceforth has to be done independently of the COC.
As if.
"There's no question OTP has been an absolute home run," Rudge said, "but there are areas where we still have overlaps between what the COC does in athlete preparation and what OTP does. Are there ways those can be harmonized in order to avoid duplication and release more dollars? The panel has given its report back, I've not seen it, but from my perspective — because it's going to say something about where we should go, but it's not going to be able to act on it — I think we're better off not seeing it until after the Games."
If Jackson's spidey senses are tingling, it's only because he's been president of the COC, when it was the COA, three different times, and he knows how it works and doesn't work.
"It's a hugely politicized organization, and it's a membership organization, so you have the member (sports federations) themselves approving distribution of money, and they're the ones into whose pockets these funds would go," said the former gold-medal-winning Olympic rower.
"For us, a far better model for Canadian sport is a properly run agency, totally independent, totally focused on high performance, rather than mixing it up with the politics of the COC, the self-interest of all the representations of federations in the COC, and all of the other program responsibilities of the COC which include Pan-Am Games, winter Games, summer Games, youth Games, and all those Games missions and the other stuff. It's a no-brainer."
You want medals? Focus on medals. Sounds simple.
Rudge agrees, and says there's no reason it has to be a war. The federal government, he points out, has "stepped up to the table" with a total of $47 million in annual funding, in three different initiatives, guaranteed in perpetuity, that wasn't there five years ago, "so I think Minister Lunn deserves some credit for what he's done, and we shouldn't lose sight of that."
It's only a question of who will control that money, and whatever additional funds the government might allocate in the upcoming budget.
"It's not something I would panic over. I think it's a healthy debate. The truth is always somewhere between two opposites. I think that truth will be found," Rudge said, and believes that the government-commissioned panel will find it.
That, surely, would be a first.
Vancouver Sun
ccole@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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The Biggest Question: What Happens After the Games?

Take a look at RANDY STARKMAN's column
http://thestar.blogs.com/olympics/

There is no doubt that there is much anxiety about future sport funding. Canada has a pattern of putting gobs of $$$ into the one or 2 years before a big competition, expecting miracles (there seldom are any), and then dropping back to an abysmal amount of funding for sport. And the results usually show this short-term thinking.

It has been like this as long as I have been in sport, and longer. Just look at international results starting in the mid-1960s.

Canada's Team at the OWG: Canada Games Grads!!

This is great!!!

(February 2, 2010) Ottawa – Canada Games Alumni represent 44% of the athletes that will compete for Team Canada at the upcoming Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The fact that, in sports on the Canada Games program, close to half of the athletes competing in the Olympic Games have competed at Canada’s multi-sport event indicates how important the Canada Games are in the development of Canada’s next generation of national, international and Olympic champions. This number comes at a time when the success of Canadian athletes is linked to improved development programs as well as increased funding and athlete performances are being monitored closely.

“The Canada Games are proud to act as a key stepping stone for many Canada Games athletes,” says Sue Hylland, President and CEO of the Canada Games Council. “Every two years, we anxiously wait for the Olympic team roster to track the Canada Games alumni percentage in sports that are on the Canada Games program. We wish all of Canada’s Olympic hopefuls well and look forward to marking the Canada Games alumni who medal at these important Games.”

Overall, 80 Canada Games Alumni will compete in Vancouver and many are medal contenders. Renowned alumni competing in Vancouver include five-time Olympic medalist and the athlete named Canada’s flag bearer Clara Hughes (Speed Skating), 2006 Olympic Gold medalist Jennifer Heil (Freestyle) and returning gold medalist Chandra Crawford (Cross-Country Skiing). The Canada Games are well represented in almost all sports at the 2010 Olympic Games.

In some sports the impact of the Canada Games is even more apparent. Of the eight-member Biathlon team competing in 2010, seven athletes are Canada Games Alumni. In Speed Skating, Canada Games Alumni will make up almost 70% of the total team. Some notable Canada Games Hockey alumni who will also be competing in Vancouver include two time Olympic Gold medalist Jennifer Botterill, four-time Olympian Hayley Wickenheiser, three-time Olympic team member Christopher Pronger and Sidney Crosby who will be competing at his first Olympic Games.

In addition to the athletes, many of the Team Canada members who make up the Canadian delegation at the Vancouver Olympics are representing as coaches, managers, technical personnel, mission staff, and organizing committee staff and many can attribute their roots to the Canada Games.

10 DAYS TO GO !!

In this morning's Kingston Whig Standard, there is a small piece about a gentleman who died. The part that the editors put on the front page is that "he was a family man."

When will this nonsense stop? Or should we start including in the obit of women that "she is a family woman"???

Saying that someone is a "family man" does not move him up in the eyes of a reader.

Please, editors/writers stop using this phrase. It is outdated, if nothing else.

Scott Tournament of Hearts

The Scotties started on Saturday. Not quite painful to watch, but not gripping TV.

After the Olympic Trials and some Grand Slam curling, it's hard to come down to ground and watch the very pedestrian brand of curling that provinces like NB and PEI offer up.

Let's hope it gets better toward the end of the draw!!!