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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