Jamie Sarkonak: Canada chose its Olympic decline
Fall in gold-medal rankings comes after years of stagnant funding and leadership that abhors excellence
The Olympics are over, and the tallies are in. Canada finished with five gold medals, seven silver, and nine bronze. Our athletes did us proud, but did we do them justice? For a second Winter Games in a row, we ranked 11th in terms of gold medals, which is a stark break from the past: between 1992 and 2018, Canada always ranked among the gold-earning top 10, often reaching the top five.
You could dismiss it as a matter of chance, but it tracks with the rest of this country’s decline. We’ve been getting poorer, sadder and less healthy, among other things, and many of our leaders now frown upon excellence and the building of national pride as worthy objectives in any field. Now consider that sports funding has stagnated for the past two decades. It’s no wonder that athletic performance is getting noticeably worse.
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One face of the problem is simply low per-athlete funding. Canada does have an athlete allowance that, ideally, would work like basic income. Titled the Athlete Assistance Program, it pays out a maximum of $2,175 per month (a result of a slight hike in 2024 in the first Carney budget), and can cover some tuition for university athletes. A small bonus of $650 per month is paid out to Olympic medalists with incomes below $80,000/year for the two years following their medal wins, with smaller bonuses going out to those who make below $85,000; a duplicate scheme is offered to athletes with children.
It’s not hard to see how that isn’t enough for the pro sports world. Team fees, training fees, equipment fees and facility time are all expensive. The sheer amount of work it takes to make it to the top of one’s sport doesn’t exactly allow for much work on the side, either (and those who do take on part-time gigs do so at the expense of focus and practice). There’s also just the cost of living — athletes have to move to where the training centres are, and many have to contend with the same rents that everyone else does. Yes, corporate sponsorships exist, but these are the exception.
So, you end up with stories of squalor. Last year, one of Canada’s professional lugers said she had to pay team fees of $25,000, as did our bobsleigh and skeleton athletes. One of Canada’s best speed skaters — Isabelle Weidemann, who won gold, silver and bronze medals in the 2022 Beijing Olympics, and just won another gold in Milan last week — was reportedly in debt last year. The year before, bobsledder Cynthia Appiah reported the same, adding that a teammate had to seek free accommodation in a church during a competition.
It’s not just happening at the pinnacle of sports, either: at all ages, participation is getting more expensive, and that’s turning people away. Even hockey, Canada’s actual national passtime, is seeing enrolment drop like a rock. The smaller the mine, the fewer diamonds you get. We’ll really start to see the effects of today’s neglect in 10 to 15 years, when athletes that would have been never show up because their families couldn’t get them over the rising paywall during their tween years.
The affordability problem is also a performance problem. Speaking to the Associated Press last year, Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton CEO Kien Tran summed up the problem as follows: “Sports in Canada is becoming just pay to play…. You may be not be getting the best athletes. You may be getting the best athletes that can afford this.”
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Like their athletes, sport organizations are also dealing with choked budgets. Many of these rely on the federal Sport Support Program, which is a roughly $200 million package of funds doled out to athletic orgs around the country. It received a boost of $8 million in each of the two years following 2024 thanks to the first Carney budget — a change which was welcomed with a slow clap by the Canadian Olympic Committee. These funds, along with the increased athlete allowance and a $15 million package for community sport fell far below the $104 million that the committee had requested.
In 2026, the Canadian Olympic Committee says that the $220 million sports organization ecosystem needs an additional $144 million to function properly — a point that was hammered home as the Milan games wrapped up. This is modest compared to the ever-growing list of multi-million vanity programs that tax dollars end up being wasted on, at home and even abroad.
The Sport Support Program has also felt the blight of politics in recent years: among multisport organizations applying for funding, those “which are mandated to provide a specific service or which deliver services to a specific underrepresented group” are given priority, and support for “underrepresented groups” is an evaluation criterion.
“Groups generally considered to be underrepresented include women, people with disabilities, Indigenous Peoples, members of Two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, plus (2SLGBTQI+) communities and racialized groups,” notes the application guidelines.
Diversity was a priority in the 2019 Canadian High Performance Sport Strategy, as well as the 2024-2028 strategic plan of Own The Podium, a non-profit geared at helping Canada win more medals. And just last year, the Canadian Olympic Committee came up with a diversity, equity and inclusion plan (DEI) that discloses a $1 million DEI “investment” in Canadian sport organizations, as well as the creation of numerous initiatives to support “equity-deserving communities” in sports — from funding to marketing efforts.
Just as in federal research funding, the allergy to excellence on the left has seeped into athletics. But conservatives can only huff so much, as their camp includes a plethora of curmudgeonly defund-everything types who would happily agree that losing out on a few medals every couple of years would be worth the savings gained from eliminating athlete allowances.
What the Olympics should really be is a national unity moment — one of pride and, in the case of winter sports, global domination. Our best athletes deserve our support to take them as high as they can go, and in turn, the whole of Canada gets to feel a sense of collective accomplishment. Call it a luxury if you want, but it’s one we should be able to afford.`
National Post
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