Opinion: Alberta athletes deserved more support for Olympic Games

Canada finished the 2026 Winter Olympic Games with 21 medals, cementing its position once again as one of the most consistently successful winter Olympic nations. Canadians should rejoice in the success of all our Winter Olympic athletes and the national pride they conjured over the past 17 days.

As athletes return home from the games, pundits from across the country will utilize the games as a measuring stick to assess the state of our amateur athletic system. Make no doubt, it is strong, but maybe not as strong as it once was. If medal count is how we judge our performance at an Olympics, let the 2026 Games show that the 21 medals won in Milan were the country’s lowest since the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, where Canada returned home with 17 medals.

Blame has been placed on the feet of the federal government, which has not increased core funding to national sport organizations in the past 20 years. “This inattention to this funding crisis over the last 20 years has shifted the burden onto Canadian athletes who already, [if] you’re a nationally carded athlete, you’re still only through the carding system earning at or below the poverty line,” said Canadian Olympic Committee CEO David Shoemaker in an interview before the Games. “So the idea that you then have all of these additional burdens foisted on you is not the sports system that we want.”

Take a step further back from federal funding and the picture of where our amateur sport system may be failing becomes a little clearer. At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, over half of the Canadian team trained in or hailed from the province of Alberta. And of the 24 medals that Canada won at these games, over 75 per cent of these medallists had connections to the Wild Rose province.

Twenty years later, as Canada’s Winter Olympians returned to Italy, Alberta’s influence on the games has tumbled mightily. In Milan, only 46 of Canada’s 205 athletes hailed from Alberta. Excluding the sports of hockey and curling, 17 individual athletes from Canada stood on the podium in Milan. Only one of those athletes, Brendan Mackay with a bronze in men’s ski half pipe, hailed from Alberta.

The legacy of the 1988 Olympics helped transform Canada and Alberta into a Winter Sport powerhouse, providing athletes with many of the best facilities in the world in which to train. But many of these facilities have fallen into a state of disrepair.

Consider the luge and bobsled track from the 1988 Winter Olympic Games. At the 2006 Winter Olympics, Canada won three sliding sport medals. Duff Gibson (gold) and Mellissa Hollingsworth-Richards (silver) in the sport of skeleton, Pierre Leuders and Lacellas Brown (silver) in the two man boblsed. All three athletes benefited from the legacy of the 1988 Winter Olympics to propel them to Olympic glory. By 2019, the Olympic sliding track at Winsport’s Canada Olympic Park closed indefinitely as it could not find the funds to make the necessary repairs. Canada’s sliding teams failed to win a medal in Milan.

There is also the matter of provincial sport funding. In 2013, the Government of Alberta provided $8.3 million in sport funding to 104 provincial sport organizations. A decade later, government funding to these same organizations was unchanged. All this, despite the fact that Alberta’s population has increased by over 1 million residents and the economy has witnessed a 30 per cent jump in inflation between 2013 and 2023.

Today, Alberta’s provincial sport funding has been cited as the second lowest in Canada when measured against population growth and inflation. Meanwhile, support for our provincial sport organizations is currently only 37 per cent (in terms of real dollars) of what it was in 1993.

When it comes to amateur sport, Canada and its amateur athletes should be pointing the finger at Alberta’s government to do more. Our athletes deserve better. Albertans deserve better.

Michael Simonson is a former athlete on Canada’s national rowing team, winning medals at the 2003 Pan-American Games and is the author of the Book Heatstroke – Why Canada’s Summer Olympic Program is Failing and How We Can Fix It.