Can Canada learn to play to win?
Own the Podium proved for one Olympics that winning could be not just a hope but an expectation. Then we defunded it.
Great Expectations
Fifty years ago this past week, in a driving Montreal rain, a 20-year-old high jumper from Vancouver named Greg Joy cleared 2.23 metres, beat the reigning world record holder, and took silver at the Summer Olympics. For decades afterward, CBC ran a clip of that jump as the final image in its sign-off O Canada montage, filed alongside beavers, canoes, snow and mountains as an artifact of the official national identity.
Joy’s silver was the best moment of an Olympics Canada was proud to host. And like all good hosts, we were more than generous with our guests, letting them have all the glory. Montreal 1976 remains the only Summer Games in history where the host nation failed to win a single gold medal. Sure, we more than doubled our medal count from the previous two Olympics combined, but Joy’s near-miss in the rain was as close as we came to glory on our own soil. We turned his silver into a national icon because it was the best we had.
Then we did it again. Twelve years later, hosting the Winter Games in Calgary, Canada once more failed to win gold, making us the only country to host two Olympics and not hear its anthem played in triumph.
By the time Vancouver won the right to host the Winter Games in 2010, somebody in Ottawa had had enough. Own the Podium, a non-profit launched in 2005 for exactly this purpose, was blunt about it: fund the athletes who could actually win, and stop pretending that participation was the point. It worked wonderfully. Canada took 14 golds, which at the time was the most any nation had won at a single Winter Olympics, punctuated by Sidney Crosby’s overtime goal against the Americans in the men’s hockey final. For two and a half weeks, Canada played the way it likes to imagine itself playing all the time: to win.
Alas, the commitment to winning didn’t last. Own the Podium saw its mission diluted and the funding dried up, with predictable results: at the Milan-Cortina Games this past February, Canada won only 21 medals, five of them gold, with losses in both the men’s and women’s hockey finals. This marked the fewest total medals Canada has won at a Winter Games in two decades, and did nothing to reverse the 30-year-low gold count Canada hit at Beijing four years earlier.
None of this is really about high jump, or hockey, or what happened in February in Italy. It’s about the theory of the Canadian state that Own the Podium briefly interrupted but which Milan-Cortina quietly confirmed: we treat winning as something nice that occasionally happens, rather than the deliberate outcome of a system we have created. We fund broadly instead of ruthlessly, measure effort instead of podiums, and generally take a “just happy to be here” approach to international competition.
When we do get serious, it is Ottawa writing a cheque for a fixed window of time, but eventually the appetite for victory fades and everything reverts to the mean. A country that spent decades re-airing a silver medal every night has made a kind of peace with something, and that something is not being the best.
Build Canada published a memo this week, “Play to Win, Canada,” that puts its finger directly on the problem. American college athletics alone raise roughly 24 times what all of Canada’s sport and recreation charities raise combined. Ottawa’s Athlete Assistance Program tops out at around $26,100 a year for our most decorated competitors, and the national sport organizations that support them say their real purchasing power has fallen by a third since 2005. We ask our best to carry the flag on a training allowance that wouldn’t cover the rent in most Canadian cities, then act surprised when we find ourselves trailing the Swiss or the Norwegians or the Germans.
The memo’s answer isn’t to propose another line item in the federal budget. Instead, it is looking to the private sector for support. It proposes tax-credited “Team Canada Accounts” that any Canadian or company could pay into directly, suggests that a slice of the now-enormous provincial sports-betting take be redirected to athlete development, and proposes a permanent, independently governed sport endowment so the whole system stops living program to program on the mood of whoever happens to be in office in Ottawa. Canada Soccer’s foundation raised $25 million from private donors in eighteen months once it built a proper vehicle to ask. The appetite is evidently there, we just need to build the infrastructure to meet the demand.
This is, in the end, the same argument Build Canada keeps making about everything else in this country, from the pipelines to the housing to the power grid. Canada is not short of ambition, and we have never lacked people looking to clear the bar. What we lack is the institutional will to build systems that turn a good try into a gold medal on purpose, every four years, rather than once by accident.
Sport is just the version of this argument that has a scoreboard attached. Everywhere else Build Canada has looked this year — the pipeline that needed a special summit just to produce a memorandum of understanding, the submarines still years from the water, the AI strategy that talks about adoption instead of building — the shape is the same: real ambition, a burst of government urgency, and then a quiet reversion to mean once the cameras leave.
Greg Joy himself has said that Canadians used to hope for a medal; for a few years after Own the Podium, we expected one. That’s the real measure of whether a country wants to win: not the hope, but the expectation. Right now, in sport as everywhere else, we’re back to hoping. This is a part of our national character that simply has to change.
Build Canada Merch
Summer is half over, but there is still time to get styling. Head over to 🛒: shop.buildcanada.com
Mary Pratt (1935-2018)
Jelly Shelf, 1999; Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 71.1 cm
Mary Pratt was one of Canada's most celebrated realist painters, renowned for her luminous still lifes of domestic subjects — jars of jam, fish on tinfoil, sliced fruit — rendered with photographic precision and an unsettling emotional intensity. Born Mary West in Fredericton, New Brunswick, she studied at Mount Allison University, where she met fellow painter Christopher Pratt, whom she married and moved with to Newfoundland. Working often from photographs, she elevated overlooked household scenes into meditations on light, labour, and the quiet undercurrents of domestic life. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1996.
This week in Building Canada
Aug 1: Slavery was abolished across the Empire, including Canada, on this day in 1834. While this freed fewer than 50 people outright in British North America, Canada’s role in the slavery story is best known as a post-1834 haven for American fugitives.
Aug 2: John Lorn McDougall becomes Canada’s first independent Auditor General, under the newly passed Public Accounts Audit Act. The office was created after it emerged that the previous auditor (the deputy minister of finance moonlighting as his own watchdog) had covered for Sir John A Macdonald retaining control of secret funds after leaving office.
Aug 3: Canada’s first infant heart transplant was performed on this day in 1989, led by Dr. Wilbert Keon at the Ottawa Civic Hospital.
Aug 4: On this day in 1914, Canada entered The Great War as part of the British Empire. It was a conflict that through industrial mobilization transformed the country from a rural economy into a manufacturing nation.
Aug 7: Happy birthday Sidney Crosby, born on this day in 1987.
What else we’ve been reading
More than 10 000 federal public servants applied for the early retirement package that was offered this spring. So far almost 7000 have been approved, with 41 applicants rejected.
The Canadian Armed Forces has issued a new directive on “spiritual reflections in military settings.” It replaces "prayer" with "spiritual reflection" as the default public-facing act at CAF ceremonies. A spiritual reflection is explicitly defined as not using religious-specific language (no invoking God, etc.), and is meant to hit themes such as gratitude, remembrance, hope, and integrity without doctrinal content.
The federal government has given Canada Nickel the go-ahead to build a new nickel mine in Northern Ontario. The project was referred to the federal Major Projects Office for regulatory fast-tracking in November. And Canada economic growth beat expectations in May and is now on track for annualized growth of 3.4 per cent.
American pop star Ariana Grande has teamed up with Apathy is Boring an organization that educates youth about democracy, to encourage concert-goers in Montreal to vote in the upcoming provincial election. And former federal cabinet minister Chris Alexander is running for mayor of Toronto.
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why do we need to win each time? enjoy the moment in time. I've spent countless hours in the gym (6hours daily in my youth) and countless hours on the bike (20000km a year 20k funding racing with some of the worlds best in nuemtb.com 100 milers racelaruta.com etc... I won't put all the links in here cause this site hates URLs and links to proof - substack sucks...) Most people live on credit cards when they race. There are good and evil to it all like anything else in life.
Balance and moderation is key, sustainability.
Same with our work culture now. As more money is thrown at a mess execs make their dough and move on. People used like debt pawns and tax slaves chasing the almighty buck to prove self worth. Seeking outside affirmations rather than feeling comfortable with self.