Canada Spent Big Money on Its Olympic Athletes
Canada's Olympic athletes are doing very well in the ongoing Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and it's no coincidence. Money may not be able to buy you a gold metal, but it can certainly help, and Canada has been pouring funding into its athletic programs in the years leading up to the Vancouver games.
Even the names of programs designed to help Canada overtake its rivals in the race for Olympic medals read like spy-agency dossiers: OTP, B2ten, Top Secret.
There's no doubting it was a national priority.
All Olympic powers have comparable programs. Canada wasn't in their class, in terms of ambition or resources, before Vancouver won the bidding for the 2010 Games -- and its subsequent endeavors are evidence of the lengths nations now go in pursuit of gold.
Exhibit A is moguls skier Alexandre Bilodeau, who Sunday became the first Canadian to win gold on home territory after a shutout in two previous Canada-hosted Olympics. He's a direct beneficiary of three of the key Canadian initiatives:
- Own The Podium, a multiyear investment of more than $110 million in government and corporate funding to help Canada win the most medals in Vancouver, with the bulk of the money steered toward the top medal contenders. By comparison, the U.S. Olympic Committee said its 2007-2010 investment for these games was $58.2 million.
- Top Secret, a component of Own the Podium that allocated about $8 million to high-technology and science-related projects. For Bilodeau, this included sessions in a Montreal lab improving his relaxation skills through a process called bioneuro-feedback.
- B2ten, a private organization, funded by a small group of wealthy donors, that has provided $3 million over the past five years to a select group of elite Olympians, including Bilodeau and 17 others who are competing at these games. Their aim was to invest with business-style efficiency, getting money straight to promising athletes without diversions for administrative costs.
B2ten's program director is Dominick Gauthier, who also coaches Bilodeau and moguls silver medalist Jenn Heil. The program provided the two skiers and the other selected Olympians with new equipment if they needed it and access to a specialized support staff - including athletic therapists and sports psychologists - that wasn't available to non-B2ten athletes.
"It's absolutely a difference-maker," Gauthier said of the extra support -- which for the most part went to athletes just on the edge of medal prospects such as bobsledder Lyndon Rush and speedskater Denny Morrison.
"We were looking for people a tiny bit behind ... where our dollars would make a big difference," Gauthier said.
