Share the Spirit?

Olympic Water Cube. Flickr Creative Commons: angus_mac_123

I love the Olympics. I love the weird sports, I love the mainstream sports, I love watching superhuman Micheal Phelps take over the universe.

But as we march forward in Day 5 of the Games, the clamour surrounding Canada’s so-far medal-less performance as a country is starting to grow considerably. Today, the head of the COC told people to “calm down and relax” and that we will reexamine our athletic support systems after the Games are over.

The trouble is, we’ve heard that before. Our Summer Games performance is never that hot, and our Winter Games performance has been occasionally attributed to its generally less populated nature. But every time this happens, everyone says we have to go back the drawing board, pour more money in and in general, be more Australian about the whole thing. I just have a hard time seeing it — the Harper government launching a brand new, from-the-ground-up program to really put Canadian athletes on the map. They’re just not that kind of government.

Unfortunately, the athletes themselves seem to be feeling the sting of our collectively medal-less performance. Fencer Sherraine Schalm pretty much freaked out on camera after her first-round loss in fencing–and to be honest, I can’t blame her. “I’m sorry, I know I was Canada’s great medal hope” she said sarcastically as the camera caught her on her way out. I thought it was refreshing. That’s exactly what I would have felt like saying afterward, not some canned, super-Canadian comment about trying hard.

Let’s keep behind our athletes, but more importantly, let’s put more pressure on our government to back them in a real, significant way so that we can really ’share the spirit’ at the London Games in 2012.