The Olympics: okay for Canada after all

I found it funny much of the criticism aimed at Canada’s Olympic athletes seemed to stop when Carol Huynh (ironically, her name is pronounced “win”) captured our first medal, a gold in women’s 48kg wrestling.

Funny and, at the same time, a little bit sad.

Huynh’s medal wasn’t the only one Canada won in Beijing. It wasn’t even our only gold. Eric Lamaze in equestrian and the men’s eights in rowing also made it to the top of the podium.

On the negative side, it did take our athletes more than a week of competition to win Canada’s first medal, of any colour. On the positive side, they made up for a slow start by winning 18 medals in all, tied for our second-best summer Olympics showing ever.

I hope those criticizing the lack of medal-winning performances by our athletes in the first week of the games enjoyed a nice meal of crow sometime before the competition wrapped up.

Yes, 18 medals pales in comparison to the totals amassed by the Americans or Chinese. I never expected Canada to challenge those numbers – not with a tenth (or less) the population and a fraction of the commitment in government support.

If people feel moved to criticize anything, how about a government which puts little or no funding (proportionately) into amateur sport but yet, like most everyone else, expects results to rival much-larger (and far better-supported) countries?

It really says a lot for our athletes they do as well as they do.

I felt the performance of our Canadian athletes – once they got going – was about what could have been expected, and not unlike our performances at other summer games in which the entire world took part.

I read the pre-games goal of the Canadian Olympic Committee was 16 medals and a top-16 finish overall. As it turned out, Canada won 18 medals and finished tied for 14th.

As is almost always the case, there were athletes who should have won and didn’t, those who came out of nowhere and whose results could best be termed a surprise.

Huynh, who virtually no-one had heard of prior to two weeks ago, falls into the latter category. Same with Priscilla Lopes-Schliep in track and field, Thomas Hall in paddling, Ryan Cochrane in swimming and Melanie Kok and Tracy Cameron in rowing.

All have often toiled in the shadow of better-known teammates, and all managed to rise to the occasion when the occasion presented itself. That, to me, is what the Olympics is all about – or at least, what it should be.

I admit to feeling very pleased especially for those, like Adam VanKoeverden or Eric Lamaze, whose podium finish was a means of redemption, either short-term (less than 48 hours, in the case of VanKoeverden) or long-term (10 years or more, in the case of Lamaze).

I felt especially good for Cameron, not only because she is Nova Scotian, but because I remember her from her days as a student athletic therapist at Acadia. I’m sure a lot of people who knew Cameron then and had lost track of her since wondered, as I did, if it was the same person.

I also felt pleased for Ian Millar, such a Canadian icon, and who, at 61 and in his ninth Olympic appearance, finally earned a medal: a silver in the team equestrian event.

There were lots of wonderful moments in Beijing: Alexandre Despatie shaking off the lingering effects of injury (and beating off the Chinese) to take silver in springboard diving; then, Emilie Heymans doing basically the same thing on the women’s side. At that level of competition, arguably the best the Olympics has ever seen, any silver medal was virtually as good as gold.

Overall, I felt it was a typical Canadian performance, at least in terms of the summer games: a decent selection of medals and a number of fourth-place finishes which, as I suggested last week, are as good as a medal.

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. Canadian athletes proved that. I feel they did us proud but, of course, to me, they did us proud just by being there.