What’s all the fuss about winning medals?

There was a lot of grumbling the first Olympic week about Canada’s relative lack of success in Beijing. I, for one, think it’s terrible.

All the grumbling, that is.

One headline got me really steamed – in our Nova Scotia daily paper, of all things: “they have Phelps, we have flops,” a reference to American swimmer Michael Phelps, the eventual winner of a record eight gold medals.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement – and from their own country, no less – for a group of athletes (in this case, the Canadian swim team) clearly doing its best in an increasingly-competitive world.

Canada’s Michael Brown placed fourth in the 200-metre breaststroke, just 0.09 seconds out of third. To me, that was a tremendous performance; the headlines suggested, for Brown, it was “0.09 seconds between victory and agony.”

What a crock! The man had just finished the swim of his life, and on the world stage. I’m sure he was disappointed to have missed a medal by so small a margin, but he’s fourth in the world! When did that become something to be ashamed of?

The rest of the Canadian team was also coming in for its share of criticism from a nation that has obviously lost the meaning of competition.

We need to remember – and a lot of people seem to have forgetton – is success is a relative thing.

I have to think I’ve covered enough sports to know doing your best is what really matters. If you end up winning, that’s a bonus. For what it’s worth, a lot of really successful local athletes – golfer Laura Harris, for one – have told me that very thing.

As former Acadia hockey coach Tom Coolen once told me (after a disappointing loss), you win with class and you lose with class. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong, but it’s gotten me this far and I see no reason to change my perception.

The attitude of Canadians to our Olympic performance really ticks me off. Despite having among the lowest-funded athletes from any competing country, Canada is all of a sudden expected to keep up with 300 million Americans and more than a billion Chinese, to name just two larger countries; and bring home a cartload of medals.

If we don’t, we’re somehow a failure? Give me a break! It’s never happened before - not at the Summer Games or at the Olympics in general. Why, for heaven’s sake, should we expect to be world-beaters now, when we never have been?

It’s a bit hard to take when much smaller countries like Azerbijian, Togo and Mongolia had won medals and we hadn’t but, at the time I’m writing this, Canada had broken through and won seven medals, including a pair of gold, in a two-day span.

The Games still aren’t over, and who’s to say we won’t have many more medals? That’s supposing winning a medal – an arbitrarily-engineered and totally imaginary line of success, over which we are somehow successful and under which we are somehow a failure – is all that important anyway.

I’d like to think I have as much national pride as the next person; I admit to a rush of emotion anytime I hear O Canada played at an international competition. It’s great to cheer for our Canadian athletes, but support has to be tempered by commonsense. It’s not wrong or a cause for national shame if an athlete does the best he or she can and ends up fourth, or fifth, or even 10th in the world.

Because it appears to be the measure of success, I hope Canada wins more medals, and reaches its pre-Olympic goal of 16 medals and a top-16 finish overall. If nothing else, it might shut up all the critics. But, if we don’t, it’s not – and shouldn’t be – the end of the world.