Avenue Magazine Calgary

Canada’s history of hosting the Olympic games has been a bumpy one. The Montreal 1976 Summer Games have been immortalized as a financial debacle where we earned the distinction of being the only host country not to win a gold medal — a dubious achievement we repeated in Calgary at the 1988 Winter Games.

This no-golds-on-home-soil thing really irks some folks. Our dismal medal counts over the years (and the disparaging media coverage that invariably follows) pisses off our national sport federations and leaves us Canadians hungry for a little national pride, dammit.

And so, in January 2005, after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2010 Winter Games to Vancouver-Whistler, Canada’s 13 national winter sport federations set things in motion to change the course of Canadian Olympic history — to the tune of $150 million over five years. The initiative is called Own the Podium (OTP) and the target is clear.

“The goal is to become the number one nation, to beat all the other countries in 2010,” says OTP’s CEO Roger Jackson.

OTP’s millions go into coaching, sports medicine, research and technology, all with the vision of Canada’s athletes winning the most medals at the Vancouver Olympics and ranking top three in the Paralympic Games that traditionally follow.

Ballsy? You bet. Doable? Amazingly … yes.

We’ve been ratcheting up the medal count ladder ever since the Salt Lake City Games in 2002. There, we won 17 medals (a fourth-place tie with Austria), jumping up to 24 in Torino, Italy, in 2006, which put us third after Germany and the United States.

“[In 2008/2009], we won 29 medals at the world championship competitions,” says Jackson. “That’s our best indicator of whether we’re notching upward relative to the other countries. It’s been a grand success up to this point.”

Meanwhile, the Paralympic team surprised everyone with an unexpected climb past their goal of third place to claim top spot in the 2008/2009 world championship events.

A little context? At the 1988 Winter Games, Canada garnered only five medals (two silver and three bronze), putting us in 10th place. We’ve certainly come a long way, baby, and if everything goes as planned, Canada is poised to dominate the 2010 Olympics.