Human Flags
The 2026 Winter Olympics is over, and I gotta admit the ending of the men’s hockey final was a kick in the ass. I thought going into that game the Canadian team was going to get whupped, based on the preliminary rounds, but I could not have been more wrong. From the 2nd period on (which is all of the game that I watched) Canada pretty much owned the ice. That Hellebuyck guy was great in goal for the US, and once you get to 3-on-3 OT, the outcome gets to be a crap shoot. Canada lost. I will survive. As will Canada.
The end of the Games has produced the quite-inevitable post-mortems here in the Land of Ice and Snow, and one article of this genre was in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, written by their sports columnist, Cathal Kelly, titled:
Canada risks making its Olympic program a country club without proper federal funding
I expect that headline gives you the drift. Kelly’s column argues that Canada’s federal government needs to increase (to a ‘proper’ level) its funding of the Olympic program or only rich folks will be able to compete for Canada at the biannual Olympic games.
For those who don’t know, Kelly’s modus operandi, his very reason for being in the Globe, I would say, is to be cranky and controversial. For the entire NHL season he rags on the Toronto Maple Leaf organization (perhaps deservedly so) and the rest of the time he writes negative columns about whatever else in sport he can find. That’s all fine with me, sports writing is full of hero-worship generally, so some spice to go with all that sugar is welcome.
This column is no exception, and here is one of his opening lines:
CBC does a lot of things, but to me, it is the Olympics. Without the Games, our national broadcaster is PBS, minus the thrills.
So how do we explain that we publicly fund the national broadcaster to the tune of $1.4-billion a year, but won’t give a fraction of that to the event that gives it its main purpose?
Well, as it turns out, we (meaning Canadian taxpayers) do give a fraction of that to the Olympics. Kelly also writes this:
According to COC CEO David Shoemaker, the government funnels about $220-million annually to all the various sports organizations that make up the Canadian Olympic tapestry. They would like a raise – by $144-million – to $364-million annually.
Punching all that into my calculator, that means we give just under 16% of the CBC annual budget to ‘the Canadian Olympic tapestry’, every year, and the COC (Canadian Olympic Committee) would like to see that increase to 26%. Definitely a bigger fraction. And percentage.
I would note in passing, as I have in the past, that the taxpayer also gives more than a billion dollars to Canada Post, except….apparently we don’t ‘give’ it to Canada Post, it is a ‘loan’. Canada Post recorded an ‘operating loss’ of $1.3B in its 2024 annual report, almost exactly the subsidy that we ‘give’ to the CBC. So, we (taxpayers) loaned CP the money to keep going.
One might ask – why a ‘grant’ to CBC and a ‘loan’ to Canada Post?
The amount that goes to Olympic sport is, it would appear, also not a loan. I mean, how would they ever pay it back, even the gold medal winners? I don’t actually see how Canada Post is ever going to repay its loans, either, but this is an article about the Olympics, so let’s move on.
More from Kelly’s article:
This isn’t to install an MRI machine in the rumpus room of every snowboarder. According to the assembled sports executives, it’s to get the basics.
Milan’s Chef de Mission and former gold medalist, Jennifer Heil, told the story of a young Canadian Olympian being chided in a grocery store by a veteran teammate for not buying enough greens. Their excuse? They can’t afford fresh vegetables.
And of course, as a ‘get to the truth’ journalist at The Globe, Kelly believes whatever is said by the people like Ms Heil who work for the organization that would get this proposed increase in funding.
Thousands wouldn’t, but CK believes.
And that seems to be what is missing from his article. I would bet, without looking, that Mr. Kelly has written many an article in the past on the corruption inherent in the IOC. The vast amounts of money spent by the countries that host the games to build facilities that afterward stand hardly used, and the constant stories of big envelopes full of money being passed around to win a Games hosting bid. The Big Owe is still standing unused – and crumbling – in Montreal 50 years after that city last hosted a Games. To be fair, FIFA’s process for deciding who hosts the World Cup is surely even more corrupt (the bags of money appear to be even bigger), but that is hardly to the credit of the IOC.
Kelly is a sportswriter, and The Globe sent him to Milan with an expense account so he could write about these games. Not terribly surprising he is in favour of more taxpayer money going to the athletes who compete there from Canada. But honestly, some of what he writes seems to me like an argument against taxpayer funding of Olympic athletes. Like this:
Is this really the country we want to be? The one that slaps away the hands of people volunteering to travel around the world dressed up like human flags, making the rest of us look good?
That’s an interesting argument for taking money out of people’s pockets to fund elite athletes, Mr. Kelly. Here’s another of his characterizations of what we ‘should’ be doing –
The other way is to trust that the people who run our Olympic set-up aren’t trying to con us, and believe them when they say the money is not going to be used to buy everyone a gold-plated BowFlex.
Again, anyone who has kept up with the ongoing saga of Olympic corruption, as well as anyone who notes what happens when the federal government starts handing out hundreds of millions of dollars, might very well balk at being asked to ‘trust’ that all that money will be well-spent.
Anyway, I will confess my own bias. I stopped watching the Olympics ages ago. In the summer I might watch some of the soccer (i.e., football) and I saw a couple of the Canadian men’s hockey games, although that happened mostly because I had a bug and was doing a lot of lying about during the day.
When I was a kid I did watch the Winter Olympics some. It was exotic and new, with people doing things like luge and skeleton (is that still a thing?) that were sort of fun to watch. Over the years the Games have just gotten bigger and bigger, all in an effort to hand out more medals, have a longer broadcast, and sell more ads. There is now a team medal competition in figure skating. I’m sorry, figure skating is not a team sport. (Canada’s ‘team’ finished 5th, apparently. I have no idea what that means.)*
The entire Olympic mess has come to be yet another device for allowing people who have too much money already to make more. I don’t mind people making money, I watch plenty of professional sports played by multi-millionaire athletes, playing for teams owned by billionaires. However, I do mind the hypocrisy of the Olympics. They are not about building national pride, or bringing the world together, or promoting the dream that anyone can be a world class athlete. The Olympic Games are driven by cash, as in the chance for some few folks to get a lot. I don’t want to help pay for any of it.
One last quote from Kelly’s article:
But the winning of medals isn’t the core issue. As Heil pointed out, an underfunded sports system will become a playground exclusive to the rich. They’re the only ones who can afford to become permanent amateurs through their 20s and 30s.
I will echo here what one of the commenters in the Globe on Kelly’s article had to say. No amount of taxpayer funding will change the fact that only the quite well off will be in a position to ‘become permanent amateurs through their 20s and 30s’. That just ain’t natural.
However, Kelly seems to be correct; that is the madness required to compete at the world level in obscure sports. If you believe that giving the COC that extra $144million is going to be what turns some poor kid from Saskatchewan into a world class curler/snowboarder/luger/whatever, then good for you. And if it doesn’t, well – maybe just another $200million will?
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*After I wrote this it occurred to me: if they had the figure skaters from various countries do a relay race around a speed-skating rink, I would watch that.