Maloney's Musings
Twenty years after the “Breads Not Circus” bleeding hearts (including the late Jack Layton) helped put the kibosh on Toronto’s 1996 Olympic bid, a recent movement to get Toronto into the running was summarily shot-down by mayor Rob Ford and councilor Doug Ford, the resident frat brothers at Toronto City Hall.
“It's just not the time,” Doug Ford told the media. “Everyone would love it but financially no one is in the shape to take it.”
The problem is: when is the time? With the Summer Olympics not having been in North America for nearly a quarter century and the United States decidedly out of the running (due to the USOC’s financial dispute with the IOC), the most advantageous time possible for Toronto to win an Olympic bid is now. The Games would have a tremendously positive impact on the city and sport in general as they did in facilities in Montreal and Calgary (it’s too soon to tell on Vancouver).
Of course, we’re confident the cultural significance and economic benefits of the Games were not lost on the cultural aficionados at City Hall, whose main priority these days seems to be a Ferris Wheel and who by their own admission wouldn’t recognize Canada’s most famous author (Margaret Atwood) if they met her in the street. I digress.
It is a shame because such a bid would likely have been very well received by the IOC but we will never find out.
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It’s hard to know whether to read into the departure of Own the Podium head Alex Baumann, who resigned this week to take a similar position in New Zealand. There are family issues that were mentioned and appear to be real. One of Canada’s greatest swimmers amazingly enough no longer has roots in this country, having spent two decades prior to 2005 as a sporting administrator in Australia and raised a family there.
There are those who have had issues with Own The Podium, which is a topic onto itself. What Baumann brought however was an uncompromising understanding of the realities of high-performance sport. There was something very Un-Canadian about the entire OTP enterprise and it certainly rubbed some in this country the wrong way, which is ironic considering at this stage in his life Baumann is probably more Australian in his thinking than he is Canadian.
A much more elaborate process similar to OTP was exactly what happened in Australia in the late 80s/early 90s and led to rise of the Australian sporting machine a decade later. It rubbed some people the wrong way there too initially because it tiered sports according to a criteria of competitiveness and tradition, but such targeted approach of resources was seen through to its successful conclusion. It will be interesting to see if that occurs in this country. The odds are against it if history is any indication.
"There is no such thing as equity in sports," Baumann has said before.
Alex Baumann is a man that gets things done. He did more for this country in five years than all of the various government position papers, communiqués, symposiums, and other bureaucratic puffery accomplished in a quarter of a century. He will be missed.
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The Ontario Summer Games were in Toronto just a few weeks ago but apparently did not include track and field based on a scheduling issue with the event being held so late in the summer. It will be interesting how the late Pan-Am Games in October affect fall training for those with Olympic aspirations the following summer.
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Looking at the platforms of the three Ontario provincial parties, only one of them has even mentioned funding or strategies for sport at all: the Liberal Party. With the province in a massive budget deficit, there will be cuts that need to be made in the next five years as a matter of fiscal reality and it’s probably a good guess that sport and fitness funding (what little there is from the province to begin with) will be safer under a party that has at least acknowledged its existence in its platform. The flip side to that coin of course is that one could also look at the broken promises in the last Liberal platform (and the one before that) and cast serious doubt as to the veracity of their promises this time around.
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Steve Buffery of the Toronto Sun this week lamented Canada’s poor performance at the World Championships (“London’s Going to Suck for Canadian Track Team”) and the bad omen it portends for the Olympics, which are less than one year from today. Dylan Armstrong’s medal aside, the most troublesome statistic of all is the shockingly low number of Canadians (four) that made finals, let alone medaled.
Buffery seems to think Donovan Bailey might have something to offer the sport in administrative role. Part of Bailey’s criticism of the leadership in Athletics relates to the stagnation of personnel in high positions in this sport for decades and the fact that nobody from Athletics Canada has reached out to him.
Sadly, this is exactly what we heard from Alex Baumann two decades ago before he left this country (the first time) to go help build the Australian sporting machine. Whether Bailey has the same organizational and leadership characteristics as Baumann is undetermined, as is the question of whether he can play nice with others. But the real question is: can he do any worse?
