Own The Podium

OK, so I had been thinking about where Canada might end up in terms of medals at this year's Olympics. The past few months have been filled with news stories about our athletes winning medals at all of the world cup events leading up to the games. Excitement and expectations are high.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

Canada has the unfortunate history of being the only country to ever host the Olympics and not win a gold medal (and we have done it twice!). That's not going to happen this time.

In Torino, Canada finished 3rd overall in the medal standings (5th in gold) with 24 medals in total (7 gold, 10 silver, 7 bronze) behind Germany with 29 (11/12/6) and the USA with 25 (9/9/7). This was our best finish ever, a huge improvement on the 17 medals won in Salt Lake City.

In 2005, a national program called Own The Podium was created. Supported by all of Canada's winter sports organizations, and the Canadian Olympic Committee, the organization expanded in 2006 to include targeted summer sport federations.

This aggressively named (and almost un-Canadian-like) program's plan is to make Canada a world leader in high performance sport. The program has a budget of over $100 million, and supports development of coaches and athletes, improvements to facilities and equipment, as well as some super-secret high-tech research initiatives to try to give Canadian athletes as many (legal) advantages as possible.

Their goal for Beijing was a top 16 finishing at the summer games, which was achieved when Canada tied for 13th place. Click here to see an interactive map of medal counts from every Olympic Games. For Vancouver 2010, the goal is to finish atop the medal standings, and they think that it will take somewhere between 28 and 36 medals to do that.

I was all set to make my prediction guess of 30 medals (9/10/11) for our final medal count public when Sports Illustrated published their predictions, and came out with the exact same number as me (though their breakdown is 10/11/9). They have us finishing second behind Germany (35), but ahead of the USA (27).

Regardless of how it turns out, I'm sure it will be thrilling, and heartwrenching. There will be tears of joy and disappointment. As I've said before, for me, the games are about the athletes and their stories, so I'm not going to get all hung up about how many medals we win (or don't win).

The design of the medals (as seen in the photo above) is unique, in fact, every individual medal is unique. The story of the design of the medals is terrific. Here's a really cool video that shows how these beautiful medals came to be:



This video over 7 minutes long, but it is really worth watching if you get a chance.

I leave tommorrow, so my next post will be from Vancouver! See you there!