Falling off the pedestal

The British press has been getting a hard time in Vancover for their coverage of the Winter Olympics. Seems they are not sufficiently sycophantic and have veered dangerously close to telling it like it is. Not quite the done thing chaps apparently.

One of the more telling criticisms of the Canadians that I have read concerns their inability to understand how their attitude was coming across. Promoting slogans about "Owning the Podium" seem to have back fired spectacularly. Indeed we seem to have seen a very different side of the Canadian psyche. One that is highly competitive and dangerously close to an American style tunnel vision of winning at all costs.

An example of this occured when a Canadian luge competitor innocently expressed his frustration that, now that the course had been shortened and changed slightly following the death of the Georgian luge competitor, he had lost his home town advantage. "I had practised more than 200 times on the course and now i have to go back to square one". Apparently not appreciating that no-one else had had a chance to practice 200 times on the course and that he was now simply in the same boat as everyone else. And insensitively dismissing the Georgian's death by failing to acknowledge the tragic accident that led to the change.

And there was the incident with the British skeleton competitor who won gold on a hi-tech sled designed by an engineering student studying sled design for his doctorate. The Canadians (and Americans) promptly appealed against the design of her helmet! (Which was dismissively rejected). The Canadians however seemed blithely unaware of the irony of this complaint coming from a nation that funded 55 "secret" programmes to try and gain a competitive advantage in a range of winter sports. They funded programmes to develop new training methods for speed skaters and a range of other initiatives designed to achieve exactly what the British did with the sled design. Not exactly the sportsmanship one would have expected from the "nice" Canadians.

The "Own The Podium" programme was apparently a five year $120M project designed to get Canada to the top of the medal table. No-one seems to have stopped and stepped back to think how all of this would come across. Just read this website from a couple of days before the start of the Games:
Vancover 2010 Olympics - 11 Feb

The London Olympic team have also apparently been observing the alleged debacle that is the organisation of the Vancover Games. British press coverage has compared the Vancover Games to the Atlanta Summer Games in 1996, universally acknowledged as the nadir of Games organisation. No doubt the Canadians will have the microscopes out for London, however there is the suggestion that the impact of these Games will rumble on for years, both in financial terms and in terms of damage to Canada's reputation