Vancouver Province
for September 29, 2000

What do the Canadian Open Golf Championship and the Olympics have in common?

Both show Canada’s deep-seated inferiority complex.

Who can forget the look of bewilderment on Tiger Woods face when he received that monstrosity of a trophy for winning what we pretend is some sort of "slam", being winning the British, American and Canadian Opens in the same year? Because we have this overpowering need to pretend to ourselves that we’re important when we’re not, we neatly overlook the fact that very few players ever win the British and American Opens in the same year and when they do, they don’t usually bother with our Open. No wonder Tiger looked as if he was part of some Canadian inside joke and that we were just pulling his leg.

With the Olympics, the idea is that Canada, by dumping in taxpayers dough, gets up on the world stage. It’s a matter of national pride thence national unity. The trouble is, with few occasional exceptions, we avoid winning anything that the world watches. We have a national orgasm when a Canadian wins a medal, conveniently overlooking that while getting a bronze medal in the Trampoline makes Canadian television all day long, it gets diddley squat coverage anywhere else. We seldom win anything that gets world-wide coverage, the obvious exception being when Ben Johnson, at Seoul in 1988, went in less than 24 hours from being the "All Canadian Hero" to an immigrant from Jamaica.

Losers though we may be, masochistically we pour tax dollars into what has become symbolic, not of any spirit of sportsmanship and goodwill, but of drugs, cheating and corruptness. The Olympic ideal has become a steroid muscled behemoth escorted by a fat cat in an Olympic blazer. The Olympic Games of Ancient Greece wallowed in corruption and expired – the modern ones simply wallow in corruption. Officials take bribes – some formal, even more by way of first class airfare, fancy hotel suites, expansive expense accounts. At the Winter Olympics, heated limousines on call 24 hours of the day are expected and delivered to Olympic officials.

What used to be the bringing together of superb amateur athletes has now become an extravaganza where a fraction of a second here or a millimeter there means hundreds of thousands, nay often millions of dollars to the winner. Little wonder the athletes use drugs. Few sports (though I assume trampolining is an exception) escape the flinty eye of Olympic officials who poke about in athletic urine. Every Olympics there are sensational expulsions of athletes on steroids – every Olympics there are only slightly muffled guffaws from Games insiders that only the fools get caught.

I don’t really blame the athletes. Their careers depend upon tiny margins of victory. Ever since competitors stopped getting a little brass under the table and graduated to earning fortunes from Nike for wearing its jockstraps, all the unpleasantness of professionalism has overtaken the Games.

But back to the main question. Why do Canadians put up with public money going to finance Olympic athletes? To make us all fitter? Well, the athletes might become fitter – or at least look fitter after steroid laced training – but is there a jot of evidence that the population is now flooding into the trampoline store?

Let’s face it, folks - Canada’s not a track and field nation and that’s where the international glory is. With the exception of the west coast, we’re a winter country. Moreover, we’re not used to constant, intense international competition. Most commonwealth countries have red hot rivalries in cricket and rugby. Europe carries on a complexity of constant international soccer rivalries. Below the line, hundreds of colleges compete in every imaginable sport all year long. We play hockey – and of course the trampoline.

It’s mortifying to see us trying to inflate our leaky national ego by making such a fuss whenever we win a bronze in some obscure event. There is, thank God, more to being a country than doing well in the Olympics.

We need unifying events and the Olympics don’t do it for us so let’s save our money and go back to doing what we do best – snarling at each other over regional boundaries. After all, mutual distrust often amounting to hatred is what holds this country together so lets not sacrifice it all by trying to save international face by winning a few bits of metal on a string.