Canada's snowboard team won 24 World Cup medals this season, its most successful year in history.
In return, as the snowboarders gather for the combined U.S. and Canadian nationals this weekend at Mount Hood, Wash., they get no respect, no money and mountains of worry.
Less than two years before Vancouver holds the 2010 Olympics, the Canadian Snowboarding Federation is so starved for cash that team members have been forced to pay their own way to events.
Since Christmas, Jasey Jay Anderson and Matt Morison, who last weekend won a gold medal at Valmalenco, Italy, in the parallel giant slalom -- his fourth podium of the winter -- have had to pay for their own flights to Korea, Japan and Europe.
'SORRY, GUYS'
"Over the summer we got our first shock when they told us they wouldn't pay for flights to training camps," Morison's father, Paul, said this week. "Then, around Christmas we got an e-mail that said: 'Sorry guys, we can't cover your flights.' In Italy, they had to pay their own ground transport and we're waiting for the bill for accommodation. It's a blow."
The CSF also let its media officer go, which meant that when Anderson won in February, or Crispin Lipscomb captured the halfpipe last weekend, it happened in a publicity vacuum.
"Matt is never going to make a million dollars and that's not the goal. But it would be nice when guys get a good result that they be acknowledged," Paul Morison said. "These guys are representing Canada and it would be nice if they didn't have to go to these events scrape, beg and borrow."
National team coach Mark Fawcett says the team lost one racer, Phil Berube, because he couldn't afford it.
"We had one athlete who was pretty talented slip through the cracks," Fawcett said. "He had to work to make money to live and opted out of the national team."
Team members must sign agreements promising to participate fully if they're named to the team.
"Yet we can't often supply 100% of the resources they need. It's a bummer," Fawcett said. "It puts us in a difficult position staff-wise. Do you keep the wax technician or the (media) guy? It puts the athletes in a difficult position because they have to compromise training to keep a job."
Royal Bank and Telus are the CSF's major sponsors, but that money blankets everything down to grassroots snowboarding and isn't targeted to the high-performance team budget. Once, the majority of sponsorship came from the snowboard industry. "Now they've kind of chucked the competitive athlete to the curb," Fawcett said.
Finding corporate sponsorship always has been a challenge.
"The sport has had a wild image," Fawcett said.
"The (Ross) Rebagliati Factor probably has something to do with it," assistant coach Sylvain Jean said.
The stigma lingers like the haze of a pot-party the morning after.
As A-carded athletes, racers get $1,500 a month in government funding. Morison also got $6,000 this year from Own The Podium, a consortium of corporations and private benefactors. But when you're paying for flights and staying in European resorts that doesn't go far.
SAVIOUR
"Own The Podium has been the complete saviour of the program," Fawcett said. "It's our only major support. Thank God for them or we'd be really stuck. But when you get all your eggs out of one basket, it's a scary thing. If they ever cut our funding, we're screwed."
Fawcett won 14 World Cup titles, represented Canada at both the 1998 and 2002 Olympics and, along with Anderson, pioneered the sport.
"I lived in a tent, a school bus and a van for nine years," he said. "Before the '98 Olympics, Jasey and I were living in a camper on the back of my pickup truck in a WalMart parking lot in Colorado. We were plugged into a lightpost until they kicked us out."
It isn't quite that bohemian now. Okay, Morison and his teammates did drive seven hours last weekend from Italy to the Munich airport "but they're not exactly living in a van," Fawcett said.
And, like skiing's original Crazy Canucks, after a slow start the team posted some promising results, including Morison's fourth overall in the World Cup standings. Too bad, hardly anyone noticed.
"What we really need," Jean said, "is sponsors. If guys can't afford to come to the summer training camps ... well, we're struggling to get the athletes where they need to be for 2010."
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CANADA'S 2007-08 WORLD CUP SNOWBOARD MEDAL WINNERS:
G S B
Maelle Ricker 3 3 0
Matt Morison 1 0 3
Brad Martin 1 1 0
Jeff Batchelor 0 2 0
Dominique Maltais 0 0 3
Drew Neilson 0 1 1
Jasey Jay Anderson 1 0 0
Crispin Lipscomb 1 0 0
Rob Fagan 0 1 0
Sarah Conrad 0 1 0
Tom Velisek 0 0 1
TOTAL 7 9 8
