On the final afternoon of the Vancouver Olympics, almost all of Canada is expected to watch, live and experience a gold medal hockey game and at night tune in and bid an emotional goodbye to the Winter Games of 2010.
And then what?
After so many years of buildup, promotion, controversy and excitement, what will be left for Vancouver, for Canada, or for amateur sport in this country?
We know the 17 days of the Games will be full of stories and moments and unexpected athletic magic, the way every Olympics turns out. But what of the future? What will be the legacy of the very expensive, very public Games of Vancouver?
"I'm an eternal optimist about that because of the experience we had in Calgary," said Frank King, who headed up the Calgary Olympics in 1988 and has acted as a consultant to the Vancouver Organizing Committee. "There are different ways you can do this. I remember going to Sapporo to look at their facilities after their Games and there weren't any. All there was were brown patches of grass from where the buildings used to stand. Then you look at what happened from Calgary. We had no facilities of any kind for Olympic sport prior to the Games in 1988. And for the last 20 years, our facilities have been used to train Canadian athletes and athletes from all over the world.
"You look at Vancouver now and count the number of athletes who trained in Calgary to get there. You know what the legacy from that has been. And when I look to the future with Vancouver, I don't expect to see any brown patches of land. I see a whole lot of possibilities."
With 22 years of retrospect it is easy to surmise what Calgary left behind: In many ways their Games were the complete opposite of what is anticipated six months from now.
In Vancouver, Canadians are expected to win medals, lots of them. These Olympics are expected by many to be a coming out party of Canadian pride. In Calgary in 1988, the pride came from community, from organization, from this Rubik's Cube of an event cooked to perfection. The fact that there was athletic disappointment from the host country didn't diminish the texture of the Games.
And now come the opposite Olympics: Where athletic expectations will be enormous for Canadian athletes, maybe even unrealistic. The pressure placed on the CIndy Klassens, the Jennifer Heils, the Canadian hockey players and curlers, men and women, the Charles Hamelins, will be at a frenzied pitch.
But after exhaling, after the Games are over, the legacy will matter more than any sporting accomplishment.
Own the podium
"These will be the most important sporting events in the history of Canada, and not because of what's accomplished in Vancouver," said Roger Jackson, the former gold medal rower who heads up the Own The Podium program. "In my opinion, the legacy of Vancouver will surpass anything that happened in Calgary or Montreal. The absolute best thing that will come out of the Olympics was the formation of the Own The Podium program and all the results we've seen already.
"This isn't just about Winter Olympics. This will affect Summer Olympics also. This will affect Canadian sport."
It already has.
"I don't know if a lot of people know this but Canada won more winter sport medals around the world last year than any other country," said Kathy Priestner-Allinger, another Olympic medal winner who is an executive vice-president of VANOC, the Vancouver Organizing Committee. "That's the first time that ever happened. When you see these kind of results, with a program as young as Own The Podium, you realize what we're capable of.
"When we talk about the future (from Vancouver) we're talking about a sustainable sports system where we can compete among the best in the world, summer and winter, and we've never been that. Winter has come a long long way. Summer has been a little behind. But what we've proven is, if we stick with this, we'll have something our country can benefit from for years."
The problem, as always, is money. Own The Podium was financed by VANOC and the federal government and the results have been apparent. "We need about $120 million over the next eight years to accomplish the high performance goals we're gearing towards," said Jackson. "We hope to be able to raise that kind of money."
This is where the pressure on the athletes performing in Vancouver is not singular. Being at home, it will be difficult enough for them to succeed.
And now, it's not just about them anymore. It's about them and it's about the future. The more medals Klassen wins, for example, the more money likely to come to Own The Podium for the future.
Chris Rudge understands how the pressure and the legacy are intertwined. As chief executive officer of the Canadian Olympic Committee, he has raised the bar for the Canadian athletes. The better the 17 days of Vancouver end up for Canadian athletes, the better it will be for the future.
"Like a lot of people, I can tell you where I was when Paul Henderson scored the goal," said Rudge. "People live for those kind of moments, they're personal, they change you in some ways. The memories are going to be tremendous. When you can marry our potential successes with memories of a home game Olympics with unbelievable media covering, people are going to take away tremendous memories from this and into the future.
"In Calgary, the legacy were the facilities left behind and they became the core of our development programs for Canadian athletes. There was also a financial legacy.
"I'm not sure it will be the same for Vancouver. The major legacy of these Games will be more ephemeral. We have developed a new way of managing high level sport in Canada, a new attitude believing we can. That has manifested in good results for our athletes. If we can carry that on, that will be tremendous."
steve.simmons@sunmedia.ca
Steve Simmons will be part of the Sun Media team in Vancouver.
