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Owning the Podium
Leading up to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, there was a fair amount of controversy over the “Own the Podium” program. It was an umbrella funding and sponsorship program, launched in January 2005, to help prepare Canadian athletes for the 2010 Games. The program was created in response to our failure to win a single gold medal in the other two Olympic Games hosted in Canada, Montreal (1976) and Calgary (1988).
Canadians appeared to be seriously conflicted, in our own peculiar way, between privately wanting the country, and our athletes, to do well in the medal count, and yet feeling rather awkward and somehow uncomfortable with setting bold achievement targets and making them public. It just did not seem right, ...
