BY NOW, WE’VE heard all about Canada’s ambitious Own the Podium Olympic project, but Chris Rudge, CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC), one-time Thornhiller and chair of the Own the Podium Committee, has been hearing about it for the past half decade.
As the Vancouver 2010 Games kick off,he’s as anxious as anyone to find out whether five years of an Olympic-sized effort to support Canadian athletes will pay off.
February will tell the tale of exactly how much our nation’s Olympians will benefit from the Own the Podium program, an initiative designed to develop athletic talent in order to increase Canada’s Olympic medal count. The program was funded in part by the COC, the organization Rudge helms as chief executive officer and secretary general.
Launched in 2005, the program invested $110 million in science, technology, medicine, travel and competition development for Canadian athletes leading up to the Games.
It’s arguably a much-needed investment. In the two Olympics Canada has hosted (Calgary in 1988 and Montreal in 1976), no Canadian has ever won the gold on home soil, something Own the Podium is out to change.
“A number of leaders in the sports community recognized that we had not been successful at hosting the Games in the past,”Rudge says.“Our teams didn’t do as well as one might have hoped. Recognizing this,we felt that we had to do something to improve the chances of the team to perform well in 2010, and in order to do that,we had to perform a pretty thorough analysis of where we were with our sports programs and decide what needed to be done. That was really the genesis of what went into the thinking of the program.”
It’s a labour of love for Rudge. He’s an avid sportsman and prolific volunteer who coached the Canadian National Field Lacrosse Team in 1976, played for the National Lacrosse League’s Syracuse Stingers and taught phys. ed. in GTA high schools during the 1970s. Later, he held senior positions at Quebecor World Inc. (one of the world’s largest commercial printers), Maclean Hunter Printing, QueNet Media and the Financial Post.
The experience in both the corporate and teaching worlds gave him the combination of business acumen, mentoring and communication skills the COC needed. But for his part, joining the committee was more about following the wife’s orders ( Janet Nutter, a diver at the 1980 Olympics and 1978 Commonwealth Games medalist) than anything else.
“Well,I’ve done a lot with my life,”he says. “And after I retired in 2003, I had been working out pretty heavily at the Thornhill Extreme Fitness at Yonge and Highway 7 for about a year. My wife said to me, ‘You’re driving me crazy. Get off your butt and find something to do.’ So I ended up joining the Olympic committee.”
As a former long-time resident of Thornhill — Rudge has lived on Thorny Brae and Deanbank Drives with his family and worked as chair of the Thornhill Recreational Advisory Committee — one need look no further than local environs to see his passion for his home and for sports.
You’ll often find him practising his golf swing at the Thornhill Country Club, working up a sweat at the aforementioned gym and enjoying the peppered beef carpaccio during an evening at Tutto Bene, his favourite place in town to break bread (Not so sporty as the other two activities, but everyone has to have a little bit of fun, right?).
“The committees were very interesting politically with the to-andfroing,” Rudge says. “You had Vaughan on one side of the street and Markham on the other, and they were two very different jurisdictions. It’s like that old political saying, ‘The battles are vicious because the stakes are so small.’ But I have a deep affection for Thornhill. My wife and I were looking for a place that would suit our work and recreational needs, and Thornhill turned out to be exactly that.”
It takes that accomplished, driven person with a tremendous sense of community to put in the work necessary to make Canada a force to be reckoned with in the coming weeks. Not to say that we haven’t performed in the past given our circumstances.
Rudge would have us consider that as a young nation of less than 34 million people, we’ve done relatively well compared to the likes of perennial Olympic powerhouse countries such as the United States and Russia. And unlike other top-medal nations such as Germany, Austria or Norway, Canadians face a unique challenge in contending with the vast expanse of our territory.
“There are a lot less of us then there are in other countries,”he says.“And we in Canada have to support fully both summer and winter sports initiatives.
That really spreads the costs around.
And we have a huge geography to bridge.The Germans,for example,don’t face that. In Europe, you don’t have to travel very far to be in another country. They can be there in a few hours. Even for us to aggregate our athletes and bring them together for training can be a huge challenge. So I think our accomplishments speak well to the Canadian competitive spirit, to accomplishing our goals and objectives when we need to.”
According to athletes on the ground, it’s an objective of Olympic success much closer to being realized than in days gone by, thanks to the infusion of cash and attention paid to our competitors in the years leading up to Vancouver.
“Own the Podium is the best gift we’ve ever had as athletes,” says Olympic snowboarding hopeful Michael Lambert. “Especially at a time when the Games are in our country, we have this influx of spending. That cash allows you to do things that you otherwise couldn’t do if you didn’t have it: have extra coaching, pay to develop equipment, pay for plane tickets, alleviate your stress. If you look at the Canadian results over the last couple of years, it really shows that it’s working. On the other hand, it’s bad because I know it’s not going to be here next year, especially after seeing first-hand what it really does for us.”
So it’s not about avoiding ignominy at home (for the time being, at least!), but inspiring the nation by showing what Canadians can do when we put our minds to it, something Rudge has been looking forward to since he took the job five years ago.
“In any endeavour in life, we all benefit if we help those who have a passion to be the very best they can be,” he said.“I think in particular athletes — who have made so many sacrifices to get where they are — inspire all Canadians to do whatever they do a bit better.And I think Canadians have jumped on to support that initiative.”
