As Canadian stars end Olympic careers, some wonder if resources exist to produce the next gen of medallists
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“…in what is likely their last Olympics.”
Through much of these Milano-Cortina Olympics, you’ve read that addendum and heard that phrase uttered many times.
For Canadians, it has often accompanied medallists.
Thirty-something speed skaters Isabelle Weidemann, Ivanie Blondin and Valérie Maltais won team-pursuit gold in what is likely their last Olympics.
Freestyle skiing icon Mikaël Kingsbury, 33, ended Canada’s gold-medal drought in Italy by winning the dual moguls event in what is likely his last Olympics.
Bronze-medal figure skaters Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier, both 34? Yup, likely their last Olympics.
Sidney Crosby and Drew Doughty, 38 and 36 respectively. The list goes on and on.
It begs the question: Who’s next?
Megan Oldham celebrates with teammates after winning gold in women’s freestyle skiing big air on Feb. 16. She earlier won bronze in slopestyle. (Associated Press)
There have been some breakout stars for Canada. Megan Oldham is an Olympic champion and two-time medallist at 24 years old. Daryl Watts, 26, in her first Games, looks like a keeper for the women’s hockey team. Quadruple-medallist speed skater Courtney Sarault is 25. Their performances in Italy will make them some of the faces of the Canadian team as it heads to the French Alps in 2030.
But, as things stand today, they don’t appear to have much company. And the fear among some in the Canadian sports world is that those numbers will keep dwindling thanks to a lack of funding.
It’s an alarm that’s been sounded for years. The starkness of it on display in Italy is only making the noise grow louder.
“The fear is that this goes to a pay-for-play [model],” Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton CEO Kien Tran said in a recent interview. “You don’t necessarily get your best athletes — you get the ones that can afford it.”
Through Saturday, individual sports (excluding hockey and curling), 17 different Canadians have stood on the podium at these Milano-Cortina Games. Their average age is just under 29 years old. Eight medallists were at least 30, while nine were under that age. Of the latter half, six belonged to the short-track team, while snowboard cross silver medallist Éliot Grondin, 24, Oldham and freeski half-pipe bronze medallist Brendan MacKay, 28, were the others.
Or, you could compare the Canadian women’s hockey team — with its average age of 29.2 — to the relatively spry Americans, who clock in at 25.8. Canada has five players under 25; the U.S. has 13.
The U.S. women’s hockey team averages four years younger than their Canadian rivals. (Getty Images)
If the ensuing Winter Olympics were taking place next year, then sure, this wouldn’t be a major issue. But in 2030, those medallists will all be in their late 20s and 30s; in sports parlance, just finishing their prime or out of it altogether.
“I feel like the whole talent pool needs to be replenished,” said Julie Stevens, a professor at Brock University whose work focuses on the amateur system.
In announcing a $500-million corporate investment into the sport system just ahead of these Olympics, Canadian Olympic Committee CEO David Shoemaker acknowledged that “this strategy cannot solve the immense funding gap that still exists in the sport system.”
Meanwhile, CBC Sports’ Chris Jones reported that Italian athletes get paid roughly seven times what Canadians do for medals, making even Sarault’s $65,000 earnings for her four medals so far seem paltry.
On the federal level, core funding has not increased for more than 20 years despite the extra costs and time it now takes to become an elite athlete. Add it all up, and you can understand why younger athletes are less likely to turn to high-performance sport. Oftentimes, it’s simply unsustainable.
“This inattention to this funding crisis over the last 20 years has shifted the burden onto Canadian athletes who already, [if] you’re a nationally carded athlete, you’re still only through the carding system earning at or below the poverty line,” Shoemaker said in an interview prior to the Games. “So the idea that you then have all of these additional burdens foisted on you is not the sports system that we want.”
For most of this millennium, there has been a sound system in place thanks to Own The Podium, an initiative that was created in 2005 to boost Canada’s medal hopes at Vancouver 2010.
It worked: Canada won a national-record 14 gold medals at home. Its 26 total medals also set the mark before it was surpassed by a 29-medal haul at Pyeongchang 2018. Canadians reached double-digits in gold medals for three straight Winter Olympics until Beijing 2022, which saw a precipitous drop to four.
Canadians celebrated a national-record 14 gold medals at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. The Own The Podium program was started in 2005 to boost Canadian athletes. (AFP via Getty Images)
In Italy, Canada seems hard-pressed to get to 10. It would need everything over the remaining days to go according to plan — men’s and women’s hockey and curling golds, first and foremost.
Today, Own The Podium still operates as it ever has: it recommends which national sports organizations receive funding based on performance, and Sport Canada distributes money accordingly.
But therein lies the rub: performance leads to funding. And when the results don’t come? Neither does the money.
Stevens said funding goals should begin to take a longer-term view instead of focusing solely on results.
“If there was the patience and the space to allow sports to shift their focus into just trusting, building a participation pool, building domestic participation in many, many different ways, shapes, forms, whatever that might take for different kinds of participants and give themselves a little bit of time to replenish the pool, then I think that’s what would start to shift the talent drain that the system has faced and is facing right now,” Stevens said.
There’s fewer in the younger generation to even get involved in sport.– Julie Stevens, professor of sport management, Brock University
Of course, it is no guarantee that Canada is headed downhill — in the simplest terms, things would look different had the moguls tie gone Kingsbury’s way, and had Grondin crossed the finish line 4/100ths faster than he did.
In snowboarding, 22-year-old Liam Brearley may have contended for a medal in big air and slopestyle had it not been for injury that prevented him from competing at all. Same goes for 21-year-old freestyle skier Olivia Asselin, who also missed the Olympics.
Still, the numbers don’t lie — Canada will finish with its fewest medals at a Winter Olympics since it came home with 24 at Turin in 2006 and may wind up closer to the 17 from Salt Lake City 2002.
The nine-day gold-medal drought to start these Games was the longest since Canada was shut out of the top step of the podium in Grenoble in 1968.
It is also possible that this is all the natural ebb and flow of a sports-team cycle, the same way professional organizations bob in and out of contention windows.
But Stevens said that is unlikely in this case thanks to dwindling numbers in the development system.
WATCH | Chef de mission Jenn Heil on funding:
‘We haven’t had new investment in the sports system in 20 years:’ Jenn Heil talks funding challenges
Chef de Mission Jenn Heil tells Ariel Helwani about the funding challenges facing the Canadian sport system in an interview at Milano Cortina 2026.
“There’s fewer in the younger generation to even get involved in sport and the cultural shifts we’re seeing is less participation because the younger generation focuses upon consuming sport like spectators and now this whole area of gambling, which takes away from an interest to be active and to be involved in sport in a way that might lead you into a career path as a high-performance athlete,” she said.
“So to me, I really am not seeing a lot of correction happening by chance in the horizon.”
Stevens compared Canada’s high-performance athlete shortage to any other workforce — the same way the medical field might work to increase its numbers when low on doctors, or the schooling system might look to increase its teachers.
“High-performance sport leaders need to think along those lines and they need to consider how they enhance the workforce. And one is you don’t just keep looking for the short-term hire. You look for long-term strategies to build your personnel pool,” Stevens said.
Whether there will be enough of a national push to overhaul or adjust the sports system to better reflect development and take the 20,000-foot view remains to be seen.
Hockey and curling triumphs could paper over the holes in the system exposed by other sports — including sliding sports such as bobsled, luge and skeleton, where Canada has missed the podium entirely.
“We have many athletes that go, we are participating in the majority of the sports, and it may not raise a red flag,” Stevens said.
In that sense, the Canadian sport system could be a victim of its own success.
But the trend from these Games is not looking positive. Heading into the next quadrennial, a new pipeline of young stars must be discovered.
Yes, Canada has some gold medallists. But it has even more old medallists.
