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BEIJING — The jokes started a couple of days ago, when Edmonton's David Ford finished sixth in the kayak K1 final, three spots behind Benjamin Boukpeti, born and raised in France but only via his father eligible to represent Togo.
When Boukpeti won the little West African country's first ever Olympic medal, the gleeful cry went up in the Canadian press corps: "Hey, we lost to Togo! Who we going to lose to next?"
Then came that low, familiar rumbling, plain in questions to Alexandre Despatie and Arturo Miranda, who missed out on an expected podium appearance in the synchronized three-metre springboard: Boys, what would you say to all those Canadians back home who really want a medal?
What Despatie said, with, in the circumstances, what was excruciating politeness, was this: "Diving isn't here to support Canada on its own. The Games have just started, it's still happening, people are still training and still competing.
"The medals are going to come," he said. "We want medals, too. Don't give up on us."
But that said, if you haven't read it already, you will; if it's not in your newspaper this morning, odds are it will be soon.
As predictable as death and taxes, every Olympics features the traditional "Canada chokes" story.
Less well recognized (and certainly less well publicized) is the fact that almost as traditional is the "Sportswriter eats his words" story, such as the time at Albertville in 1992 that one fellow retired for the night, serene in the knowledge that the start of his piece ("I fell out of bed last night. I wanted to know what it felt like to be a member of the Canadian team at the Olympic Games.") would endure.
Alas, by the time he fell out of bed again the next morning, Canadian TV audiences had watched Kerrin Lee-Gartner tear to a gold medal in downhill skiing.
There was also the time, in 1976 at Innsbruck, that Canadian sportswriters decided the country's women had no chance in the giant slalom, with most skipping the tedious trip to the ski hills.
Kathy Kreiner of Timmins, Ont., then all of 18, roared to a gold; the sportswriters, me among them, scrambled desperately to catch a bus to get to the victory press conference in time.
There are dozens of stories just like these; if you haven't heard them, it's because we don't write 'em.
Indeed, it is only the haunting fear of being similarly humiliated — the 12-hour time difference between Beijing and Central Canada means that stories may reach their best-before dates before they are even printed — that may fend off the wolves this time.
Sportswriters Wednesday were reminding themselves that tempting as the choke story was to do right now — Day 5 and no medals! — before it saw the light of today, Oshawa's own Mike Brown would be in the pool, perhaps poised to rub it in their faces with a medal in the 200-metre breaststroke. Alas, Brown missed a bronze medal by 0.09 seconds in the final on Thursday, finishing in fourth place.
Anyway, this is mostly good-natured stuff, except when it isn't.
My Globe and Mail colleague Matthew Sekeres describes being at an event where a young Canadian athlete was asked why she'd failed, and reacted with "a look like her puppy had died." Dawn Walton of The Globe's Calgary bureau was at the fencing hall when Sherraine Schalm, who lost in her first round to a lower-ranked fencer, was asked how she felt and said, "You feel like you want to curl up and die … You train so long, and I feel like I disappointed myself, my coach, my family, my country, everybody." Even 57-year-old trap shooter Susan Nattrass burst into tears after failing to make her final.
All across the Olympic Green here, in the first five days of competition, where the Chinese were celebrating their astonishing successes, Americans were waving the flag, Brazilian beach volleyballers were defending their newfound Georgia-ness (Ich bin ein Georgian, to borrow from late American president John F. Kennedy), Canadians were apologizing.
If it is true that a handful of Canadian athletes have come up short in a couple of events where they were expected to star — the synchronized divers, Daniel Nestor and Frédéric Niemeyer in tennis doubles, and Brent Hayden of Mission, B.C., the reigning world co-champion in the 100-metre freestyle swim who didn't make it into the final eight — they were really the only genuine medal prospects who have thus far competed.
The rest, particularly those in the pool, for the most part turned in the performances of their lives. Not good enough, or as the headline of a Globe editorial Wednesday read, "Enough with the personal bests."
That editorial, and the fine story that probably inspired it, correctly points out that if Canadians want lots of Olympic medals, they will have to pay for them. While funding for athletes in Canada has increased in recent years, it remains a fraction of what is spent by the nations reaping all the gold, silver and bronze here, and athletes in less popular or more obscure sports still often pay some, or nearly all, of their own expenses.
The improvement of the elite athlete system is a worthy goal, though also controversial in a country where children's obesity is a rising problem (that supports the case for putting the financial focus on low-level mass participation in sport), and where, push come to shove, many people have a philosophical aversion to spending taxpayer dollars on any sort of elite, cultural or sporting.
Yet that whole discussion somewhat misses the point that Schalam made when she said, "I know no Canadian taxpayer wants to hear that I really did try my best. I really did give everything I had." Or what Hayden said: "It's always going to be a fight [to win a medal] and that's the beautiful thing about sport." Or what Pierre Lafontaine, chief executive officer of Swimming Canada, told my colleague Al Maki about Hayden, who shrugged off the disappointment of missing the 100-metre freestyle final to swim a strong leg in the 4 x 200 freestyle relay: "This guy wanted it so bad. For him to turn around and do what he did for the team, I would be a proud dad if I was his dad."
It's clear some Canadian personal bests aren't good enough, but what more can be asked of the athletes who produce them? What more can they do?
And I don't know about other writers, but my own experience at Olympics (these are my 13th) is that if I hit it out of the park once, I'm doing well. If there was an Olympic motto for writers, it might be, Slower, Duller, Turgider. Or something.
When Hayden was asked how he thought the fans back home would think of him, he said: "I have been cheering for the Canucks for how long? And they still never have won a Stanley Cup. I still love them. I hope Canadians think of us the same way."
Amen.
