Canadian athlete and basketball player Natalie Achonwa poses during a media day organized by the Canadian Olympic Committee in Montreal on Dec.14.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
The Olympic movement has been having a tough go of it lately. When is it not?
Just this week, there’s the feared destruction of the coral reef at the 2024 Games surfing venue, the fact that they may have to hold some Milan 2026 Winter Games events in the United States because Italy put the decimal in the wrong place, and the usual endless soap opera with the Russians.
Ticking underneath all that is every other sort of money trouble, and corruption trouble, and all the political trouble yet to come. The IOC wears all of this as lightly as a suit of armour.
Everybody’s got an opinion on how the Olympic movement is doing, except for the people who front it on the field of play. Outside an Olympics, its participants are often invisible. During one, it’s considered bad form to ask. It’s an effective form of camouflage.
On Thursday, the Canadian Olympic Committee invited the media to speak to a score of aspiring Paris 2024 invitees in a Montreal hotel convention centre. They go room to room giving any interested outlet its 15 minutes. We call this a carwash.
As ever, it is jarring going from the pros to the Olympians. The pros are bored by their own celebrity and most of the people who are interested in it. The Olympians still love a chat.
You can pick up all kinds of fascinating tidbits – sailors can tell by looking which cloud will suck wind in and which will blow wind out; climbers put deodorant on their hands, and some wear gloves in the shower; weight lifters don’t pull the weight up, they push the ground down.
In Canada, the established stars are spared the hassle of this formless back and forth. All they can do is get themselves in trouble. The people who do show up are ones who haven’t been overinterviewed.
So I asked a few how they think the Olympic movement – their movement – is going. Some took a pass. Always politely and sometimes requiring a lot of words, but a pass nonetheless.
A few had thoughts, though.
“Some things are going in the right direction, but … I’m so disillusioned. I’m not a fan of the IOC,” said race walker and Tokyo bronze medallist Evan Dunfee.
Dunfee doesn’t like the way athletes in other countries are treated or the influence of money in the Games. He described Paris 2024 as the Olympics’ greatest “pivot point” in the past century.
“The challenges are navigating this tenuous idea that there be peace during the Olympics. Even the idea of an Olympic truce.”
All great points. None of which have been addressed by the people paid to do so.
How’s it going?
“Could be doing better, I think,” said runner and Pan Am champion Charles Philibert-Thiboutot. “It’s a bit sad that this vision of the IOC has taken over what it means for the athletes to compete.”
What does Olympic movement mean to you?
“In itself?” asked gymnast Ellie Black. “I think there are key things to be taken away from the Olympic movement. I think we need to talk about sustainability.”
More than a few mentioned that specific topic, with varying degrees of hopefulness.
“What I really care about is gender equity,” said rower Jill Moffatt, who said she’d like to transition into sports policy. “The Olympic movement for us is sending a message to Canadian women that there’s a place for them in sport.”
Moffatt also talked about the issues of sustainability and “you see what’s going on in the world.”
Basketballer and soon-to-be four-time Olympian Natalie Achonwa was the only person who articulated her take on the Olympic movement in metaphor.
“You can’t simplify the issues of the world so that they fit into sport,” she said. “But I always say there’s only two places you can represent your country – in war or in sport. And only one of them is unifying.”
The most succinct, as well as charmingly Canadian answer, goes to boxer Charlie Cavanagh: “The Olympic movement? I think we’re doing the best we can.”
Every two years, for a few weeks around an Olympics, we grapple with where the Olympics are headed. For a good while now, the consensus has been ‘Probably not anywhere good.’
Evan Dunfee’s point is well taken – Paris feels like a pivot point.
At the closing ceremony of the most fun-free Olympics in history, Beijing 2022, you felt an enormous lift just watching the intro video to Paris. In the thick of COVID, it looked like an ancient world we’d begun to forget. One where you could gather in groups larger than three.
Paris was meant to remind us of the good-times Games of the past – London 2012, Sydney 2000, Barcelona 1992. The world has got a little complicated since that moment. By July, it could be a whole lot moreso.
There’s a doomsday scenario for every Olympics – black-widow bombers, trafficmageddon, collapsing venues – but rarely has the the core rationale seemed so vulnerable to reconsideration. Six hundred years after the Roman Empire built the Coliseum, no one in Rome knew what it was for. Nothing is forever.
A first step in that direction is the inability to agree on what the Olympic movement means and stands for. One way to avoid figuring that out if that’s what’s happening is not asking.
But maybe the last (unrelated) word on what the Olympics means belongs to defending gold-medal weightlifter Maude Charron.
Asked how she gets through the tough days when nothing’s going right, Charron looped in a lesson she learned as a circus performer.
“Doesn’t matter if you miss your first or second attempt, it’s still a show. So give them a show.”
Cathal Kelly