RIO DE JANEIRO — Taking their turns at the microphone, Canadian Olympic Committee president Tricia Smith, CEO Chris Overholt and chef de mission Curt Harnett all said the words: “Team Canada is ready.”
Ready to compete in these Rio Olympics, they said, “with fire in their hearts and ice in their veins.” Hey, these were political speeches. There is no penalty for clichés.
Just one caveat: Team Canada had better be more than ready; it had better be clean. Like, squeaky clean.
It was one thing when Dick Pound, the former Olympic swimmer and Montreal lawyer and IOC vice-president and World Anti-Doping Agency founder, was the only one out there from Canada hunting Olympic drug cheats with his terrible, swift sword — speaking uncomfortable truths in more colourful language than was appreciated by his stuffed-shirt IOC colleagues.
But since then, Canadian Olympic cross-country ski champion Beckie Scott has been a powerful, occasionally strident anti-doping voice as a former IOC and now WADA member, and her IOC Athletes’ Commission torch has been passed to Canadian hockey icon Hayley Wickenheiser.
And a lot of Russian athletes aren’t competing here as a result of a report authored by another Canadian, Western University law professor Richard McLaren, after his independent investigation confirmed the extent of Russia’s state-sponsored doping program.
And Pound is still in there railing, now the most senior IOC member at 56 years of service.
We should be proud of all that righteous indignation, and we are. But it does rather paint a target on our virtuous Canadian behinds.
These are shaky times for the Olympic brand, and having more and more cracks in its façade is not necessarily making our Canadian crusaders popular in some (read: Eastern) corners of the sporting universe.
“I would probably say it works the other way, where there’s a lot of patting on the back and a lot of shaking of the hand, saying ‘Thank you,’” said Harnett, who won three medals as an Olympic cyclist.
Dr. Bob McCormack, the Vancouver-based orthopedic surgeon who is the Olympic team’s chief medical officer, doesn’t see Canadians being disparaged as holier-than-thou.
“That may happen occasionally,” said McCormack, who’s at his eighth Olympics with Team Canada, “but I look at it from the perspective that because of the incredibly high standards that CCES (Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport) applies, and that we are leaders internationally, it allows us to speak.”
Smith, the Vancouver-born lawyer and former Olympic rower who took over the reins of the COC after the sexual harassment scandal that unseated former president Marcel Aubut, said Canada never has claimed to be perfect.
“We’re not saying you, you, you. It’s not just Russia’s problem, it’s a problem we all have to deal with,” she said Wednesday, in an interview following the Canadian mission’s opening news conference.
“There’s a lot of voices around the table, having good discussion about how we’re going to get to clean athletes and an anti-doping position. I think it’s always recognized that everyone plays their part, and Dick is always out there, which is really valuable, and I think people appreciate that around the world.”
Well, not all the way around. There is a fairly heavy backlash against WADA right now among IOC members, who overwhelmingly have taken president Thomas Bach’s side in his accusation of laxness on the drug-testing agency’s part in the case of the Russian scandal that ended up in the IOC’s lap just a few weeks before Rio.
Even Pound reluctantly joined the majority, saying “the arrow has left the bow” — i.e., the IOC had already decided on its half-measure punishment of Russia, so everybody might as well move on.
“What the IOC has done is a first step,” Smith said. “Definitely there’s more to be done. But the goal of everyone is the same, to have clean sport. WADA is going to look at itself and see if there are ways that things can be done better. We have to look at how things are reported, we may have to look at something like a whistleblower policy, where athletes feel safe coming forward (with information on cheaters.) So all those things have to be explored once the final McLaren report is delivered.”
Smith herself rowed in the era when the East Germans, unbeknownst to their competitors, were being shot up with steroids like so many lab rats by their government.
“I lived it. I was on the national team for 13 years during that period and I was as motivated as anything. It was motivating,” she said. “There was no proof that they were doping at that time so we never focused on it. We didn’t know, so what was the point of thinking they’re all on drugs? No. We just beat ‘em. Athletes are like that.”
Overholt said that if there is any erosion of confidence in the Olympic movement, it hasn’t shown up in corporate sponsorship of the Canadian team or of individual athletes.
But somehow, surely, all the bad news must have an impact on the public’s faith in the principles that inspire the true believers.
Asked what she would tell a skeptic who was having second thoughts about Olympism, Smith said: “Well, I would say we’re making progress. These doping cases come out now and people say, ‘Oh, Tricia, that’s terrible.’ And I say no, it’s good. We’re catching these people now.
“It’s definitely a turning point. It’s an opportunity, because the focus is really on it now. So I think we just keep our foot to the gas pedal on this and we don’t let up until we’ve got better systems in place. I’m hopeful.
“But I love the Olympics, so … I’m biased.”
ccole@postmedia.com