"We've cut, downsized and nickle-and-dimed" support of amateur sport - Bruce Kidd

For nearly 40 years, Bruce Kidd has been a Canadian sports icon, as much for his leadership and advocacy as for his track accomplishments in the 1960s. Currently, he is Dean of the Faculty of Physical Education and Health at the University of Toronto. He competed in track and field in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, and has been involved in amateur sports in Canada as a volunteer leader ever since, as well as teaching and writing on the history and politics of sport and the Olympics. In 1986 the United National Committee Against Apartheid awarded Bruce a special citation for his contribution to the campaign for the elimination of apartheid in South Africa. Kidd's most recent book, The Struggle for Canadian Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) won the Book Prize of the North American Society for Sport History in 1997.

Bruce Kidd:
  I would agree that spending upon Canada's Olympic athletes and the Toronto 2008 Olympics should not be made at the expense of the revitalization of the public sector in other areas, especially health care, education and housing. Most Canadian Olympians would agree. Triathlon gold medalist Simon Whitfield said as much to me in Sydney.
  But we would not want sport and recreation to be forgotten, too. They are important human needs.
  I would also agree with your funding priorities for the broad area of sports and recreation. National fitness, quality physical education, sports in the schools, and community recreation are all in need of a boost. But surely Canada has the resources to give those outstanding men and women who want to pursue sports at the Olympic level the chance to do so as well.
  I am not sure how many Canadians link their 'pride-of-country' to the number of medals Canadian athletes win in international athletic competition, but I do know that a very large percentage of Canadians follow Canadian athletes in the Olympics with a strong sense of identification and interest. As several national polls showed through the long and difficult debates which followed Ben Johnson's disqualification for steroids in the 1988 Olympics, more than anything else, they want Canadian athletes to compete on a drug-free and ethical basis, and to represent Canadian values well. When that occurs, many Canadians take great pride in our Olympic Teams, win or lose. Amateur sport is effectively the oldest continuously functioning nationalist movement in the country.
  But in the post-Sydney analysis, to which I've just returned, I sense something else. I sense a feeling that the comparative underfunding of Canadian Olympic athletes and coaches, the overwhelming majority of whom do it simply for love of sport and love of country - they're certainly not getting rich from it -is inappropriate, and reflects badly on us.
  I suggest that many of those people who feel badly about our overall recent performance in Sydney do so because what's happened during the 1980s and 1990s to amateur sport symbolizes what's happened to the health care system, public schools and universities, and our social institutions. We've cut, downsized and nickle-and-dimed it and them, cheating our own people in the process. It sticks out a lot more when you compete in the Olympics, but it's the same. And in country of such wealth, it should not have to happen.
  That's why people feel badly, it's not really about medals.

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