Posted: September 2, 2004

Olympics: John Craig, Executive Director of the Ontario Track and Field Association, on Sports Funding

From: METRO MORNING - HOUR TWO, TIME: 07:51(CBL-FM), TORONTO, 31 Aug 04
Anchor/Reporters: ANDY BARRIE

ANDY BARRIE (HOST): Like a dog with a bone, those arguments that insist that if only we devoted more money to elite athletics we'd come home with more medals from the Olympics. Is that what the country needs? John Craig qualified to run in the 1980 Olympics, which of course Canada ended up boycotting. He's now executive director of the Ontario Track and Field Association. He joins me now in the studio. Hello, John.

JOHN CRAIG: Good morning.

BARRIE: If you had to choose yourself between more funding for elite athletes or more funding for grassroots sports programs, what would you pick?

CRAIG: I don't think I'd pick either of them. I don't think you can separate the two. It's one continuum, and you can't put money into one end of the program and not the other end and expect to get the results you want.

BARRIE: OK, but the athletes have been complaining that they need more money. There's only so much money in the pot, so if their requests are answered, then the more money that goes to them would inevitably mean less money going to... [inaudible] sport.

CRAIG: You know, the athletes like Perdita and now maybe Charles Allan and some of the others, certainly Donovan Bailey, they're making enough money on their own now that they've reached the pinnacle, and in an odd way, they kind of contribute to the problem. It's the athletes that are immediately behind them that we really need to work with, the ones who we continue to hear that are eating peanut butter and macaroni for dinner, and they're the ones we need to look after, but they... at that level, they continue to need those programs through the grassroots programs that we're all trying desperately to support to give them an opportunity to take that next step.

BARRIE: Hm. What do we gain by funding Olympic-level athletes?

CRAIG: I guess I'm like most people in this country. As soon as somebody puts on a Canadian uniform, I stand up and with tears in my eyes cheer on the good guys. I don't know that we gain anything more than that. It's a matter of national pride and taking some real hope, I suppose...

BARRIE: Should it be a matter of national pride, just to be a little provocative here? It would be a matter of national pride to me if Canada were uniquely able to reduce obesity levels in young children. That to me would be a level of national pride. I find it incomprehensible why Canadians ought to be proud of the fact that someone has come down a hill two-hundredths of a second faster than the person who will be fourth. I don't get it.

CRAIG: Yeah, no, you don't, and I guess I do, but for me it's... if we're going to reduce obesity, we have to have the role models at the top end to make kids want to be active. I think that's why we've got so many kids enrolled in house league hockey now is because we've got the hockey players. We've got great hockey players, and everybody's going to be glued to their sets. When Perdita ran this last Olympics, she made an impression on kids. We'll get fifty phone calls this week alone from kids who want to join a track club 'cause they saw her on the television, and I think in the end that's probably really where we're trying to go with all of this is provide the role models to get the kids up and active. If we get fifty phone calls in the track and field office, all the other sports in my building are going to get the same thing from the athletes they watched, and we do have a terrible problem with that. So I don't think you can get rid of the Olympic athletes and still try and get kids involved at the grassroots level. It doesn't work that way. You need them up there in order to show them the way.

BARRIE: Yesterday Sports Minister Stephen Owen said he will increase funding for top Canadian athletes within weeks. This follows earlier government noises that they would in fact be going in the opposite direction. You've seen governments to and fro on this subject, and clearly when they've been froing, when they've been less than supportive, they haven't paid a particular political price for it. So how do you assess the politics of this situation?

CRAIG: It's the flavour of the day. We've for the last couple of years been undergoing some new report, some study that's going to try and bring federal government, provincial government, and local regional governments all together to try and provide a new formula to tackle both issues, getting rid of child inactivity and obesity, getting kids involved in recreation, and to increase our level of elite athletes. But it's another study that we've gone through before and it'll probably end up on a shelf someplace, and that's not really the fault of any one agency, I don't think. I think that's just the drive is only sporadic. People have enthusiasm only for a little while and then they move on to other things.

BARRIE: And what do you make of medal counts as an argument for or against increased funding?

CRAIG: I don't think it's relevant in the slightest. We have fewer medals or the same number of medals now that we had 1976, but there are more sports, and the medals that Canada is getting these days seem to be in the new sports, the trampoline and synchronized diving and that sort of thing.

BARRIE: And yet if we were to heed the calls which follow every Olympics for more funding for elite athletes and we don't the next time around in Beijing produce more medals. I mean I understand your disinterest in this issue, this quantitative question of medal count. If we don't get more medals, then you know that politically someone's going to call for reducing funding for elite athletics 'cause we're not getting the return on our investment. That's the way the argument's framed, isn't it?

CRAIG: Well, it is, but the return on the investment is really what happens to health care twenty years down the road. You get kids that... for every dollar that you invest in sport today, you'll reduce health care fun-... health care requirements by $20 in the future. But no government...

BARRIE: That's just one of those stats that no one has ever been able to do a thing with. Someone just produced it, and we have no idea where it came from.

CRAIG: Well, that may be true, but I think intrinsically it makes some sense, doesn't it, that...

BARRIE: Not to me it doesn't, no. Two synchronized swimmers actually manage to... or two divers jump off the board that somewhere someone's going to be a less obese seven-year-old. Do we believe that?

CRAIG: I do.

BARRIE: Oh.

CRAIG: I do. I mean I don't know about diving, but certainly in track and field and that sort of thing... I don't think they have to take up one particular sport, but if they'll do something after school rather than go down to the mall or sit at the computer, sure, we've won the battle.

BARRIE: Thank you, John.

CRAIG: Thank you.

BARRIE: John Craig is executive director of the Ontario Track and Field Association.