Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Owning the Podium - the Empires Snipe Back

I personally have a number of qualms about Canada's "Own the Podium" program, which has spent over $100 million on top-flight Canadian Olympic athletes. For starters, I'm not certain that this is the best use of taxpayers money.

That being said, I find it extremely rich to have American and British commentators sniping at Canada for having the temerity to be competitive. The formerly dominant empire in the world, and the current superpower, which each have sunk fortunes into global dominance, are upset with Canada for trying to win a lot of Olympic medals. The impudence! The gall! The shock!

I'll be curious to see how much money Britain invests in its athletes for the 2012 games in London...

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1 Comments:

At 2:25 am, Blogger Declan said...

You don't have to be curious.

In case, you don't feel like clicking the link, in 2006 they were allocating 600 million quid, on top of 60 million annually spent on medal winning potential athletes.

So, putting the 600M + 4 years at 60M each (4 years between Olympics') and converting to Canadian currency, you're looking at about $1.4 billion dollars.

Are you sure they weren't complaining about how *little* we spent??

 

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