Turning Canada’s Olympic success into increased participation in sports

This comment first appeared in the Toronto Star on 23 July 2012, and is reprinted on playthegame.org with kind permission from the author.

Later this week several hundred of Canada’s best athletes will begin competition in London, all attempting to win a medal. Estimates from those in the business of predicting Olympic success suggest that Canadians will win medals in about 18 events.

For more than 15 years now it has been claimed that medal-winning performances by Canadian athletes will inspire increased sport participation by Canadians. And yet, data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey — the most comprehensive measure we have of sport participation — show that participation has declined steadily over the last 20 years, from 45 per cent (1992) of the population participating regularly in sport to 34 per cent (1998) to 28 per cent (2005).

During that same period, increasing amounts of public money have been invested in training and competition for Canada’s high performance athletes, and they have won a steadily increasing number of medals at Summer and Winter Olympic Games. These findings are typical for countries like Canada that have joined “the global sporting arms race” for Olympic medals.

Up to 90 per cent of government funding for sport goes to helping the best athletes in their attempts to win Olympic medals, while the remaining 10 per cent or so is used to support grassroots participation in sport for the rest of the population.

It is hardly surprising that participation has declined. So where did this idea come from that top performances by a country’s Olympic athletes will help to increase sport participation in the country?

We will hear it a number of times in the next few weeks, and even our Olympic athletes will repeat it. They have been encouraged to believe that their success will somehow inspire people to become involved in sport.

The idea is rooted in the notion of “legacy.” As it became increasingly expensive to stage Olympic Games we began to hear increasingly about the various “social goods” that would be a legacy of holding an Olympics — economic and infrastructural development, new housing, new sports facilities, and a more active and healthy population who would have been inspired to get out of their La-Z-Boys by the performances of top athletes from their country.

In 2002, the International Olympic Committee hosted a legacy conference at which it was decided that, in future, the increasing costs of hosting Olympic Games would be justified by requiring all cities aspiring to host a Games to include a legacy plan in their bid. Vancouver was the first city to win an Olympics under the new requirements, followed by London — and both cities included increased sport and physical activity participation in their successful bids. In fact, Tony Blair — Britain’s prime minister at the time — claimed that sport participation in the U.K. would increase by 10 per cent as a consequence of the London Olympics.

The idea of increased participation is extremely important in modern societies, where the costs of public health services are a concern, and where there is widespread evidence of negative health effects resulting from increasing weight gain and decreasing physical activity among citizens. 

Even in countries that are not hosting the Olympics but are contenders in the global sporting arms race, claims of inspiring increased sport participation are used to justify the increasing amounts of money that it takes, as Australia recently discovered, even to stay in the same place in the Olympic medal table. So, why has the U.K. now dropped its 10 per cent target recognizing that it may achieve no measurable increase in participation as a result of the London Olympics. And why have countries such as Canada seen no increases in participation despite improved Olympic performances? Have our athletes failed to inspire us? Have our citizens failed to be inspired?

Quite the contrary. The Olympics generates a great deal of interest in sports. Young people are exposed to new sports and often are inspired to try out for a sport, especially when it receives lots of publicity because of the success of our athletes. However, in many sports our focus on high performance has left them with little capacity to welcome many inspired new participants.

The Canadian sport system is full of stories about lines of young people at, for example, rowing or speed skating clubs following inspiring performances by Canadian athletes, only to be turned away because the club was able to accept only a few new participants. 

In research by the Centre for Sport Policy Studies, interviews were carried out with 21 national sport organizations whose athletes had won an Olympic medal in the previous 10 years. Nineteen reported they had experienced no “Olympic bounce” in participation, one was not sure, and one experienced a short-term increase in interest precisely because the winning athletes had been sent on a cross-country tour to promote participation (that increase ended as the funding ran out).

Lack of capacity is a two-sided problem. On the one hand, many of our sports have limited facilities and a limited number of personnel who are qualified to teach new participants. The available facilities and personnel are often committed to national team athletes and those on the high performance development track. At the same time, participation in many sports involves costs in terms of time and money that are beyond the capacity of significant numbers of Canadians. 

We may not have reached the situation of the U.K. where it is estimated that perhaps half of their London Olympic team (and some two-thirds of their medal winners) will be drawn from the 7 per cent of the population that went to private school. But despite the financial hardships faced by many of our Olympic athletes, they are often from families with the capacity to have supported them through their early development in a sport.

It is important to fund our Olympic athletes well to enable them to enter the Games in the knowledge that they are as well prepared as their international competitors. But if our public policy goal is to achieve a more active and healthier population, our responsibility does not end with high performance funding.

Inspiration is not enough. It is tragic to encourage and inspire young people to participate in sport, and yet provide them with no means to realize that possibility. If we devoted as much money to grassroots participation as we do to funding high performance athletes, it would still not be enough, but it would be a start in terms of building the capacity of the Canadian sport system to better accommodate grassroots participation. 

Funding may also be available from unsuccessful government programs. Research carried out at the University of Alberta suggests that the children’s fitness tax credit has not increased participation, and just provides a subsidy to parents who already involve their children in sports. If we reallocated the $115 million cost each year to more direct support for participation opportunities, it would still not be enough, but it would be an important step in the right direction.

If we are to realize increased participation in sport and physical activity as a result of success at the Olympic Games, we have to plan and prepare for increased participation just as we have planned and prepared for Olympic success. It is just not enough to sit back and wait for people to be inspired.

Peter Donnelly is Director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies at the University of Toronto. This article first appeared in the Toronto Star on 23 July 2012, and is reprinted at playthegame.org with kind permission from the author.