Medals should be a 'happy outcome' not the sole focus, says 2008 Olympic medalist

How much does the medal matter?

For years Tom Hall has been pondering that question. Hall won a bronze medal for Canada in 2008 in Beijing, but recently he wrote about the increasing focus on winning medals in Canada. 

"I didn't decide one day when I was eleven that I was going to devote most of my teens and my entire twenties to being an athlete—to not partying, to twenty workouts a week, to delaying my education by eight years, to not getting work experience, to accumulating debt—all so I could stand on a podium. I paddled because I loved it."

If Canada has only a finite amount of money to spend on sports, Tom wonders if winning medals should get prioritized over growing participation in sport. 

The full interview is available in the audio player above. The following portions have been edited for clarity and length.

Why is the focus on winning medals the wrong direction for Canada to take do you think? What are benefits of backing away?
So right now, all we talk about is medals. How many are we going to win and that type of thing. But an Olympian who doesn't win a medal has still done something incredible. One of the saddest things for me watching sport, the Olympics especially, is when an athlete under performs and they're standing there apologizing to Canada for letting it down, and I just think that's one of the saddest things I've ever seen. No athlete should have to do that, and I think that's actually exacerbated when we focus on medals as an outcome. And not to mention that athletes now know that when they're competing, they're competing for their sport's budgets as well. 

So pull back the curtain - what kinds of considerations go into funding potential Olympians right now? 
There's a mix. There's two streams of funding, but the bulk of that funding that goes to national sport organizations with medal potential comes from Own the Podium. Their mission is unabashedly to win medals, and to help those sports win medals. So they'll look at a sport, what athletes that sport has right now, and whether or not those athletes have the potential to win medals at the next games, or maybe a games out --  so four to eight years out. That's only a handful of sports in Canada that get that funding. The rest of the sport system in Canada still is on the same pot of money that hasn't increased in any significant way. That money is used to work on development programs, coaching, and all those types of things, so it's hard for a sport to build both ends of the pyramid if they want to get significant funding, they have to focus only on top level athletes. 

But isn't a medal a good return on investment then? 
Sure and that's the argument being made for medals, but to me a better return on investment is maybe we have an Olympic medal, but we have a sport that reaches thousands of kids across Canada. Participation rates in sport are declining across the board, and it's a big problem. Study after study shows the benefits of kids getting active, and there's an agument that Olympic medals increase participation, but it's actually pretty flimsy when you look at the numbers. So the return on investment is, are our 18 medals at Rio worth more than $100 million? That's a crude calculation, but I do think the real focus should be on building a holistic view of sport in Canada and then if medals happen, then that's a happy outcome. 

Let's say we want to be top 12, which is a nice goal - we have that here in Rio. So let's say we win 20 medals and we get top 12, that's great, but what's next? We're never going to actually be the number one country in the world. We don't have enough money or people to beat the U.S or China...so we can try to beat them and we should, but I think we should also look at what the public funding of sport is meant to do in Canada.  

Click the play button above to hear Tom Hall's interview with guest host Stephen Quinn