Four months after the conclusion of the Vancouver Paralympic Games, Canada’s Para-Nordic Ski Team has suffered cuts amounting to roughly one-third of its total budget.
According to Cross-Country Canada Executive Director Davin Macintosh, the cuts represented 56 percent of the program’s funding from Own the Podium (OTP), the high-performance sports initiative that was set up to propel Canadian athletes to medals at the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver.
The exact impacts of the cuts are still uncertain, as Cross-Country Canada (CCC) works to restructure its program in the next few weeks. But Macintosh said that the cuts, first reported by the CBC, will force the team to scale back its athlete support.
“In the long term, we’ll have to run a more streamlined program, which probably means fewer staff who can do a wider variety of jobs,” he said.
Over the past five years, Canada’s Para-Nordic program had enjoyed a large infusion of cash from OTP, which was founded in 2005 and has since poured more than $100 million into Olympic sports.
Cross-Country Canada’s Able-Bodied program fared much better in its level of funding from Own the Podium (OTP).
According to Cross Country Canada (CCC) Executive Director Davin Macintosh, the able-bodied ski team received a three percent decrease in support from OTP in its budget for the coming year. (CCC received roughly $1.2 million for its able-bodied cross-country program in 2009-2010.)
While that number may look bad when juxtaposed with the 56 percent cut to Para-Nordic, Macintosh said that the cuts merely reflect the quality of the athletes on each team—not a prioritization of able-bodied skiers.
“If they knew we had three Para-Nordic athletes who were on the cusp of winning all the international competitions, they’d give us more money there, and that’s what we have on the able-bodied side,” Macintosh said. “Our Olympic results showed that we have a strong team of people who will be around for the next Olympics, and have obvious and proven potential to reach the podium.”
According to OTP Director of Winter Sport Ken Read, his organization conducts yearly reviews, in which each sport receiving OTP funding is categorized according to its recent and historical results, as well as its future potential. The higher the category, the more support a sport receives.
Able-bodied cross-country is a category two sport, as is visually impaired cross-country, given Brian McKeever’s success at the 2010 Paralympics, where he won three gold medals. But the other Para-Nordic disciplines are rated one rung down on the ladder, as a category three.
“Those that have earned it get the broader…support,” Read said, “and the deeper down it will go. So it’s into supporting camps, supporting coaches, supporting the integrated support teams.”
“That’s where you have the able-bodied program,” he continued. “The hope is, going forward to 2014, that Devon [Kershaw] will find a couple hundredths of a second, and…we are working with them right now on a nordic consortium of trying to entrench some of those programs that worked well.” One example he cited was a project involving base grinding and ski technicians.
Read said that the categorizations were evaluated on a year-to-year basis, and that the level of support for the Para-Nordic team would be reconsidered next spring, “based on results.”
The initiative was designed to provide extra financing specifically earmarked for athletes with strong chances of winning Olympic and Paralympic medals. But over time, the money allotted to the Para-Nordic Ski Team—some $630,000 last year—had come to finance a large portion of its operations.
“When OTP first came into being, they put a lot of money into the development side,” said Jeff Whiting, who recently retired from his job as a Para-Nordic development coordinator for CCC.
“The program grew extremely rapidly over the past four years thanks to rapid increases in support from OTP, and that created a much larger budget,” Macintosh said.
After the conclusion of the 2010 Games, though, OTP’s future was uncertain, since funding from the soon-to-be-dissolved Vancouver Organizing Committee had made up a large proportion of its bottom line.
While the Canadian government doubled its share of OTP support in the federal budget this spring, the total amount of funding available for high-performance programs was still reduced—$20 million, instead of $23 million, according to OTP Director of Winter Sport Ken Read.
And while OTP had targeted three athletes during the 2010 Paralympics—Brian McKeever, Jody Barber, and Colette Bourgonje—only McKeever will continue to receive money for the next four-year Paralympic cycle.
Bourgonje has said that Vancouver was her last Paralympic Games, and “the remainder of the athletes in the program weren’t seeming to have gold medal potential,” Read said, referring to OTP’s standard for funding Paralympic athletes.
“In Paralympic [sports], it’s gold medal potential, not deep athlete development,” Read said. “The sport is supposed to be taking on that role of upkeep.”
An increase in funding to CCC from Sport Canada, a separate arm of the federal government, has softened the impact of the OTP reductions slightly, but not entirely, according to Macintosh.