Twenty years ago Canada was a much smaller nation. Not in geography, obviously, and not really in terms of population, but smaller, inarguably, where it counts most: We thought smaller and dreamed smaller and were satisfied with less.
Sports are a crude measure for these kinds of things, but there’s not much argument that they represent our secular church, and the Olympics are the centrepiece of that communal calendar. Twenty years ago we were, when it comes to our sporting passions, just happy to show up, drop some change when they passed the plate and be done with it. Now we’re all about cathedrals and grand statements of ambition and delivering on those promises.
Twenty years ago Canada played Sweden in the final at Lillehammer—the last Olympic hockey tournament that didn’t feature our best against the world’s best—and a team of college kids and journeyman pros lost to Sweden and Peter Forsberg in an infamous shootout.
Since then, not only has our hockey program transformed, but also our entire outlook on international competition and where we fit within it.
In Lillehammer the silver medal we won in hockey was just one of 13 overall, with just three gold—two won by Myriam Bédard in biathlon, another by Jean-Luc Brassard in moguls. We were sixth in total medals and seventh in golds, and this in itself was a significant improvement on our showing in Calgary in 1988, when we were 12th in the medal standings and became the first Winter Olympic host to fail to win gold, a trick we managed when we hosted the Summer Games in Montreal in 1976 as well.
We didn’t know it then, but Canada was on the verge of an athletic explosion, at least compared with what came before. In the 20 years between Sweden-Canada Olympic hockey finals we’ve had Canadians win MVP awards in the NBA and MLB, a Canadian Masters champion, a Canadian F1 champion and world champions in all kinds of Olympic disciplines. The best female soccer player in the world may well be Canadian, and more is likely to come with inroads being made by Canadians en masse in baseball and basketball. Men’s soccer success continues to be elusive, but the grassroots are being seeded more systematically than ever before. It’s at the point now where the expectation is the best athletes carrying a Canadian passport should aspire to be the best among those carrying any passport.
But winter remains our touchstone.
After two-and-a-half weeks in Sochi, Canada comes home with 10 gold—good for third overall, trailing Russia and Norway and ahead of the United States—and 25 total medals, which was fourth.
Today this seems like our rightful place. It echoes our showing in Vancouver, where we led the medal count with 14 gold and stood third overall with 26 medals, and compares nicely with the 24 medals we won in Turin in 2006, which marked the beginning of a focused Winter Games build.
The results are not only results, but a change in outlook: “Vancouver really started a brand new trend, a winning culture,” bobsleigh star Kaillie Humphries told reporters in Sochi, where she and teammate Heather Moyes—repeat gold medalists from Vancouver—were the flag bearers in the closing ceremonies. “It’s the one where we were able to show the world that we’re fierce, we’re proud, we’re determined and we’re not going to settle for anything less than the very best.”
And we discovered we liked winning. It was fun. It didn’t diminish the efforts of those that didn’t win.
We recognized that perhaps the most compelling stories emerging from Sochi—as in Vancouver—weren’t always from those with gold medals around their necks.
I would nominate speed skater Gilmore Junio’s decision to give up his spot in the 1,000 meters to Denny Morrison, skier Jan Hudec’s surgery-riddled bronze and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s grace in ice-dancing “defeat” for my couch-bound Olympic podium of storylines.
And our Winter Olympics excellence isn’t to say that we remain some kind of global cliché: a nation of people with backyard rinks who gather en masse at the local curling club when we’re not at the ski hill or racing to and from hockey practice.
Canada is too diverse a country now to cover with a single Hudson’s Bay blanket and a great many of the people who call Canada home will never have the luxury of truly enjoying winter. They’re too busy staying warm and paying the bills.
But when forging a common identity you have to start somewhere and there is nowhere in Canada that isn’t touched by ice and snow. And while we all don’t all curl or play hockey or snowboard or luge—we get it. And increasingly we get being good at things, even great.
So whether we identify with it intimately our not, Canada has become a Winter Olympics giant. We have coaching, we have tradition, we have resources and we have expectations. The difference between the Canadian hockey team that won a silver medal against Sweden in 1994 and the one that completely shut down the field in winning gold on Sunday is that we understand excellence in a way we didn’t before.
The significance of it all isn’t the end result—the medal counts or the celebrations. It’s the expectation that Canada is a grand place with ambition as vast and limitless as the land, and the knowledge that with the right commitment, training and drive, those ambitions can be realized. Whether you play hockey, ski, curl or prefer to look forward to spring, that is reason celebrate.
