Should we worry about Canada's winter sports decline?

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In early 2004, the people in charge of Canada's "high-performance" sports ecosystem met in Calgary to decide how to stop their worst nightmare from coming true.

Vancouver had recently been awarded the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. And these folks — including officials from the government, the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees and the various winter national sport organizations (NSOs) — wanted to avoid the humiliation of Montreal 1976 and Calgary '88, where Canada did not win a single gold medal. In fact, they set a far more ambitious goal: to put Canada on top of the medal standings in Vancouver.

In order to achieve this, the people in that room knew they would have to raise a lot of money from both the federal government and corporate sponsors. But a simple increase in funding would not be enough. They had to break from the traditional just-happy-to-be-here philosophy expressed by modern-day Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin when he said "the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part."

So, rather than continue to dole out support pretty equally across the dozen or so NSOs, a ruthless new system was devised: Canada would decide which sports and athletes had the highest potential to deliver medals and funnel the most money and other support (coaching, equipment, research, etc.) to them. This became known as the Own the Podium program, which officially launched in January 2005.

In terms of delivering on its core promise, OTP was a smashing (and immediate) success. At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, Canada's