Team Canada remains without formal medal targets for 2nd straight Olympics

For the second consecutive Olympic Games, Canada's athletes won't have any formal medal targets.

Own The Podium — an organization founded in 2004 with a mission to put more Canadians on Olympic podiums — has recommended the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees again forego performance objectives.

The organization, which receives $66 million from taxpayers every year, says similar to the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games the disruption to high-performance sport around the world — because of the COVID-19 pandemic — has made it difficult to project how Canada stacks up against other countries heading into Beijing 2022.

"While winter sport athletes may have been able to compete a little more than the summer sport athletes did heading into Tokyo, we as an organization didn't feel we had sufficient competitive data to feel comfortable in recommending a performance objective," Own The Podium CEO Anne Merklinger told CBC Sports.

For instance, Canada's sport organizations have had to improvise in some cases in terms of who would compete in Beijing — notably the mixed doubles curling duo of John Morris and Rachel Homan were handpicked after the Olympic trials were cancelled because of positive COVID-19 tests among the athletes scheduled to compete.

"There's this invisible minefield laid out in front of you over the next few weeks, as you try to dodge COVID and not become positive in the next couple of weeks, while trying to train for one of the biggest moments of your life," said Canadian figure skater Eric Radford told CBC Sports last month. 

"Preparing for any competition, and especially the Olympics is difficult enough. It's one of the most stressful times of an athlete's life."

"Even in the last six to eight weeks, many of