Who should be Canada's flag-bearers for the Paris Olympics?

On Tuesday, the Canadian Olympic Committee unveiled its team of 338 athletes for the Paris Summer Games. But the COC didn't announce who will carry the Canadian flag at the opening ceremony on July 26. That decision is expected to be revealed next week.

In the meantime, it's our last chance to debate that classic pre-Olympic question: who should be Canada's flag-bearer?

I offered up a bunch of candidates in this newsletter back in April, but one of them delivered some sad news yesterday. Reigning decathlon world champion Pierce LePage said he will not be able to compete in Paris due to a herniated disc in his back.

Fortunately, there's no shortage of worthy Canadian athletes. Before I present some of my favourites, we should acknowledge that the process of choosing a real-life flag-bearer is much more complicated than it seems.

A lot of it comes down to boring stuff like transportation and scheduling. Swimmers, for example, are unlikely to get picked because many of them compete the morning after the opening ceremony. Track and field athletes have the opposite problem: their events take place later in the Games, so some of them won't even be in Paris yet. And space can be just as big a factor as time: the women's soccer team, for example, plays its first match the day before the opening ceremony out in Saint-Etienne, hundreds of kilometres from Paris.

Then there's the cold reality that many athletes simply don't want the job. The superstition of a Canadian flag-bearer "curse" has faded over the past couple of decades, but it was pretty spooky in the 1990s and early 2000s after high-profile athletes like decathlete Mike Smith, figure skater Kurt Browning and skier Jean-Luc Brassard missed the podium altogether after