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Can Canada feel good without being overly golden?

Why yes, Canada's athletes really have to be sorry for not providing the "coach potatoes" back home — stick tap to Carolin Nytra — with easy gratification of Olympic gold. Since London 2012 is drawing down and Canada's medal tally is more bronze-heavy than top-heavy, it's only natural to contemplate whether Canada's one gold, pending how wrestler Tonya Verbeek does in her likely final Olympic match in fewer than two hours, is sufficiently satisfying. For a nation of 34 million which gets about four months of summer, tops, it probably is. From Bruce Arthur:

Winning gold just feels better, and it hasn't happened much, yet. Watch the British roll up 22 gold medals, and you see a nation in ecstasy. Watch China and the United States engage in a relatively quiet sociopolitical struggle for global athletic superiority — at least until China repossesses all the American medals after the Games, as collateral for monies owed — and you hear their anthems at every turn. Read the medal tables as ordered by the International Olympic Committee, which prizes wins over everything, and Canada is 30th.

Gold means winning, and it's fun ...

And as some of us write stories about our most beautiful losers, we get emails from the relatively unhinged excoriating excuses, demanding results, deriding Canada as a nation of also-rans. (National Post)

No doubt it's more fun for journalists to cover a gold medallist. There's no strings attached, no having to convey the agony of the silver medallist who came so close or the relief of the bronze medallist for whom there is no fate worse than fourth. That's not really the question.

The reason Canada ought to be satisfied by its showing is that it held its spot amid the endless Olympics arm race. The conspicuous consumption of never-satisfield fans that is peculiar to "countries that have turned up on the winners' podium, though not as often as expected," in The New York Times' deadpan phrasing, reflects a kind of greed.

At some point, Canada's Summer Games showings are what they are; it seems more rational to enjoy it that way in the short run. In the long term, one should stay engaged with the postmortems, when the Canadian Olympic Committee and Own The Podium, et al., decide how to proceed for Rio 2016. It's getting more expensive to play. Yet Canada has 15 medals, plus a host of top-eight finishes (did you know Olympians get certificates for those?). It's decent. From Tom Parry:

Anne Merklinger, the former curling skip and now CEO of Own the Podium, the independent agency set up to help fund Canada's elite athletes, says the world of Olympic sport is becoming more competitive with each new Games.

"I mean the world has stepped up. The level of performance from nation after nation has increased significantly," she says. "And we're not the only nation saying that.

"Look at the pool, where Australia used to be dominant. And this time we are seeing nations with medalists on the podium that we've never seen before." (CBC Sports)

Gold is great on the surface, no denying it. But many don't see everything that goes on in the background, which is why seeing silver and bronzes ought to suffice. The Maple Leaf still gets raised for those medals, you know.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Contact him at neatesager@yahoo.ca and follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.