Did Canada underachieve in Sochi?

There are plenty of positive emotions across the country about Canadian athletes' performances in the Sochi Olympics, and there are good reasons for that. Canada finished with 10 gold medals, 10 silver medals and five bronze medals, placing third in golds (behind Russia and Norway) and fourth in total medals (behind those two countries and the U.S.). That's pretty impressive, especially as it goes against the typical trend of host countries falling back to the pack after hosting the Games. Moreover, these Olympics ended with a couple of high-profile gold medals in men's and women's hockey, which saw enthusiastic/a> celebrations from coast to coast. While the medal haul was substantial, though, and while Canadians came through to win highly-anticipated golds in hockey and curling, it's still notable that Canada fell short of both the official Own The Podium projections and the much-more-ambitious neutral ones.

Heading into these Olympics, Own The Podium CEO Anne Merklinger told Cam Cole of The Vancouver Sun that "Our performance objectives are pretty clear: we want to win more medals than we won in Vancouver." That didn't happen, as Canada finished one short of the haul of 26 in Vancouver (and four golds behind the 14 won on home soil), snapping the country's streak of improving in the total medal count at every Winter Games since Lake Placid in 1980. Narrowly missing a target like that isn't awful, of course, but it's worth mentioning that the Own The Podium projections were extremely conservative compared to pre-Sochi projections from neutral sources, such as the 33 medals predicted by numbers-based analysis from Dutch group Infostrada, the 31 from The Associated Press or the 30 from The Wall Street Journal (although Canada did beat the WSJ's projected nine golds). It's also noteworthy that there were more medals available at these Games (294 versus the 258 in Vancouver) thanks to all the new events, and that new events proved key for Canada, as they often have. Thus, there were a lot of expected medals out there that Canadians were unable to bring in.

Why didn't those medals come in? Well, some of it was certainly thanks to injuries. Numerous top Canadian athletes were hurt heading into or during the Games, and while some (including Jan Hudec and Mark McMorris) managed to overcome injuries to still snag medals, injuries likely played a part in foiling the dreams of medal contenders like Marie-Michele Gagnon and Maelle Ricker. Every country suffers bad injuries, though, and they were particularly noticeable during these games in the more extreme sports, so it's not like injuries struck Canada alone.

Beyond that? There were judging controversies in slopestyle and ice dance, but even if those had gone Canada's way, the result would have been improved medal positions, not more medals. Another medal could have come in ski cross if the French team's pants had been ruled illegal (seriously). Mostly, though, the lower number of medals in Sochi was about Canadian athletes coming up short relative to expectations, and while some teams such as freestyle skiing overachieved, many more (such as short-track speedskating) underwhelmed relative to pre-Games predictions.

Plenty of Canadian athletes who shone at world championships weren't able to repeat that in Sochi. That doesn't necessarily make them chokers, as there are a lot of random factors that can influence medal results, especially in small-sample-size competitions such as the Olympics, but it does show that the "conversion rate" of turning world championship success into Olympic success still needs improvement. The Canadian Olympic Committee calculated that rate at 54 per cent in Sochi, compared to 59 per cent in Vancouver, and while it's never going to be near 100 per cent given the difficulties of succeeding at the Olympics, the COC did mention 64 per cent as a reasonable goal at one point. Given the success that Canada has found on the world stage, which in turn is largely thanks to funding from Own The Podium, b2ten and other agencies, finding ways to improve that conversion rate could be crucial to improving in the medal count going forward.

In the end, though, it's hard to see Sochi as too much of a failure. While the 25 final medals marked a lower total than many expectations, and while that ensured that history wasn't made (if Canada had improved over Vancouver in Sochi, it would have become the first country to ever improve twice after hosting the Games), that's still the fourth-best total in the world. As Yahoo's Nick Cotsonika writes, that's not bad at all, especially when considering the greater funding and population the Russian and American teams have:

So, while there's still plenty of room for improvement, Sochi doesn't necessarily represent a step back. If anything, the level of achievement in these Olympics shows that Vancouver wasn't a one-off and that Canada can compete with the best in the world even when the Games aren't on home soil. With that status comes high expectations, though, and there will certainly be much more work to do to maintain these levels of performance heading into the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018.