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Own The Podium copied by Russia; might Canada have to be more ‘realist’ about medal hopes?

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it shouldn't be surprising that Russia would, uh, borrow the Canadian know-how that made Own The Podium so wildly successful and widely polarizing.

Canada got the jump on the rest of the world in 2010 by winning a record 14 gold medals and winning 26 medals overall, remarkable numbers for a nation of 34 million people. Four years on, a lot of that expertise is now informing Russia's preparation for Sochi 2014. Russia earmarked some $172-million US toward preparing its competitors, which exceeds the annual budget for OTP in Canada. It also hired away sports gurus Cathy Priestner Allinger and Todd Allinger, the husband-wife team who authored the OTP playbook in the mid-aughties.

It's par for the course in the mercenary world of Olympic sports.

Own The Podium isn't only about identifying athletes with potential medallist bona fides (and disciplines where they might excel, the thinner the field and newer the event the better, he did not type cynically), but about using sport medicine and science to find the "one per cent factor" that could be the difference between gold and thanks-for-coming-out. Now Russia, after two decades of so-so showings, is hoping the Allingers' intellect will help it re-experience Soviet-era glory.

From Ken MacQueen:

There’s more pragmatism than mystery in the approach the Allingers applied in Vancouver and now Sochi. Their number-crunching strategy demands bigger expectations, less sport bureaucracy, greater accountability by coaches and athletes, and targeted spending on fewer sports—only those with a hope of success. Added to the mix in Vancouver was the unprecedented “Top Secret Program”—a science-heavy research effort administered by Todd to give athletes in select sports a psychological, physical and technological advantage.

... Todd says a confidentiality agreement prevents him from revealing the value of the contract with Allinger Consulting Inc. However, reports by Vedomosti, a Russian-language business daily, and the English-language Moscow News peg the deal at US$5 million. It is the first large-scale sporting contract of its kind for a foreign company. The money for the contract, and for a squad of imported sports talent, comes indirectly from a sponsorship deal with Gazprom, the monolithic state-dominated and largely Putin-controlled natural gas corporation. (The Russian Olympic Committee is precluded from spending on foreign expertise.) In similar fashion, much of the money for Own the Podium and Top Secret was underwritten by corporate sponsors.

... Understandably, not all sports federations or coaches were overjoyed at the oversight. “At first they’re kind of like, ‘Why are you here?’ ” Todd says. But such visits usually brought knowledge exchange in the form of new video analysis tools, or training, recovery and nutritional advice. Identified gaps in technical and team staffing also brought new resources, which improved attitudes considerably. “Gradually we got their trust,” he says. “It’s kind of like you’re in with the Russians—or you’re out.” (Macleans, Jan. 29)

Hey, you chase the money. From a Canadian point of view, it's something to be mindful of now that this country is on a track where "(a)ll that really matters is me and my lust for a gold medal."

Own The Podium CEO Anne Merklinger insisted in a recent interview with CBC's Jian Ghomeshi that the nation's Olympic overseer has realistic objectives. The poach-a-coach trend — personified by Pierre Lueders coaching the Russian bobsledders — is just part of a fight over scarce resources.

That's our industry, that's the sector. We have many great Canadian coaches that we've developed and are now working in other nations. At the same time, we're recruiting coaches from other nations and bringing them into our system. It's all about, how do we continue to get better? When Own The Podium was created it was very successful but we need to evolve and continue to move forward. One of the more recent shifts was to not just look at the upcoming set of Games, but to expand that and look at eight years down the road. That's so we can sustain our performance from Games to Games.

" ... We set realistic objectives. There's not a bottomless well of money available for high-performance sport, so we're realists on that front." (CBC, November 2013)

The elephant in the room, and it's true in any sport, is once 'we' win, anything less is a huge bringdown. The unintended consequence of Own The Podium and "narrow(ing) the investment and the technical support to those athletes that have the potential to win medals ... [and] not trying to be all things to all people" (Merklinger's words, not mine) is that people are conditioned to buy into a first-or-last mindset.

It's rather glaring that this is all done in the name of inspiring children, without proof it actually does so, at a time when government art funding and science education are each under attack in Canada. Why isn't the same logic applied to arts and science education, which will far better equip the next generation of Canadian children to compete in an ever-global economy than learning how to snowboard? That will have to be another post.

With all that said, Canada should expect to stay near the top of the winter medal table. Own The Podium, warped values and all, should still be considered successful overall, since it's carrying out its objective to give Canada a hand up in an unfair game. It's kind of like a multisport Moneyball. Keep in mind the Oakland Athletics still haven't reached the World Series, but the deeper-pocketed Boston Red Sox have won three using a similar approach since Michael Lewis' book was published.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.