‘Own the Podium’ speaks about Canada’s Olympic medal tally

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Team Canada snagged 25 medals at the Sochi Winter Olympics: 10 gold, 10 silver, and five bronze. That was good enough for third in terms of gold and fourth when it comes to the overall medal total.

Canada’s Own the Podium program provides support and training for athletes to prepare them to increase Canada’s medal haul, boosting the medal tally in 2010 to 26 with a Winter Olympic record-breaking 14 gold.

Even though our athletes missed that mark in Sochi, CEO Anne Merklinger is very pleased with how Canada performed.

“Really our primary performance objective for 2014 was to win more medals than we won in Vancouver,” she tells News1130 from Sochi. “We were within a whisker of achieving 26, so it was just one or two shy. We would have celebrated endlessly if it was 27 but we still performed extremely well. The spread of medals across the top five or six nations is much tighter than we’ve ever seen at any Olympic Games and we certainly fared better than some of the nations that were in the top five.”

Russia excelled on home ice and home snow, just as Canadian athletes did in Vancouver, winning 33 medals in total and almost doubling their tally in 2010.

“They adopted a very similar approach to preparing athletes as we did for Vancouver,” says Merklinger. “But we held our own. There’s room for improvement and starting today, the day after the Games, that’s our focus. We need to identify what went well, what areas we can improve, what are other nations dong that we need to consider. Over the next four years, we will look at how we can continue to improve on our performance at the  Olympic Winter Games.”

Own the Podium tries to provide the necessary technical guidance and support for athletes who have the potential to medal at the Olympics by ensuring they have the best coaches, training, equipment and sport medicine possible.

The program was created in 2005 after Vancouver’s successful bid for the 2010 Games with $110 million in funding provided by the federal government and private sponsors over its first five years.

“We prepare them as well as we possibly can and then they come to the Olympic Games. There’s no competition more fierce or tough, it’s very much the ultimate contest. We’ve seen that here in Sochi in terms of depth of competition and the number of nations and athletes that have won medals here. We’ve never seen an Olympic Games as competitive as these ones.”

Merklinger says making it to double-digit gold in Sochi is huge accomplishment and something to be celebrated.

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