Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity.
I must admit I was pleasantly surprised to hear of this level of inquiry and oversight. I think it's a much-needed process in examining performance of any endeavour, particularly high-performance sport.
As you can tell by my accent, I'm not originally from Canada, but I came to Canada in 1990 to do my Ph.D. My specialty is in altitude and altitude training. Then I was recruited to work for Mr. Henwood and his multi-disciplinary service provider team at what was then called the Canadian Sports Centre. They recently changed their name to the Canadian Sport Institute. This really is the brain trust of the service providers who help and guide Canada's coaches, high-performance directors, and obviously the athletes themselves.
I went through three Olympic cycles as the director of sport physiology and strategic planning, basically for the winter sports that were based out of the Calgary-Bow Valley corridor.
We were asked to talk about the preparation for this particular Olympic period coming up. One thing I would say is that, unfortunately, despite the fantastic success at Vancouver, there was somewhat of a hiatus in the months immediately after the Vancouver games, when there really wasn't necessarily, in my opinion, a strong direction for sport. Individuals such as Mr. Henwood had to work very hard to keep the system on an even keel going forward, with the lack, if you like, of leadership from the highest levels of the sport agencies. This is despite recognizing that both the COC and Own the Podium provided a level of guidance, but there was a period of time when we were almost rudderless.
So this quadrennial, in my view as a sport scientist with a reasonable track record—and we haven't actually had a full quadrennial, leading into these particular games.... While that may not come back to haunt us, we need to understand that sport is an ongoing concern, with almost core aspects of middle class values. In other words, it really is about short-term loss for long-term gain. What I mean by that is that there is a massive process behind high-performance sport to ensure not by chance but by design, high performance outcomes at the end.
The way we at WinSport have tended historically to be involved is around the provision of facilities, facilities in which the likes of Mr. Henwood's team of experts can actually operate. We're moving much closer to that period now with the opening of our new facilities at Canada Olympic Park.
WinSport itself is not isolated simply to the legacy facilities directly within Calgary. In partnership with Alberta Parks we also run a high-performance training centre out in Canmore that is focused on the Nordic sports, in conjunction with that particular facility. Up on Haig glacier in Kananaskis country, we have an altitude summer snow training facility for cross-country and biathlon sports, which is definitely a Canadian advantage.
We have another relationship, obviously, with the University of Calgary surrounding the speed skating oval, the Olympic oval itself, which is one of the lasting testaments to the Calgary games of 1988.
We really are living proof of the foresight of organizations, individuals, and the federal government in hosting major games whereby facilities are brought together that are not just there for the two weeks of the games, but have some long-lasting impacts on not only the local community but the entire country.
One thing I would bring to your attention is that prior to the 1988 games, for example, our speed skating team used to have to spend inordinate amounts of time in the Netherlands to train, but over the last quarter of a century we've been able to have a home training base here in Canada. It's actually a place where the world comes to train and to compete against Canadians, and we can showcase Canada because of it.
We have done some other things in this particular quadrennial to gain an innovative leg up on our competition. In particular, we have Frozen Thunder out in Canmore, where quite literally at the end of the winter season, we bury snow in the ground in big pits, cover it with sawdust, and then, come October, bring it out of the ground and lay it out. We actually have the earliest on-snow training virtually anywhere in the world. This is the type of innovative process we undertake. We even do a lot of our national team selections on this sort of quasi-artificial surface.
There are other aspects that have been innovative for us. A number of years ago, CODA/WinSport built an indoor start facility for bobsleigh, skeleton, and luge called the Ice House. This weekend we will host an inaugural world push championship. Many of the countries that compete in bobsleigh will be on live television on Saturday evening going through the process of showing what they can do in pushing a bobsleigh at the start, which is obviously a critical component.
Without that type of innovation and foresight, we would definitely not be as great a leader in the area of winter sports participation and excellence as we have become.
I would like to dwell on some other agencies that we interact with. Partnerships and the interaction of various jurisdictions are extremely important. As I said, WinSport, largely from a facility side, along with our partnership and increasing bond with the Canadian Sport Institute in Calgary, brings together the brain trust with the actual facilities.
I need to stress that the facilities are extremely important, particularly the innovative ones, and they are a place Canadian athletes can call home, but at the end of the day, it is the quality and the quantity of the people who are in these facilities that really make the ultimate difference. Fortunately at WinSport, and with the CSI, we are able to bring together those two critical elements. The future therefore looks bright.
The challenge for us, about which Mr. Heck spoke, is to ensure that we have a sustainable business model. I am somewhat alarmed at what is happening in Canada—despite my accent—by way of the over-indulgence in Anglo-Australian sports systems. While they may have produced some level of success, they are very expensive, and because of that, somewhat unsustainable.
I would urge us as a country, particularly the leading agencies, Own the Podium and the Canadian Olympic Committee, to understand the need to be a lean, mean, high-performance machine, whereby we are extremely effective and efficient at the top level and really invest in our coaches, in our high-performance advisers, and obviously in the support personnel: our sport medicine physicians, our sport scientists, our psychologists, and our performance analysts. We must ensure that the Canadian Sport Institute network and ancillary organizations....
For example, the B2ten organization has moved in to help supplant and aid the Canadian Sport Institute.
It is important that we really focus on our current generation of experts and ensure that we have very sound succession planning so that we don't get on the merry-go-round you see in other countries where they invest for a time in sports and then, after a period of time, realize that it's not a sustainable model and lose their expertise. The expertise goes abroad to other countries; we see that constantly with almost every quadrennial, whether it's on the summer side or on the winter side.