Chairman and honourable members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity this morning.
A biathlon is a sport that receives very little attention in Canada. Elsewhere in the world biathlon is a major spectacle that fills cold stadiums with 30,000 plus animated spectators. Once every four years Canadians get an opportunity to see our national team perform. This provides a vital but limited window upon a dedicated group of athletes who are focused 24-7, 365 days of the year on performing a perfect race.
Biathlon is all about the relentless pursuit of perfection. An athlete can ski the fastest but miss their last target and lose the race. The very next day the same athlete can shoot perfectly, but not ski fast enough to win. Even leaving with a medal around your neck is no guarantee that a performance was truly perfect. Biathletes obsess about how to get closer to this mission.
I'll provide a few quick facts about Biathlon Canada. We are the second-smallest winter Olympic sport organization in this country. Our participant base is made up of both civilian and cadet biathlon. Many young Canadians are exposed to low-level biathlon through the cadet program, but the transition from participation-based cadet biathlon to competition-based civilian is challenging due to the limited resources of many cadet families. Ultimately the majority of our national team come from a start in cross-country skiing. There are more than 50 biathlon clubs across the country and many of these clubs are integrated or partnered with larger cross-country ski clubs.
International biathlon is serious business. It is ranked as one of the most popular winter sports in Europe by TV audiences, magazines, fan clubs, trading cards, live broadcasts, and intense media scrutiny.
Biathlon has 27 medals available at Sochi. When biathlon and cross-country medals are counted together, they account for 40% of the total medals available. In Vancouver, Canada won none of these medals despite coming quite close. Canadians have had success in biathlon in the past. Myriam Bédard was a world champion and three-time Olympic medal winner with a bronze in Albertville and two golds in Lillehammer. Unfortunately, Biathlon Canada was unable to capitalize on or repeat this success.
In Vancouver we finished the games with a top-six result. We want to improve on this for Sochi. This season Biathlon Canada has two distinct goals. The first is to put an athlete on the podium. The second is to try to prepare the next generation of athletes for future success. Today I will speak specifically about our Sochi preparations. Our goals for Sochi are simple. We are doing everything we can to put an athlete on the podium. Achieving secondary goals will validate increased program strength, but will not contribute to the overall Team Canada performance at the Olympics. With our performance partners we have targeted support for our athletes. This strategy involved identifying a group of potential athletes eight to twelve years in advance, and each year challenging them to become faster, more accurate, and more dedicated.
Biathlon Canada is heavily dependent on governmental support. This has meant that our plans have been adjusted as our performance partners target resources according to their unique and sometimes uncoordinated efforts. In the pre-Olympic season we won our first World Cup gold medal in 20 years, and collectively our team had its best-ever world championship performance.
To improve our athletes we focused on several strategic programs and methods. In preparation for the 2010 Olympics we shared a special treadmill with Speed Skating Canada. This meant driving an hour to the Olympic Oval for training in Calgary, and then driving another hour back to our training centre in Canmore. Thanks to the investment from OTP and WinSport, we have a new ski treadmill in Canmore for our use.
OTP has supported the development of our biathlon shooting lab, which uses pressure sensors and motion sensors to help improve our shooting accuracy.
We use a walk-in refrigerator, where we are able to simulate extreme weather conditions while doing ammunition testing. This is actually done at a decommissioned tunnel that was built for the 1988 Calgary Olympic Games.
We expose our athletes to altitude training at specific times during the training cycle, to improve their cardiovascular performance. WinSport Canada has provided access to the Beckie Scott high-altitude training centre on the Haig Glacier.
Training at an altitude of 2,700 metres is only an hour’s drive and a 10-minute helicopter ride away from Canmore. Unfortunately, we can't shoot during our multiple three- to four-day stays on the glacier, so for more comprehensive training, we went back to Park City, Utah, and to Dachstein, Austria, for sustained altitude and high-low-high-low training.
To assist our national team staff, we invited several world-class coaches and researchers to our national training centre, for insight into strength, recovery, technique, and shooting. OTP and the Canadian Sport Institute, Calgary, supported this initiative to help us build our own pool of Nordic experts that will be a key factor in sustained success, post-games.
Our preparation has been focused on optimizing performance. We believe we have maximized what we can with the resources provided, but it has not been perfect. We have several challenges, heading into the games. The gradual reduction in our high-performance money has led to dropping support programs and increasing costs to our athletes. Having no funds directly targeting the next generation of athletes will be a major hurdle for us going forward.
One side effect of Canada's funding system is that Nordic sports are disadvantaged in the current funding formulas. The one-size-fits-all standard prioritizes for winter sports but it does not control for Nordic sports' larger field sizes, opportunities for multiple medals by the same athletes, and the greater developmental time required to produce medal winners.
In spite of the challenges, we are very proud of the success we have had. Last season, Jean-Philippe Le Guellec won Canada's first World Cup gold medal. It was our first medal since 2007 and our first gold medal since 1994.
We have several advantages going into the games. Our focused use of technology has improved our ability to provide feedback and analysis, without creating additional work for our staff. Thanks to a comprehensive athlete tracking system, we know more about our Canadian athletes and more about how they compare to the world's best. As well, the elevation of Sochi is nearly identical to that of our Canmore national training centre. This will reduce the time needed for our athletes to acclimatize. With our extensive research into snow conditions, pre-Vancouver, we are world leaders in dealing with near-zero temperatures and heavy and unexpected snowfall, which we expect at the games.