Canadian Heritage Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2013

[The Chair (Mr. Gordon Brown (Leeds—Grenville, CPC)), Conservative, Gord Brown]

Good morning, everyone. We'll call to order meeting seven of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

We have a very busy schedule. To start off the day, we have three witnesses: Don Wilson, chief executive officer of Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton; Peter Judge, chief executive officer of Canadian Freestyle Ski Association; and from Calgary, Alberta, by video conference, we have Curtis Lyon, chairman of Ski Jumping Canada .

We'll start with Mr. Wilson, for eight minutes.

[Don Wilson, Chief Executive Officer, Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton]

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning.

It's my pleasure to be given this opportunity to speak to you today about the investment, preparation, and strategy that Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton has taken on behalf of Canada to ready our team for the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi. I thank you for this opportunity, and appreciate your interest and support of Canadian athletes and their coaches.

It seems only appropriate to start the status of our preparations for Sochi with the results from last weekend's World Cup held in Calgary. Kaillie Humphries and Heather Moyse dominated the women's two-man bobsleigh, capturing gold by over half a second from their closest rival. Chris Spring and Jesse Lumsden captured bronze in the two-man. Eleven Canadian athletes and teams competed in skeleton bobsleigh. All but one finished in the top ten.

Our mission is simple. BCS creates, nurtures, and supports world and Olympic champions. BCS believes strongly that the important values that underscore any sustainable community are described by what we call INSPIRE: integrity, national pride, sportsmanship, professional, innovation, respect, and excellence.

Our vision is clear. BCS will lead our entire Canadian community in the pursuit of becoming and sustaining the mantle of the leading bobsleigh and skeleton nation in the world. Kaillie Humphries, Jon Montgomery, Helen Upperton, Pierre Lueders, Lyndon Rush: we produce results.

While predominantly concentrated in the west at WinSport and the Whistler Sliding Centre, our champions hail from all provinces. In fact, we have representation from 10 of Canada's provinces and territories on our senior national team. The singular, clear, and unwavering focus of BCS is manifested in our provincial sections in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario.

In terms of investment in our success, our mission and vision could not be reached without the critical investment of Sport Canada, Own the Podium, and the Canadian Olympic Committee. Our boutique sport is geocentric by the nature of access to required facilities. We receive about 85% of our operating funds from these partners. We supplement those dollars with sponsorship revenues from corporate Canada, and 90% of our funds are directed towards our athletes and our technical programs.

I'll turn now to the preparations for success. In Vancouver, thirty-nine one-hundredths of a second was the margin between getting a medal to not being on the podium in bobsleigh. In skeleton, Jon Montgomery's walk of fame was the result of being seven one-hundredths of a second better than everyone else. We don't have 60 minutes to adjust. Every adjustment is critical at 156 kilometres an hour. Preparation is our key.

Our athletes are preparing for Sochi with a prediction of three medals. We have been in Sochi twice with all of our top athletes. Last year Kaillie Humphries repeated as world champion and medalled in all world cups, including six golds and a bronze at the World Cup in Sochi. Lyndon Rush ranked number one in the world in the two-man. Sarah Reid finished with the world championship bronze medal in skeleton.

Equipment is essential in our sport. We have partnered with a Dutch sled manufacturer, and we feel we have the fastest bobsleighs in the world. We have partnered with SAIT in Calgary, and are on the cusp of developing world-class skeleton sleds. Supported by Own the Podium, we have invested over $1 million in bobsleigh development in the years since Vancouver.

On-ice training and competitive opportunities in Canada's legacy facilities are key to our ability to race and win on any type of track in the world. The federal government's belief and investment in Calgary in 1988 and Vancouver in 2010 has been the cornerstone of Bobsleigh Canada's ability to develop world and Olympic champions.

Our access to provincially and federally supported training facilities like WinSport and Whistler Sliding Centre allows our athletes to train for specific track conditions and landscapes, as these two tracks are technically very different. These differences are a critical advantage. Pilots learn to drive and adapt to different curvatures and pressures. Brakemen learn to push short for a steep-pitch start and long for a gradual slope. We have significant knowledge for the testing and adjustments of our sleds and runners for both bobsleigh and skeleton.

All across the country, our athletes access the Canadian sport institutes. While we predominantly train in Calgary, our athletes do come from across the country and always utilize the opportunities with the CSI. This partnership with the CSI ensures our athletes get world-class sports science, medical services, and coaching services in their daily training environment, giving us the margin of victory we need.

With respect to our strategy for success, our strategy starts with an ongoing search for the next Jon Montgomery or Kaillie Humphries.Our long-term athlete development pathway in bobsleigh is a little different from the playground-to-podium pathways of most other sports. We utilize the partnerships and services of the Canadian sport institutes, fellow national sport federations such as track and field, rugby, and football, and Canadian Interuniversity Sport.

Most recently, we have had success recruiting athletes from the Canadian Football League, with the acquisition of Jesse Lumsden from Calgary, Sam Giguère from Hamilton, and Jean-Nicolas Carriere from Montreal.

For skeleton, we use the more traditional model in concert with luge, where Discover Skeleton programs happen in Alberta and British Columbia with young athletes, but we also capture older second-sport athletes as well. The sport is extreme, and this intrigues those athletes who live for the adrenalin rush.

The two acquisition and retention strategies bring the PSOs and the NSF into alignment.

I've already discussed the preparation and polish.

Finally, we host national and international competitions in Canada's legacy facilities. Major competitions generate excitement for our sports. They become a critical recruiting tool. They are essential for the exposure of our corporate and government partners. We test our Canadian athletes against the best in the world on home soil. There is no better feeling than winning at home, and this is why sport is essential to the fabric of Canada. Vancouver 2010 proved that.

We simply could not host these types of competitions without the availability of grants through provincial and federal agencies. I thank the federal government sincerely for their ongoing and significant support of Canadian athletes and coaches.

I look forward to continuing this conversation with the committee.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you very much.

We'll move to Mr. Judge for eight minutes.

[Peter Judge, Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Freestyle Ski Association]

Good morning.

I would like to welcome everyone. Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you today.

First, I want to thank all of you for engaging in this significant process. Having spent over 35 years in the high performance sports system as either a national team athlete or a head coach, or now an administrator, I have witnessed first-hand how absolutely critical it is to have a strong partnership with the federal government.

I was very interested to learn, on becoming aware of this exercise, that Sochi would be my eighth winter Olympic Games as either a head coach or a team leader. As such, I feel I'm uniquely qualified to speak to and respond on the topic of Canada's preparations for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi. Historically, our international sports performance has seen its share of successes and shortcomings, but it's very clearly on a strong path at this moment. There is no question that Vancouver changed the way in which Canadians view not only the Olympics and sport but more importantly, themselves.

Undertaking an audit of this nature is certainly an expected part of the process, and it provides scrutiny that the high performance sport community welcomes. Obviously, one of the paradigm shifts moving into Vancouver involved the commissioning and commitment to undertake the Own the Podium project. I've been very fortunate to be involved with the project almost since its inception and there's no question it has had a phenomenal impact on sport. It took a significant amount of vision and a significant leap of faith to undertake the project.

Now I'll get to the question of preparation for Sochi. Specifically, with respect to freestyle skiing, we will field 26 athletes for the games in Sochi. Those will be split between the two new disciplines of halfpipe and slopestyle, moguls and aerials, which have been part of the games since they were introduced in Calgary as demonstration sports in 1988, and ski cross, which now is partially an alpine discipline. All 26 of the athletes who go to the games for freestyle will be medal-potential athletes. In fact, we will be leaving home athletes who have medalled at world cups or world championships before.

In the last two world championships we've accrued 14 medals in the Olympic disciplines. The question now is, are we better prepared than we were for Vancouver? No, we're not better prepared than we were for Vancouver. We could not be. We took every painstaking opportunity that we could to prepare on home soil. Are we preparing better than we did in Vancouver? Absolutely. This is the shift that's system-wide now. We're seeing the world differently. We're viewing it differently. We cannot have the same opportunity we had in Vancouver, but we are changing the way we work, changing the way we operate, and changing the way we see preparation.

Games preparation is not a copy-and-paste exercise. It changes significantly from venue to venue, and Sochi will probably be one of the most hostile venues we will encounter. There's going to be a very broad spectrum from easy to hard. We've already witnessed that in some cases with some of the disciplines undergoing some very significant hardships just in accessing training.

In many cases, we've been able to learn lessons from a number of variables in Vancouver, which are going to have a significant impact not only for Sochi but also right through until Korea. For example, the kind of weather metrics we were able to gather, the types of waxes, and the types of ice and how they affect things will all be the same among the three venues, so we will have some lessons that carry over.

One of the other areas we've become significantly better at is familiarization. I've always held through my entire career that this is one of the most important pieces: be there first and be there often. I believe it's the cornerstone of performance, so much so that I went to Sochi on my own literally right after they made the announcement in 2008 so I could start to undertake that process. I have made eight trips there since. Our teams have been there four times over the last four years to garner more competition experience and to become more familiar with what we consider to be a hostile environment.

One of the last things I'd like to talk about is the significance of IST, integrated support teams. We've seen over a period of time that having great athletes is not enough. You need to be able to support and care for them, especially on the last run into the games. I'll give you a specific example.

One of our athletes, who was a gold-medal winning athlete at the last world championships last winter, did her ACL, which is normally at least an eight-month to a year-long injury, in August of this year. She will start skiing this week. This is because of the advancements we have been able to undertake through Own the Podium, through collaboration within the sports medical community, and creating these integrated support teams.These kinds of things are significant because they ensure that our athletes stay healthy and more productive.

Last but not least, I'd like to talk about collaboration. I've often said that I don't care how it gets done and who gets it done as long as it gets done. I think we've seen unprecedented collaboration in our sport world today, particularly with the Canadian Olympic Committee, Own the Podium, and with Sport Canada all working together. I don't think we've ever had a better environment than we have today in sport.

To that end, the future looks bright for 2014. For 2018, it's going to be more difficult, and for 2022 and 2026, more difficult as well, as we see the world change, but I think at least we're equipped to deal with those adaptations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to snowy Calgary, Alberta, and hear from Mr. Lyon, for up to eight minutes.

[Curtis Lyon, Chairman, Ski Jumping Canada]

Thanks very much for allowing me the opportunity to talk today.

My experience is a little more limited than the two gentlemen you just heard from, but maybe it will be a bit of a different perspective.

I'd like to applaud the continued investment in winter sports throughout the last quadrennial by the federal government, with the goal of being the best in Sochi. I'd also like to encourage the continuation of that investment to help ensure success in 2018 and beyond. Without continued investment from the federal government, Canada cannot compete on the world stage. There was a great sense of pride that was instilled after the success in Vancouver, which has not faded, and return on that investment cannot be measured.

Specifically, for Ski Jumping Canada and our preparations for the games, we are a small sport. We are limited at the moment only to Calgary, with a club starting in B.C. next year, and we're hoping to grow that through the next four years. For an NSO that consistently produces Olympians, we rely on public funding to be competitive and to produce athletes capable of competing on the world stage.

The investment into women's ski jumping after the sport's acceptance into the Olympics for 2014 was encouraging. However, that support has decreased as we have progressed through the quadrennial. Even with that level of decreased support, the level of the program and the professionalism of the program have definitely increased.

We have made great strides in some of the areas that the other two gentlemen also mentioned, in integrated support teams, technology, increased collaboration with other sports, and also partnerships with the Canadian Sport Institute.

Canada was the big proponent, along with the U.S., of getting women's ski jumping into the Olympics, and we need to continue that support to help us be the best at that sport. For Canada to be the best at the Olympics, we need to ensure we invest in sports that can increase medal potential, and in ski jumping, in Canada's case, that is very cost-effective.

Ski Jumping Canada has built some good partnerships with private supporters in the past few years to fill in holes in public funding. However, our capacity to do so is limited. We're mostly a volunteer organization, and once again, we rely on public funding to sustain a level of competitiveness.

Currently we're a volunteer-run organization. We rely on the Olympic legacy coaching fund to pay most of our coaches. We also relied on Sport Canada grants this year to keep our program actually running. With sustained funding over a quadrennial, Ski Jumping Canada can improve all facets of our organization—high performance, grassroots—and the goal in mind is to consistently contribute to the success of Canada at the winter Olympics.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gord Brown]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to a round of questioning for seven minutes. We will hear from Mr. Hillyer.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Judge, you talked about Sochi being a hostile environment. Could you expand on what you mean by that?

[Peter Judge]

I think we see a number of different versions of that. I think we've already seen some gamesmanship, we'll say, with certain aspects of access to training. Even just getting visas to get into the country is extremely difficult. In a softer sense, too, we're dealing with a country that has an extremely different culture than we do in terms of language and getting around. It's halfway around the world; it's extremely remote. In many versions of the word it is that, but some maybe more malicious than others.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Some are intentional.

[Peter Judge]

I would venture to say there has been some gamesmanship, yes.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Wilson, you're smiling as if you have had the same experience.

[Don Wilson]

Unfortunately, the head coach of the Russian bobsled team is Pierre Lueders, a Canadian. I guess he has certainly taken the position that, much the same as Canada looked forward to hosting the world on their home soil, he has fully embraced that thought about ensuring that Russia will host on their home soil, and we now know that.

As Peter has said, some of it is the track. In our particular case it's how it's prepared, how it's available, how many runs you get, things like that. We are finding that, yes, hostile and difficult.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Okay.

Mr. Lyon, do you have the same experience with your sport?

[Curtis Lyon]

It's probably a little bit different. We haven't seen any malicious acts or anything like that. We were there once in preparation. It was just difficult—I think that's the word I would use—in terms of the way they operate. It was very disorganized when we were there. Skis were left out in the rain, not intentionally and not just for our country, but I would use the word “difficult” as well.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Judge, is there anything that could be done at a government level to help that, or does that just go with the territory, and you guys have to deal with it?

[Peter Judge]

We have to suck it up.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Well, enjoy.

Mr. Lyon, in your sport, this is the first Olympics that women are competing in. What's been the resistance? Are women just not interested, or is there some sort of philosophy that it's too dangerous? What's been stopping women from being involved up to this point?

[Curtis Lyon]

I think that the sport needed to get to a point where it was Olympic calibre. I don't think we were there four years before Vancouver. I definitely think the sport was there one or two years before Vancouver. It is definitely there now.

We have a deep field with a lot of countries represented. It's just progressed to a point of competitiveness that it can now be an Olympic calibre sport. Participation was a key factor. I think that in a lot of the European countries they were definitely opposed to the idea—it was a male sport—but we were very supported in North America. There were a lot of women jumpers even 20 years ago in the U.S. and Canada.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

It's more of a result of a generation or so ago its being a men's sport and just taking time for it to get to a more elite level for women. Do you sense any official resistance nowadays?

[Curtis Lyon]

No. After Vancouver.... I think ski jumping is a European-dominated sport; the governance is all European. Once they got used to the idea that this was going to happen, once they got on board, it was full steam ahead.

The professionalism of the women's programs in Europe has taken off greatly. They're using a lot of the resources from the men's side. They're combining the two events at certain world cups. We're going to see that this weekend in Lillehammer. There are going to be men and women jumping interchangeably on the same day and on the same jump. I think the Europeans, once they accepted that it was going to happen, then it was full steam ahead.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

Mr. Judge, I understand there are some new events with freestyle ski, like the halfpipe and slopestyle.

I think I know what halfpipe is, but what is slopestyle?

[Peter Judge]

Slopestyle, again, is another child of the kind of generation X games events. It really evolved out of what was originally rollerblading. The use of street pieces involved in rollerblading evolved, and we're seeing it in everything from BMX to skateboarding, and now in the snow venues, with both snowboarding and freestyle.

It involves a number of waves of features. There are usually six waves. The first three waves are usually types of street features, rails and different things that the athletes use to perform tricks, and then there's usually another wave of three jumps from which they'll perform large jumps.

[Jim Hillyer, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Is the original freestyle event, what's been known as the hot dog, where people do ski jumps and flips?

[Peter Judge]

Yes.

That's one of the interesting things. We've seen what's old become new and become old again. We've seen it come right around the block. The kind of speak and counterculture that was freestyling in the sixties and seventies, in the hot dog era, has been kind of reborn. Now we have these two kinds of facets really, the classic side of freestyle and the cult side of freestyle.