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.