Canada’s Olympics and doping

My last blog post was about the Canadian cycling community’s stance on doping. This time, I want to point out some discrepancies in our Olympic movement.

The Olympic movement in Canada has decided that winning medals is the goal of Canadian Olympians, not representing their country, inspiring others or performing to the best of their abilities. Medals are what it is all about. And winning medals determines funding across our various sports. When sport becomes only about winning, then there is a strong incentive to dope. If winning is where the money is, people will do what is required to get it.

Following Ben Johnson’s positive test at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Canada took a strong stance against doping, establishing an independent anti-doping organization, today represented by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES). CCES conducts random tests, ensuring that Canadian athletes are not doping. Canada is a leader in the anti-doping movement. When we were racing overseas in the mid-2000s, some of the riders couldn’t believe that we had testers coming to our homes in the early morning to conduct random test. Not all the countries of the world treat doping the way Canada does.

The focus of Canada’s Olympic movement on winning and the CCES message against doping has created a conflicted message. We are asking Canadians to not dope, but to go out and compete on a world stage that is likely (call me a cynic) far from even.

If we are to keep doping out of our sports, we need to focus on more than simply winning. Yes, sport is about winning. But it is also about doing your best and pushing your limits. As a country, we need to be careful that by focusing solely on winning at the Olympics that we aren’t inadvertently asking our athletes to dope for us.