The Electronic Telegraph Saturday 4 August 2001 Owen Slot Canadians. A sensible race, love the outdoors, good lifestyle, got it all in perspective. The leading national sports story on Thursday is that the Toronto Raptors basketball club have given Vince Carter a contract extension that will pay him US$94 million over six years. Meanwhile, the local sports news in Edmonton (and these World Championships are certainly a local affair, there is no indication anyone outside this city is watching) is that their leading athletes are on the breadline. They do not actually have many leading athletes. Those they do have include Brad Snyder, a shot-putter ranked 12th in the world. Snyder told the Edmonton Journal that his funding from Athletics Canada has recently risen to Can$13,000 (£6,500) a year. This means he can now afford a 1980 Datsun which he shares with discus thrower Jason Tunks to travel to training. But they cannot afford the insurance and Snyder has not had a phone in his house for two months after being cut off. He goes to his coach's house to make a call. It is thus a strange kick that you get from being here in Edmonton. We are in a supposedly advanced country which is miles behind Britain in terms of sports administration, and it is not often you experience that. (We'll ignore the issue of the stadium for the moment, I can confirm that they managed to have theirs built over 25 years ago.) Canada are where Britain were five years ago, except that we were on the verge of Lottery funding for our athletes and they are not. This may explain why Canada was so hopeless in the last Olympics; in track and field they failed to win a single medal. It should have arguably been the Canadians who surged ahead after 1996. After all, Donovan Bailey, Olympic champion and world record-holder, is not a bad figurehead on which to pin a national resurgence. Bailey, however, has painted a sad figure here in Edmonton. He should really have packed the game in ages ago knowing he cannot achieve much here, but he elected to hang on and say goodbye in front of home fans. Not a bad sentiment really but he is raging around feeling all angry and unloved, suggesting he should be handed the honour of the last leg in the relay team and be carried down the straight in a royal chariot. And the Canadian press are roasting him. God forbid that we in Britain should ever treat an Olympic 100m champion with such disrespect. Whether Bailey's gone mad or not, his point that Canadian athletics has gone backwards in the wake of his golden era (a two-man affair involving him and the ageing Bruny Surin) is a valid one. It was on the back of Bailey that the IAAF were persuaded that Canada was an athletics nation worth bringing their big show to. How empty that sentiment seems now. The World Championships are expected to bring in Can$386 million to the provincial economy and that is before you take in ticket sales and national marketing rights. It does seem a little strange that most of the Canadians who will be performing are working part-time to be able to do so. The city will still turn out to support them and there are various reasons for this. Mark McCoy, a Canadian gold-medal hurdler in 1992, said: "If the World Championships were in Toronto, they would get lost in the shuffle. Here there's nothing going on, so the people will support it." It is, indeed, hard to disagree with this assessment. Edmonton is one of those sprawling North American cities with no centre and scattered randomly with shopping malls, IKEAs and steakhouses. Its best claim to fame is it houses the biggest shopping mall in the world, though the scandalous rumour doing the rounds is that there is one in Minneapolis that can eclipse it (but only, of course, after using performance-enhancing drugs). We should have guessed at this after speaking to Kathy Butler, the British 5,000m runner who spent much of her childhood in Canada. Butler struggled to divulge much information on the city. "I've never been there," she said. "I'm not exactly sure how far it is from the mountains. It's not that it's in the middle of nowhere, but you'd have to be going there for a reason." Well there's a pretty good reason now, with even the Earl and Countess of Wessex rating the trip worthwhile. The welcome they got (the crowd really thought they were dynamite) on entering the Commonwealth Stadium for the opening ceremony on Friday, driven round the track in a classic Buick, is the sort of thing you suspect Bailey might have liked. One day maybe Canada's top athletes will be extended the red carpet and have a genuine chance of making the most of their talent. Until then, we can only hope that Edmontonians appreciate the spectacle that has been brought to their doorstep. If they do, they might help their athletes join the first world where they belong. Eamonn Condon www.RunnersGoal.com
