Canada’s MLB franchise, I’m told, has been trying to push key players – Vernon Wells, B.J. Ryan and John McDonald – through waivers for the purposes of trading them but, honestly, I don’t feel like discussing the Blue Jays today.
No, after spending most of last week dissing Canada’s Olympic squad, the only topic worthy of discussion in this York Report is the success our athletes suddenly are enjoying in Beijing.
What a weekend, eh? I guess our Olympians don’t stink, after all. With seven medals over the weekend, and presumably more to come from Ontario kayaker Adam van Koeverden and others, the redness in our faces has vanished. We’ve earned the right to gloat, at least a bit.
We can row, row, row our boats not-so-gently down the stream, and we have four medals to prove it, including gold from the overpowering men’s eight crew. We have a 19-year-old swimmer, Ryan Cochrane of Victoria, B.C., who ended our eight-year drought in the pool with a bronze medal. We have women wrestlers – two of them – you don’t want to mess with because B.C.’s Carol Huynh owns a gold medal and Ontarian Tonya Verbeek has a bronze. We also have a professor, B.C.’s Daniel K.N. Johnson, with goathorns because he assured us after his scientific research that Canada would leave Beijing without gold.
And we can breathe sighs of relief because we actually have more hardware than Cameroon, Togo and Tajikistan.
Hallelujah.
And double hallelujah for the Canadian men’s eight rowing squad, which won not only gold in Beijing but also redemption for finishing fifth at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The eight thoroughly dominated in Chinese waters with wire-to-wire supremacy.
“I could see early (in the race) we’d win,” said coxswain Brian Price of Belleville, Ont. “We pushed hard every stroke. It was the culmination of four years of intense work. We were so determined to make amends for Athens, and we did.”
They did, in fact, convincingly.
Not that they ended the raging debate about Olympic funding in Canada. Shawn Saraga, president of www.freemyteam.com., approached Canadian Olympic Foundation chief David Armour about co-ordinating a $10-million fundraising initiative for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
“It is heart-breaking to see other countries financially support their athletes,” Saraga said, “while our athletes are primarily self-supported.”
On the weekend, however, Canada managed to climb the Olympic ladder respectably. Combined with U.S. swimming sensation Michael Phelps and his unfathomable eight gold medals, the Jamaican sprinters and – cross your fingers – no steroid issues, and – whaddya know?—Beijing is turning out to be quite memorable, after all.
Who needs the Blue Jays?
