Jctriguy wrote:
Halvard wrote:
B.McMaster wrote:
BigOilerFan wrote:
Not a clever response, B. McMaster. In Canada we have 7 times more people than Norway and as much snow and hills and they are blowing us out of the snowbank with their performance. I wonder how much of their success is promotion of skiing, ski jumping, etc., from school and club programs that place such high emphasis on these sports? The best athletes in Canada tend to gravitate towards hockey at an early age.
Doesn't your response prove my point.
Canada has snow and cold but a large portion of your population doesn't give a sh-t about a lot of these sports.
You are very local in your thinking. In 2013 Dario Cologna beat Roger Federer as sportsman of the year in Switzerland.
Maybe you are not familiar with Cologna but in his market he is famous.
As far as I know, Canada just have one famous athlete - Ben Johnson...............
What are you talking about?? What does Switzerland have to do with Canada?? Canada has 100’s of famous athletes...they almost all play in the NHL.
Reply back mainly to Halvard as I had posted this earlier in this thread. Here in Canada, we have our athletes spread over EVERY SPORT SUMMER AND WINTER. We'll end up with ~42 medals between 2016 summer and 2018 winter games. The thing about Canada is that we are pretty well spreading our athletes across every sport on the planet. We have federations for all sports here, even though Hockey is kind of a national sport, we have good federations for Rugby, for baseball, for cycling, swimmer, weight lifting, judo, etc etc etc. Fortunately our country is rich enough, large enough in population for the wealth, and diverse enough to support all sports under the sun to different degrees of success. Aside from the podium, you will find a lot of Canadians posting top 5, top 10, top 15 in Worlds and Olympics across sports....we're not just nordic skiers, or speed skaters or downhill skiers (the bulk of Norway Medals).
Great on Norway for the culture that ends up building a decent size pyramid of participants for Olympic sports that give out a ton of medals. Probably the same group of girls who in Canada go into hockey in Norway they are skiers....hockey gets you 1 medal....skiing, I lost count how many medals you can win (keep in mind in hockey you literally can only win 1 medal, whereas in XC skiing your team can win multiple individual medals in a single event).
As for "which famous athletes outside Ben Johnson"....well since we are on a triathlon forum and talking Olympic Medals, we can talk about Simon Whitfield for triathlon, we can say Steve Bauer for road cycling (he's not our only cycling medal....Alison Sydor, Linda Jackson, Brian Walton, Curt Harnett, Clara Hughes...our women's team pursuit squad in Rio etc etc) and in swimming we have a decently deep swim medal haul, but my favourite in Alex Baumann winning 200IM + 400IM gold in LA....but most people today will point to Penny Oleksiak with 5 free/fly/relay medals in Rio and in running, we had Andre DeGrasse at Rio giving Bolt a good run (literally) and pulling in 3 medals. I THINK our medal depth over time in the sports that ST is built on is half decent. Not USA deep or Germany deep, but it's OK and deeper than Norway for summer sports and our climate is much more miserable than Norway for doing summer sport....but we don't really have an excuse for not being able to compete with Norway in Nordic....they just do it better than us....culture+program+money++++