Yesterday afternoon in London’s picturesque Hyde Park, the world got the chance to experience one of the most heartbreaking events of the Olympic Games thus far. Having not competed in over a year due to a chronic hip injury, Canadian triathlete Paula Findlay struggled mightily throughout her race, getting to the point where only the encouraging words of her doctor were able to keep her from pulling out of the race before the 10K run. While crossing the finish line, Findlay was clearly emotional, with tears visibly streaming down her face. After the race, Findlay was interviewed by Canadian broadcasters, and took the opportunity to apologize to the whole country for her poor performance, and for “letting everyone down”. While this apology was no doubt admirable, and showed just how badly Paula wanted to make her country proud, I am of the opinion that the fact that she felt compelled to apologize in the first place is ludicrous, and is a poor reflection on the ridiculous culture that we have built around our amateur athletes in this country.

Before I get into my rationale for this statement, I first wanted to talk a little bit about my own athletic career in order to provide context for my opinions. Throughout my high school years, I was very lucky to be able to compete both nationally and internationally in freestyle mogul skiing. As a competitive skier, you are forced to miss a great deal of school during the winter months, due to the heavy amount of travel required to get to the best competitions. Because of this, I had an important decision to make before entering my final year of high school – I had to decide whether to stay at my semestered public school and try to maximize both my grades and my ski results while attending classes full time, or to transfer to a school that was termed as opposed to semestered, which would allow me to take time off in the winter months in order to focus on skiing. Of course, choosing the latter option meant that I would not graduate in the spring of 2008 with all of my friends, and would therefore begin university one year late. After consulting with my parents, I made the decision to transfer schools, and therefore delay my university education.

During my “extra year” of high school, I was constantly asked by those around me why I was not in university yet, and I would respond by giving them the explanation I described above. However, each and every time that I told this story to people, their reaction was the same – “what are you doing with your life?” If you were to listen to the people that I was talking to, it was as if I was kissing away any potential post-secondary success, whether it be on campus or in the workforce, by choosing to begin school a measly 12 months after my classmates. This stance was even further perpetuated when I informed them that I did not stand to gain financially from my ski career, and that I was only skiing because it was what I loved to do, and I wasn’t quite ready to give it up. At times, I was honestly looked at like I had two heads. Some of the worst conversations that I had of this nature were with my high school teachers, who, let’s remember, are supposed to instill in their students that they can do “anything they want to if they put their mind to it”. The majority of my teachers were very disapproving of the fact that I was to miss any class from something as “silly” as mogul skiing. In fact, the primary role of my school’s “Elite Athletes Program”, which was supposed to provide high level athletes such as myself the support needed in order to excel both academically and athletically, was to ban teachers from verbally chastising athletes for missing class due to their athletic commitments.

Now, we live in a country where education is obviously very important, so I did understand where this sentiment was coming from. What bothered me though, and continues to bother me to this day, is that these people that were looking at me like I had two heads are the same people that, every two years, complain incessantly about the lack of success by our Canadian Olympians. These people don’t seem to realize that you cannot have it “both ways”. We either have to support our athletes, or not; we cannot ignore them for the 3 years and 50 weeks leading up to the Olympics, and then criticize them for not “doing our country proud”. If we want to breed a winning amateur sports culture in this country, then we must begin to change the way that we treat our amateur athletes.

This brings me back to Findlay. The fact that she felt compelled to apologize to the whole country on national television is a sad manifestation of this insane culture that we have created around our amateur athletes – we don’t approve of you daring to be different and pursuing amateur athletics, but if you do, you damn better well win. It is hard to imagine the toll that this culture puts on our amateur athletes’ minds. As anyone who has ever been or known an elite amatuer athlete will tell you, no one is harder on an amateur athlete than themselves. These people devote their lives to their sport, and make a great deal of mental, physical, financial, and social sacrifices in order to do so. When an athlete is not performing up to their expectations, they know it, and they feel terrible. From my own experience, poor peformance in amatuer sport can lead to feelings of loneliness, frustration, and sadness. Do we really think that we are helping as a country by condemning each and every underachiever or poor performance in our national newspapers and on our national television stations? The answer is unequivocally “no”. If anything, all the negative press is doing is serving to further damage these athletes’ mental states, which could result in further poor results later on in their career.

Instead of this “we don’t approve, but you better win anyways” culture, we need to adjust to a culture that doesn’t make amateur athletes feel as if they are from another planet, and accepts the fact that these athletes are human, and aren’t always going to perform up to their potential. If Canada were to have this type of culture present today, there is no doubt that Paula Findlay would not have felt the need to apologize to the whole country, and would have realized that, no matter what, we are proud of her.

There is nothing wrong with showing emotion on the field of play and being upset; however, it is imperative that we breed a culture in which that emotion comes as a result of the fact that athletes are disappointed in themselves, not as a result of the fact that 30 million others (who don’t really care much for you for the other 364 days of the year) are disappointed in them. Making our amateur athletes bear the insane burden of 30 million other Canadians is, quite simply, not fair.