Posted: June 18, 2005

Athletics: "Friends of Canadian Athletes" Letter Gets a Response from Athletics Canada

In may of this year an "Open Letter to Athletics Canada" was written by Steve Boyd, past national team athlete and current coach and master’s competitor.
The letter is posted below the following response from Athletics Canada:

June 6, 2005

Mr. Steve Boyd
Re: "Friends of Canadian Athletes"

Dear Mr. Boyd,

The Board of Directors has carefully considered your letter received May 18, 2005 at its most recent board of directors meeting and is pleased to provide the following information.

Our strategic plan focuses on the National Senior "A" team as mandated by the membership. Success at this level results in increased funding both from Sport Canada and the Canadian Olympic Committee and corporate partnership. We have had success in garnering additional support for our Senior "A" team due to this focus. This in turn allows us room in the budget to address the issues of junior and youth program support.

Athletics Canada prefers not to self-fund major national teams. As you may or may not know Athletics Canada is still in the process of retiring a deficit incurred in the period 1998- 2000. This and a tough corporate marketplace have impacted our ability to deliver all programs. An amount of $ 60,000 to $ 100,000 is dedicated to deficit redressment each year and along with a tight budget has presented challenges in all areas of association business. It is not uncommon for athletes in many sports (as well as aspiring musicians, dancers etc.,etc) when representing Canada to pay for part of the costs. In fact it is an international practice in youth and junior sport.

With the advent of new dollars from both Sport Canada and the Canadian Olympic Committee we have been able to reduce the amount of self-funding required in our junior and youth programmes. We expect the Pan-Am Junior team this year to be fully funded or at the very most pay a fee of approximately $ 300. The World Youth team will receive additional support as well. Member branches have agreed that junior and youth programs as well as "la releve - under 23 " programmes are essential to our sport and in doing so have also agreed that funding for these teams is a partnered responsibility. In many cases member branches and clubs provide direct athlete support for these programmes.

The World Cross Country selection was not mishandled. Mandatory training camp applied to all team members including those who made special requests as NCAA and CIS athletes. While sensitive to the situations of all athletes the National Team Committee supported the mandatory nature of the training camp and that all athletes should be treated equally. The training camp is not merely extra days in Europe but serves as an educational, health/injury assessment and team building exercise as an integral piece in preparing athletes to compete with the best in the world. The camp has received overwhelming support from the vast majority of athletes. All athletes, coaches and medical staff were free to make the choice of whether to meet team requirements or not. Performance analysis from the 2004 World Cross Country Championships indicated that those who arrived late did not perform well.

In the words of the athlete reps to the Athletics Canada board of directors "We (I) truly believe athlete fairness was preserved. To allow exceptions would compromise other athletes and the programme as a whole. This must be viewed holistically and not divisively with regard to whether an athlete is funded or not."

We appreciate your concern and advocacy on behalf of athletes. Athletics Canada listens carefully to its members and like you we are making best efforts to strengthen all of our programs.

Should you wish to have further dialogue please feel free to contact me or Martin Goulet.

Sincerely,

Jean- Guy Ouellette,
Chair
Board of Directors
Athletics Canada

Editor's Note: The government of Canada is fully funding a team (actually THREE teams - Quebec, New Brunswick and Canada - of 80 athletes plus officials to this year's Francophonie Games in Niger

The following letter, written by Steve Boyd in May of this year, has been circulated among Canada's athletics community with the intent of addressing the myriad of problems facing Canadian athletes.

To: Athletics Canada
Suite 300-2197 Riverside Drive
Ottawa, Ontario
K1H 7X3

E-mail: athcan@athletics.ca

To the Board of Directors:

We, the undersigned, wish to address the board over concerns arising over the de-selection of athletes to the 2005 National Cross-Country Team. We feel that this situation, including both the initial decision to de-select the athletes in question and AC’s subsequent published response to the concerns of the broader athletics community (as expressed in the media and other forums), was seriously mishandled; moreover, we’re convinced that the mistakes made in this instance were not the results of some temporary lapse in judgment. We see this whole episode as one more symptom of a general, long term organizational malaise, characterized by a failure of leadership and vision, and a growing lack of accountability to the core constituency of the sport— namely, athletes and the club/university level coaches who do the vast majority of the work to bring them to the elite level. This affair has, for many of us, justified our cynicism regarding the role of AC as an organization charged with the promotion of elite level track and field, road racing and cross-country in this country.

While our immediate concern has been mishandling of the World X-C selection process (see our demands), we feel that the deeper issue is the continued use of “self-funding” for national teams, particularly for junior age athletes, which we think is emblematic of the general failure of AC to meet its core responsibilities to athletes and coaches. What many of us found most galling about the World X-C selection affair was AC’s continued unwillingness to distinguish between self-funded athletes and fully-funded athletes when it comes to travel and training rules. It seems to us that AC is bent on requiring a level of accountability and commitment from athletes and coaches that, for years now, it itself has been either unwilling or unable to provide.

More generally, this incident served to remind many of us long term observers of the extent to which AC has come to rely on the self-funding option for the mounting of national teams; once presented as a temporary “stop-gap” measure, self-funding has now become a staple of the organization’s year-to-year functioning. It would seem, now that it has habituated a generation of athletes to the expectation that they must pay to represent the country, that AC has removed any pressure on itself to find a more permanent and viable solution to the team funding problem. AC’s response to criticism over the recent World X-C selection affair indicates that it has now become content with offering the trappings of a national team program (rules, guidelines, a rhetoric of “excellence” and “high performance”) with little of the substance.

The now apparent institutionalization of self-funding by AC is the clearest indication of its abandonment of any serious role in the area of athlete development. The role of athlete development in Canada has been de facto devolved to local clubs and, for final year juniors and “hopefuls”, the university system (and the NCAA in particular). This shift of responsibilities is to some extent an inevitable consequence of the systematic under- funding of this and almost all other amateur sports in Canada; no one, after all, expects the federation in its current form to play the leading role in athlete development. It seems to us, however, that AC could do much better in supporting the efforts of those of us who ARE now directly responsible for providing the next generation of Team Canada members, and that the best way for it to do so, within its mandate of administering national teams, is by providing full funding for athletes who succeed in meeting the set standards for international competition, beginning with junior athletes. If AC is unable to do at least this to support the efforts of clubs and the university system, then we feel strongly that its entire raison d’etre will continue to be suspect in the eyes of its core constituency.

In light of the above, we make the following demands:

1. That AC do whatever it takes to reinstate full-funding for junior national teams as soon as possible.

The self-funding option has removed the pressure on AC to provide leadership in this area. The long term use of self-funding also systematically limits the pool of potential national team athletes at its source, and, in so doing, harms long term athlete development in this country.

2. That AC publish a clear plan, including a timeline, for how it proposes to end the practice of "self-funding" on all national teams.

Or else that it consider canceling teams that can't be fully funded and stop using self-funding to hide the public embarrassment that Canada, a G-8 nation, cannot afford to send athletes to accredited international competitions, in spite of the fact that many developing nations manage to do so.

And, in the meantime, that AC:

1. End mandatory training camps, and travel restrictions in general, for “self-funded” athletes.

We feel strongly that AC should make demands of athletes only in accord with level of responsibility it is willing or able to assume. Responsibility between athlete and federation must be balanced.

2. Make junior team funding the priority.

By far the biggest development “bang for the buck” that AC, in its now very limited capacity, can achieve is through the full funding of our most talented junior athletes, even if this involves the short term transfer of resources from other activities. The possibility of national team participation is very attractive to young athletes, but many are inevitably put-off by the potentially high costs involved; full funding for junior athletes is therefore probably the single best way to ensure the future of elite track and field in our country.

Signed: “Friends of Canadian Athletics”

Steve Boyd
Past National Team Athlete,
Current Coach and Master’s Competitor