Now that the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Games have come and gone, Canada ended up finishing lower in the medal count than in previous years.
At the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Canada secured 26 medals, and at the PyeongChang Olympics in 2018, the country won 29, marking these Games as the most successful Canadian performance in terms of overall medals at the Winter Olympics.
Canada also took home 25 medals at the 2014 Sochi Olympics and 26 medals at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
With Canada waving goodbye to the 2026 Olympic Games with just 21 medals, many Canadians may be wondering what was different this year.
Canadian Olympic Committee chief executive David Shoemaker spoke at a press conference on Sunday, emphasizing the need for increased funding.
“Core funding for national sports organizations has not increased in 20 years,” Shoemaker said. “It needs to.”
“It’s the money these organizations count on to fund operations, athletes, coaches and support staff. They safeguard the pathway from playground to podium.”
Ann Rucklinger, CEO of Own the Podium, a non-profit organization that “assists national sports bodies in Canada with their investment and training strategies,” said to Global News last week that Canada usually starts off the Winter Olympics slowly.
“We didn’t set a real specific medal target. We’re always trying to improve on our previous performance, but we knew that our athlete pool was pretty shallow compared to previous games coming into Milan-Cortina, so that was certainly a concern for us,” she said
However, Rucklinger cites the real “challenge” for the decrease in medals this Olympics to be federal funding.
The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees have pressed the federal government on behalf of national sport organizations (NSOs) for an increase in core funding, with the latest ask a $144-million raise in 2025. However, the federal budget had not allocated new money for sport.
Core funding is money all NSOs count on to fund operations, athletes, coaches and support staff, and they say it hasn’t increased since 2005. The four revenue pillars for NSOs are registration fees, corporate sponsorship, hosting events and government funding.
Two Canadian federal budgets have passed without an increase, although athletes did see a $410 raise in their monthly athlete assistance cheques in the 2024 budget.
Looking ahead to the 2030 French Alps Olympics, Rucklinger believes that NSOs will feel the strain.
When it comes to the correlation between funding and athletic results, Rucklinger said it is “very direct.”
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“For the national sport organizations, they have not had an increase in their core support funding for 15 to 20 years,” she said.
“So just layer that up against inflation and so they are having to do more with the same amount of money — and in fact it’s less money because the cost of doing business in the high-performance program is higher.“
Added with other competing nations investing more than Canada, Rucklinger called this “a huge financial gap.”
“What that means for a national sport organization is they have not been able to focus on the development part of their high-performance programs.”
Bruce Kidd, a professor emeritus in sport and public policy at the University of Toronto, says that there are many expenses at large that athletes need to think about, among them “living expenses, child care, tuition money for those in university.”
“You want to feel confident that you will be able to put bread on the table and a roof over your head,” he said.
Kidd also said that the competition aspect of training can also be costly and can include travel expenses, paying to train in facilities and equipment.
“In the case of winter sports, it involves the costs of summer training camps,” said Kidd. “Most of these sports are very specialized, so there are only so many places where they can train. That’s a huge area of costs.”
Part of this process is trying to attract top coaches and support staff to Canada.
Kidd said if he had to pick one area to invest in for ” high-performance development,” it would be coaching.
“Canada has been lucky as a country that attracts immigrants to be able to attract coaches from other countries, but it is also important for us to develop our own coaches,” said Kidd.
“At a time when sport is underfunded, it’s not a terrific time to encourage young Canadians to become high-performance coaches.”
However, despite the financial setbacks, the desire to come out victorious in Milan was still palpable.
“It goes back to that core message, that this feeling of patriotism, pride in country, the aspiration to do great things on the world stage, to sing ‘O Canada,’” Shoemaker said.
Yet he said these Olympics also posed difficult questions.
“These Games brought us together, as they always do. In return, they provided an opportunity to ask ourselves, ‘How do we want to show up on the world stage? What kind of country do we want to represent? Who do we want to be?’” Shoemaker asked.
“In some ways, I think waiting eight days for a gold medal emphasized this point.”
