I am late with this column because of the Olympics. When you watch hours and hours a day, everything from sailing to weight lifting — (actually, I don’t like weight lifting. It always makes my weak knee ache in sympathy.) — from gymnastics to the track events, badminton to beach volleyball, there is not a lot of time for anything else.

Yup. I am an Olympics junkie. And proud of it. Or at least, proud of Canada’s athletes. Even the non-medallists, the so-called losers, have finished fourth, or fifth or twentieth. Can you imagine being the twentieth best at something in the whole world? I call that a win.
But what I have noticed this quadrennial, in particular, is the diversity of the Canadian Olympic athletes.

Perhaps that is because Japan as the host country gets to participate in most events. And Japan has one of the most genetically insular populations in the world. In order to emigrate to Japan one has to have a strong connection to the country, i.e. a spouse or parent born there. This is in no way a negative, but it does make recognizing which athlete is Japanese, just by the name, pretty easy. Chinese athletes are also easily identified by name.

Canadians? No way. A Canadian athlete can bear a mid-European name and flaunt blond hair and blue eyes. Or a Muslim name and warm brown skin. Or a Japanese name and be the best captain of the Men’s Rugby Sevens ever. We have athletes born in Egypt and Hungary, we have second or third generation athletes from all over the Caribbean, and a plethora of athletes descended from British and Western European nations. And of course, we have indigenous athletes.

Canada is far down in the medal count. But when you consider that the USA has ten times our population and China many times more than that, Canadians are ‘fighting way above their weight class’ as sports people say. The USA does not have anywhere close to ten times our medal count. (And we are going to win at least one more, when the women’s soccer final is held, Friday morning.) I know. I know. When it comes to the most medals per population Trinidad Tobago wins hands down, always does. Those runners cannot be caught. But Canada is no slouch.
I do know that if there was a medal for diversity in racial heritage, sexual alignment, equality in numbers between women and men athletes, Canada would win gold in every Olympics. I can’t wait for that medal category.

by Jessica Murphy