TORONTO — Ontario health promotion minister Jim Watson Thursday pumped $1.2-million into sport science and sport medicine for high performance athletes, in the ongoing battle to stop the exodus of Ontarians who leave to train in other provinces.
"It's playing catchup to a certain degree, but at least we'll have one-stop shopping for these services for athletes. We didn't have it before and there's been — not a brain drain — but a brawn drain," Watson said in an interview.
The $1.2-million goes into the Canadian Sport Centre Ontario's new performance enhancement program that will provide Ontario's high-performance athletes with increased access to sport science and medicine services.
"Now athletes here can get properly tested here, sophisticated measurements on things like oxygen uptake and blood lactate, information they need if they're going to move on to the international level, where a hundredth of a second can be the difference between getting on the podium or being kept off it," Watson said.
The performance enhancement program involves both coaching and sport science. If a provincial sport body can raise half the salary for a fulltime professional coach, there is matching money for the other half from the province. The sport is then assigned two sport science experts to test the athletes and find ways they can improve. Eleven sports, some of which have been without a fulltime professional coach for a decade, have taken advantage of the program: basketball, cross-country skiing, freestyle skiing, cycling, gymnastics, rowing, soccer, track and field, volleyball, sprint canoe, and triathlon.
Through the 1990s, Ontario's sport community withered under a series of cutbacks and discontinued services. Support for provincial sport bodies declined 42 per cent during the Mike Harris premiership. Top athletes and coaches, who wanted to continue their development, sought training and coaching in Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia and schools in the United States because here was no sport future in Ontario.
Sport scientist Dr. Greg Gannon, vice-president of sport performance at CSC-Ontario, said he was such as case. "In 1999, I had to leave Ontario because there was no outlet for my expertise, and I went to Winnipeg where there was an endowment available because of the Pan American Games. I could only come back to Ontario last summer," Dr. Gannon said.
The presence of Ontario-based athletes on Olympic and national teams has plunged dramatically. In 1984, Ontario provided 52 per cent of Canada's Olympic team members for both the Summer and Winter Games. By 2004, it was down to 38 per cent for the Summer team. In 2006, at the Turin Winter Games, it had fallen to just 18 per cent.
There has been a push to get sport back on the agenda starting at the grassroots level, with capital works projects to refurbish or replace crumbling sports facilities around the province. But Watson said there is a responsibility at both ends of the sport spectrum. "If you're giving youngsters a chance to develop at the grassroots, you also have to give them something to strive for," Watson said. "There's no point in nurturing a young athlete and then running him into a brick wall."
The funds will also help develop Ontario sport review panels to assist provincial sport organizations evaluate and improve their high-performance programs, provide funds to implement a long-term athlete development model and support web-conferencing services to deliver National Coaching Institute training classes across the province.
