Should heritage play a role when it comes to selecting athletes for Canada’s national teams? Members of the Canadian sports community weigh in with their two cents.
Thomas Jones, CEO of Athletes CAN, an advocacy group for Canadian athletes, says athletes deserve the same rights as other talented and successful immigrants, who are generally naturalized faster: “Athletes should have the same rights as business people with vast amounts of money or scientists do to get the immigration process sped up. Athletes contribute to the country directly through their natural talents.”
“It’s not fair to say that if you are a new Canadian citizen you would not be in the same boat as everyone else when getting selected for a team,” adds Jones.
In contrast, George Gross believes that it is right to pick a Canadian-born athlete over someone of the same ability who has been parachuted in from another country to compete.
In the end, though, Gross says that if there is a large degree of difference in talent, his choice would be to drop the last Canadian off the roster to put the “new” Canadian on the team.
Selecting foreign athletes before Canadian-born athletes leads to the question of double loyalties. Lazarevic says no one has ever questioned his loyalty to Canada, but in 1999, while playing for Canada, his loyalty to Serbia came into conflict.
In March of 1999, NATO started a bombing campaign in Kosovo to stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanian Muslims by Serbians. Being of Serbian origin, Lazarevic was angered by Canada’s involvement in this campaign and boycotted the Canadian national team at the French Open water polo tournament.
“I was trying to make a statement,” says Dusan. “It’s hard to represent a country that is bombing the country where I am from.”
Kidd says it is inevitable that people carry into sport bitter debates over identity, foreign policy, and military intervention. During his athletic career, Kidd was a leading supporter of the boycott against the apartheid-era South African team in the Olympics, and he spoke out against America’s boycott of the Moscow Olympics during the Cold War.
“I think one of the features of Canadian society is that we understand that people have multiple loyalties and identities,” Kidd says. “It’s anyone’s right in a liberal democratic society to be critical of a foreign policy, and we should respect that as long as one does it in a liberal democratic frame.”
But Gross has a problem with the idea of double loyalty.
“You are either a Canadian or you are not; this is not a rent-a-country” he says. “My parents came here from Hungary and Czechoslovakia to be Canadian. Anytime Canada played Hungary or Czechoslovakia, there was no question who my parents cheer for: it was Canada. This is how all new Canadians should act.”
Coaching the 1988 Canadian track team at the Olympics, Georgevski was upset at the way a few Canadian newspapers portrayed Jamaican-born Ben Johnson’s disgrace. Georgevski says that when Johnson set the new record the media made him out to be Canada’s hero, but when the scandal over Johnson’s use of performance-enhancing drugs occurred, a few select papers emphasized Johnson’s Jamaican heritage.
“Ben Johnson did a lot of things wrong,” Georgevski says. “But we welcomed him to the country, we helped him all the way through and built him up. Let us not disown him; he is one of ours. He is not the disgraced Jamaican runner, he is the disgraced Canadian runner.”
Whatever the case, Canada’s Summer Olympic team, with or without foreigners, has struggled at recent Games. In Greece in 2004 the team only managed to come away with 12 medals, compared to the United States’s 103. Is importing athletes Canada’s solution to Olympic glory?
“Being an elite athlete should be a by-product of the grassroots and intermediate sports systems we have in place in this country and not through indirect benefit,” Georgevski says.
No one can buy his place on the podium, says Lazarevic. He says foreign-born athletes bring new systems, new skills, and different approaches to the game, which helps. But this is not a full solution.
“If good foreign athletes come, they give competition for spots on the team to Canadian athletes,” Lazarevic says. “Then Canadian-born athletes will work harder for spots on the team.”
Coming to Canada for a better life seems to be enough incentive for many talented foreign-born athletes to represent Canada in the Olympics and on national teams. Gross, Lazarevic, Georgevski, and Kidd all say money will help Canada’s performance in the Olympics, but not by buying talented athletes from other countries.
These Canadian coaches and players say Canada should spend more on athletics in schools and in club teams, so that all Canadians, regardless of cultural background, have a chance to play sports. This will expand the pool of athletes national teams can select from, give more competition for Canadian teams, but more importantly, it will help Canadians become more active and healthy-the true goal of all sports.
