Standing at the edge of the pool deck next to his fellow Canadian teammates of the national water polo team, Dusan Lazarevic listened as the announcer introduced the Serbian national water polo team. The mostly Serbian crowd went wild as each athlete stepped forward and put his hand up when his name was called.
Then the announcer switched sheets and started to announce the Canadian team. A silence fell over the crowd. Then the announcer called out Dusan Lazarevic. Many in the crowd stood and cheered for the Serbian playing for the Canadian national team, as he was still a fellow countryman.
“It was awkward,” Lazarevic says. “I was representing one team and at the moment I did not think that I was.”
During the first Olympic Games in Greece, around 500 BCE, champion athletes were honoured with statues erected in their likeness and various gifts and honours, including exemption from taxation. As time went on, however, these awards were seen as a corruption of the original purpose of the Games. Proud amateur athletes were challenged by foreign athletes who were granted citizenship to compete and were paid handsomely by Greek gamblers.
Prior to the return of the Olympics to Greece in 2004, Turkey offered $10 million (U.S.) to Iranian Hossein Rezazadeh, one of the strongest men in the world, to change his nationality and become a member of Turkey’s national weightlifting team.
Although Rezazadeh rejected the deal, saying in a press conference, “I am an Iranian and love my country and people,” the idea of buying Olympic medals, which started over two millennia ago, has not gone away.
“Is money going to be the motivating factor to swear allegiance to another flag?” asked Carl Georgevski, a Macedonian who moved to Canada and became the Canadian Olympic track and field coach at the 1988, 1992, and 2000 Olympic Games and currently the head coach of the University of Toronto’s track and field team. “Everything an athlete is today is because of where an athlete lives and the opportunities the nation has provided to him or her.”
Bruce Kidd, a former Canadian Olympic athlete in track and field and now the dean of athletics at the University of Toronto, says he condemns those who offer incentives to athletes. He believes that it hardly provides an authentic basis for national pride if a nation simply buys its athletes.
“But I stop my criticism at blaming athletes,” Kidd says. “Many of them face great hardships, like economic problems, religious and political persecution, and these opportunities could help them make better lives for themselves.”
Many immigrants come to Canada to escape the hardships Kidd mentioned. It is not surprising that great athletes have also come to this nation, as this is one of the most free and liberal countries in the world.
“In a country of immigrants, immigrants have contributed enormously to the development of sports, and have represented Canada year in and year out,” Kidd says.
One such immigrant athlete is 24-year-old Lazarevic. He started playing water polo with a local club in his hometown of Belgrade at the age of six.
In 1994 his family moved to Canada to find a better life-away from the civil war taking place throughout Yugoslavia. Lazarevic found the York Mavericks water polo team within weeks of arriving in Toronto. He has excelled with the squad ever since.
In 1998, the national team selected Lazarevic to play for Canada, but he needed Canadian citizenship before he was eligible to join the team. Lazarevic says the national team helped him get citizenship two years faster than his parents did.
George Gross, an Olympian and former Canadian national water polo team coach, strongly advocates that immigrant athletes playing for Canada’s national teams deserve to receive citizenship faster than the average immigrant.
“An athlete’s window of opportunity to play is limited and may only be one Olympics,” says Gross. “The biggest contribution an athlete can bring to a country is international exposure and success, which most governments view as positive. If Canada held immigrant athletes to the normal rule and it went past an athlete’s window of opportunity, then in effect Canada does not get part of its citizens’ contribution.”
