Angels and Demons

Excellent piece in the National Post today about a group of high powered investors who have joined forces and created a Charitable Amateur Athletic Association helping to give a talented group of amateur athletes all the resources they require to win gold in 2010. The piece can be found at http://www.nationalpost.com/sports/story.html?id=2332439. The company - B2Ten was founded under the principal of circumenting the tradititional beurocratic route of financing sport in Canada and create a business like approach to making good Olympians - great.

The concept isn't new of course in Canada. Jane Roos and her company Canadian Athletes Now - Previously "See you in Sydney...." has been looking at ways of providing athletes with annual grants of $6,000 per year through chartiable donations from ordinary Canadians.

Looking farther back in the early 1990's a B2Ten type of initiative was put forth in Canada by the unlikeliest of organizations. That organization was the Canadian Olympic Association (Now the COC). At the time the COA ran what was called the Olympic Trust which garnered donations from private corporations and high profile Canadians to help assist Canada amateur athletes in pursuing greatness. And from all signs the concept worked. The 1992, 1994 and 1996 Olympics were then the most sucesful non-boycotted games for Canadian athletes in the history of the Olympic movement.

However, acccording to Paul Henderson, a IOC and COC member, the COA did not like the Olympic trust because it meant that the COA and the trust had to be accountable to its funding partners. "Dick Pound and then COA President Carol Ann Letheran hated this concept," says Henderson. By the late 1990's the initiative was terminated, but the COA had achieved what it wanted. It was no longer required to submit audited financial statements to its investors and the affairs of the organization were hidden from all.

No wonder then that that B2Ten and Roos are not pleased with the current state of affiars. "Private industry is not keen on bureaucracy, not keen on administration, not keen on politics -- unfortunately, for better or worse, when you look at public sector, you look at national amateur sport bodies, more often than not, you find all those elements," says B2Ten Spokesman J.D Miller. Here is hoping that with charibale companies like B2Ten and Roos leading the way things are starting to change for the better.