Canadian speed skaters feeling financial pinch
As sponsorship dollars dry up, some athletes faced with paying their own way to events
This speed skating season was supposed to be better for Gilmore Junio.
Instead, the athlete who famously gave his spot in one of his races at the Sochi Olympics to teammate Denny Morrison has been plagued by both injury and funding concerns.
"I've spent more time at home than I had wanted," says Junio, who was left off the Canadian team for this month's world single distances championships and then suffered a concussion when he crashed during training.
Even before the injury, Junio says he felt extra pressure to produce results and stay in the mix for financial support from Speed Skating Canada.
"I was maybe trying to do too much. I was really looking at the points and where I was going to stand in the World Cup rankings," he says.
"It plays with your psyche. You have to compete with top athletes around the world and compete with yourself just to stay on the road."
Junio says he's not alone in his worries over money.
"I think the speed skating community in Canada is white-knuckling it right now, trying to figure out what the next year, what every month, is going to look like," he says.
Belts tighten
Times have certainly changed for the Canadian speed skating program. Gone are the days when long track stars like Catriona LeMay Doan, Christina Groves, Clara Hughes, Jeremy Wotherspoon and, more recently, Morrison won medals in bunches.
"It's not like the '90s and 2000s anymore," says Junio.
In the lead-up to the Vancouver Olympics, Speed Skating Canada was living relatively large in terms of sponsorship money and talent. But seven years later, the money is running out.
Susan Auch, who shifted from president to interim CEO of Speed Skating Canada on Feb. 2, after Ian Moss stepped down, says private (often corporate) sponsorships have become increasingly difficult to secure. As a result, belts are tightening across the organization.
"Every area at Speed Skating Canada had to revise their budget," Auch says. "We made some changes to make sure athletes stay focused on what they need to do [leading] up to the 2018 Olympic year."
She says the organization is trying to find more creative ways to sell its athletes.
"We are the most winning winter Olympic sport [in Canada], with incredible personal stories to attract those partnerships."
Auch knows what it takes to win at the highest level, having collected three Olympic medals during her career. Upon being named CEO, she was tasked with finding money for the program.
"This is not where we want to be right now," she says.
Pay to play
Junio says athletes are feeling the pinch this season.
"We had to skip World Cups, send people home from World Cups," he says. "[Some] people are paying their own way to get to the competitions and it just trickles down from there."
Auch says the athletes were told that some would have to cover costs on their own if they wanted to compete at certain events.
"Speed Skating Canada communicated to long track skaters back in September that we would not send athletes to World Cup No. 6 [next month in Norway]," she says.
"Then, in December, we had to make some tough decisions as our budget wasn't going in the right direction. We then decided to send a smaller group of athletes to World Cup long track No. 5, World Cup short track No. 6, the world allround championships [March 4-5 in Norway] and the world sprint championships [this weekend in Calgary]."
With less than a year to go to the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, Auch says the Canadian team is on track performance-wise. As a sign of optimism, she points to the three medals Canadians won at the world single distances championships, along with four fourth-place finishes.
"We are confident that [the financial concerns] will have a small to no impact on the preparation of the athletes toward the 2018 Olympic Games," she says.
Junio, meanwhile, wants to put this year's financial and physical struggles behind him and refocus for the push for Pyeongchang.
"The plan doesn't change," he says. "It might be a different approach getting to those events, but the goal is the same: to provide Canada those medal moments."