Come on Canada! When are you going to get some Olympic medal?

Question

I'm an American, but I cheer for the Canadian team too, because I have friends who are Canadian.

It dishearten me to watch the Canadian team come in 4th place, just out of medal standings.

You folks should get like Gold or Silver or aleast some Bronze medal.

Go Team Canada!

Answer 1

This year, hopefully. ;)

Answer 2

Canada is better at winter sports

And remember, Canadians are drawing their Olympic athletes from only 30 Million People

Public funding for athletes is very low

Compare with USA with over 300 million people and huge funding for training.

Canadians do pretty good with the cards they are dealt.

Answer 3

We'll get some medals at the Winter Olympics!

Seriously though, this is just sad.

Answer 4

seriously! lol. my hopes are for getting one in the 8 man rowing. i'm just hoping we don't go through the whole olympics without getting any medals. it's not really thaaat big of a deal for me how many medals we get, but not getting any at all would kind of suck. even just one would be kind of disappointing, kind of funny too i guess. i think our women's soccer has a good history, so they might do well also, but i don't know how well they're doing so far.

Answer 5

Canada according to a recent popular US article.

What's Canadian?          L.A. Times  

   1. It's big cold empty country. When there are trees, the trees go on for a thousand miles. Where there are prairies, the prairies go on for a thousand miles. It can be thirty below in Winnipeg through much of December, all of January and February, and part of March--and the wind blows from the north the whole time. But: Canada is primarily an urban country, out of contact with those vast landscapes. By far the vast majority of Canadians live together in cities, huddled together in tightly packed places dropped down in the middle of the vast empty landscapes, trying to keep warm together. Northrop Frye talks about Canadians as possessed of a "garrison mentality": we are so frightened by the oppressive vastness and threatening dangerousness of our natural landscape that we build walls against it, and hide behind the walls, in fortified garrisons of the mind. We see the natural world as something that's out to get us. Americans look at a big empty space and say, "Hey, great, let's get busy and conquer it and turn it into a city." Canadians look at a big empty space and say "I'm frightened, so let's get together and build a wall and hide ourselves from the big ugly natural world before it gets us and does us in."

   2. As a variation on this, Margaret Atwood once developed a theory of Canadians as, basically and eternally, victims. The world is cold and big and bleak and out to get us, and we are little and weak. We internalize this, Atwood suggests, and believe that everyone and everything is out to get us. We see ourselves as victims, little people in the control of vast forces. We tend to be depressed about it all, and unconvinced of our general ability to control anything or anyone. We never get to the last of the victim stages Atwood outlines: to refuse to become victims, and become creative non-victims.

   3. Politically and economically, we don't actually in fact control all that much of anything (I speak here as a good Canadian victim). Almost all Canadian business is owned by people outside the country, non-Canadians--most of them Americans or American-based multi-national corporations. We sit, a tiny nation of about thirty million, perched over the top of a huge nation of three hundred million, slowly being engulfed. We speak proudly of the world's longest undefended border, but we know in our hearts it's not defended because it couldn't possibly be--if the Americans wanted just to take over completely, they could do it in about an hour and a half (and we believe they wouldn't ever want to anyway--see below, re losers and the lack of desirability of Canada as a country to live in or be from). We are totally dominated and overwhelmed by the USA. We wear the same clothes as Americans, and eat the same food, purchased in the same fast food franchises, and we read the same magazines and we watch the same TV shows at the same time as Americans watch them (but with ads for specifically Canadian Burger Kings replacing the American ads, so that we know we're really at home). Canadian bookstores are filled with thousands of American books, published in the USA and imported without duties, and a very few higher-priced Canadian ones--higher prices because of the small print runs that eventuate from the fact that most Canadians would rather read American books. I suspect all this is why John Gough, viewing us from the distance of Australia, can't tell the difference between Canadians and Americans--we often have the same trouble ourselves, worry about it a lot, and insist to the point of shrillness that we are NOT American. As a result, a good definition of Canadians is exactly that: "NOT American." We know we are NOT American, for sure--we're just not exactly sure how, but we know it will turn out to be something very important if we can just figure out what it is. And that's a defining quality of the way we talk about ourselves-we try to establish ways in which we are NOT American, or we just proclaim that we are NOT American as we eat our Big Macs and watch our Disney movies. We insist on a difference we can't define--and this of course makes us very different from Americans, who don't have to worry about any of this at all, and who know absolutely that Canadians are exactly like them.

   4. One of the ways we are NOT American is that we are a people who act like Americans but who are in fact outside the borders of America. We tend to be critical about or to claim distance from the American lifestyle we more or less share--we are somehow outsiders on the inside of American values--able to criticize the lifestyle because we know it so well from lived experience but also know we are distant from what we live, that it represents someone else's values we have somehow acceded to but are not willing to accept as our own. This makes us peculiarly objective about the life we live and share with Americans. Our great writers tend to be critics like Northrop Frye and satirists like Margaret Atwood. Our major import to the US seems to be satirical sketch comics and satirical stand-up comics--and books written for children. We're especially good at writing for children, I think, because we have the same outsider-on-the-inside relationship to mainstream American values as many children and especially teenagers have to the values of their more powerful elders. Canadian can write well about children because Canadians of all ages tend to think as rebellious children in relation to Americans.

   5. A little question of history. Mordecai Richler (a Canadian satirical novelist and satirical children's novelist) once suggested that what defines Canadians is the fact that we're all, quite literally, losers--and we've never gotten over the fact. Nobody actually actively chose to live here because they really liked the idea. The natives, who were always here, didn't choose to have the European-dominated country of Canada imposed on top of them--but they lost battles, and so became Canadians. Losers. The French in Quebec are Canadians because the British defeated them back in the eighteenth century (and they sure don't like that fact these days). Losers, right? The British-based population of Canada consists of two major groups: United Empire Loyalists, the people in the American colonies who sided with Britain in the war of independence and lost, and so had to flee to Ontario and the Maritimes; and immigrants from England, most obviously people who were doing poorly there, losers at the game of life who decided to set out and try again somewhere else. Losers all again. Throughout this century, people who have immigrated to Canada have tended to be people who have lost elsewhere--lost wars, lost land, etc. Losers yet again. My own ancestors came here because of pogroms in Eastern Europe that destroyed their homes--and would have preferred to go to the US but they couldn't get in, so they settled for Canada, poor losers. We Canadians aren't patriotic because we really only settle for being here, all of us, rather than being delighted by it--and we love to whine about it. Losers for sure, eh?

   6. But it's not all bad. Since we think of ourselves as losers and victims, we tend to be relatively unaggressive and self-involved, and relatively civil towards others. We are a communal people, far more than we are a collection of independent individuals. We tend to be social democrats in our politics rather than republicans. We don't like people carrying guns around. We tend to be nice and thoughtful and sensitive to the needs of others, because we know what it's like to be a victim.

Summer games is the "real" Olympics.

Greece did not start the Olympics on slush.

Answer 6

We will win medals when the snow starts falling... ... unfortunately its 90 degrees in Beijing today.

Canada is a winter olympics nation and with 2010 in Vancouver this year thats the focus and the support money is going there.  Summer athletes got squat.  .  We usually do well there anyways being a winter nation.   I mean aussies grow up at the beach and what the heck is beach volleyball as an olympic sport!!    

Answer 7

When eating Poutine and Drinking beer becomes an olympic event....just kidding, Canada Rocks!!!

Answer 8

When I watch these athletes I am always aware that they can do something I can't and never could. And that the difference between the winners and the losers is often a fraction of a second. I am in awe of every last one of them, regardless of race, nationality or anything else.

I would love to hear them play our National anthem just like everyone else up here. But if I don't, well I am happy to know that they are among the best in the world or they would not be there in the first place. It is not the nature of the Canadian beast to be whining and moaning anyway.

Believe me when I tell you that if hoping was all it took to win, we would already have a pocket full of medals. Maybe our men's rowing team will bring something back.  I am hoping anyway.

As everyone else has pointed out, our strength is the winter sports.it:

Edit: Who let 'the truth' out of his cage??

Answer 9

This comment goes back to " The Truth" person that wrote that huge novel dissing Canadians. I am a Canadian and everything you said was dis respectful to me and and my country. Everything you said was false and Canada is there own Country and dam proud of it. Who cares if we haven't won any medals yet, were going to beat every ones A$$ in the 2010 VANCOUVER OLYMPIC WINTER games in Canada and if were such a bad Country then why will all the other country's come up to Canada and participate in them. I'm so offended by what you said its ridiculous. The States suck and CANADA is the most amazing, proud, self- standing country there is with free health care system which you Americans don't have and know nothing about.

Answer 10

lol... the only thing those canadians are good at is hocket Lulz

Answer 11

Good question.  Canada doesn't get many medals at the summer games.  They're better in the winter games.

Answer 12

There's an Olympic oath at the beginning of the Games:

In the name of all the competitors I promise that we shall take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules which govern them, committing ourselves to a sport without doping and without drugs, in the true spirit of sportsmanship,

for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams.

Answer 13

Its not the funding, canada.

Do these medaled countries ALL fund their sport more??

Czech RepublicCZE

KoreaPRK

Azerbaijan NetherlandsNED - SlovakiaSVK -

SpainESP -Finland RomaniaROU -

India Thailand France Hungary Zimbabwe Austria

Cuba Kazakhstan Colombia Norway Slovenia Sweden Turkey Vietnam Brazil Armenia Indonesia Chinese Taipei Algeria Argentina Belarus Croatia Georgia Kyrgyzstan Mexico Switzerland Tajikistan Togo Ukraine Uzbekistan

BULL ! let's cut the c**p.

I'd be really be surprised if they came back home with medals.

Answer 14

we will once the rowing kicks into high gear and we're over all these heats.  Our rowers are some of the best in the world. GO BUFFY WILLIAMS!! WOO! lol

Also if they weren't stupid and had sent the original badminton team and not that stupid mixed doubles team we'df have a medal there too. But no they tell the original team they can't go 2 weeks before the games.  Poor girls' parents' had tickets and flights and everything already to go watch them. and now look...our mixed doubles screwed us!