Will You Watch? What Happens When You Take the 5-Rings Away?

Canada's women's Track Cycling Pursuit Team  - they are perennial podium placers at the Olympic Games & World Championships

Did you watch the Winter Olympic Games from Pyeongchang, Korea over the last few weeks? You were not alone. Thanks to CBC Sports and their great coverage, millions of Canadians tuned in to watch, our best Winter Sports Athletes compete against the best in the world. Based on these exceptional viewer numbers from the Olympic Games, we seem to want to watch our best Canadian Athletes compete at this level.

However, did you know that, right now, and through this weekend, two other World Championships events - the IAAF World Indoor Track & Field Championships and the UCI Track Cycling World Championships are on - and Canada has medal contenders in both events. Will you be watching either one, or both?

Again - CBC will thankfully have Live Streaming Coverage for the Indoor Track & Field Championships and the UCI has their own YouTube Channel for the Live Stream of the Track Cycling World Championships  (links below for both)** . However the viewer numbers in Canada, with some of Canada's best Track & Field, and Cyclists taking part, will pale in comparison to the numbers who watched the Winter Olympic Games just over a week ago!

And so we enter into that fallow, period between Olympic Games (now two years between the alternating quadrennial Summer & Winter Olympic Games), when most Canadians tune-out watching most of the Olympic Sports. Years ago, the excuse was they are not available to view - and that was true. However in the current internet age and the advent of streaming coverage, almost anything you want to watch sports-wise, regardless of how rare and obscure it is, is available via some form of streaming service to any kind of device - even your mobile phone in the palm of your hand, anywhere, where you are!

My client Athletics Canada in fact has a partnership with RunnerSpace - the top level providor of Streaming coverage of Track & Field and Running in North America, to stream, with top-level commentary talent, and production, many of their marquee, event properties and other races of significance each year.

So the excuse, that "you can't see/find" these sports and the coverage of them, does not add up anymore. So why is it that Canadians who are so keen to watch our best compete against the best in the world, in the Winter & Summer, Olympic Games, when those same athletes are competing in, just as prestigious and competitive races/events, such as a respective sports World Championships, most Canadians are oblivious? Is the attraction of the 5-Rings, that powerful?

Later on this year, in August, Canada and Toronto, will host the NACAC Track & Field Championships (NACAC = North American, Central American & Caribbean region) at Varsity Stadium, right in downtown Toronto. There is no IAAF World Championships (outdoor) this year - but there will be IAAF Regional Championships, like the NACAC Meet here in Toronto. It's worth noting, that in some races/events, the (100m - 400m) sprint events in particular, You could potentially have a Olympic Final, or World Championship Final, made up of  athletes just from the NACAC region - so their will be truly World Class competition at the NACAC Championships in August.

Flipping over to cycling, Canada will again host, a leg of the UCI Tissot World Cup Track Cycling tour later on this year at the Mattamy National Cycling Center in Milton, ON - home for Track Cycling at the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto. The dates for this are Oct 26-28. This will be year-two for this exciting event, after a VERY successful first effort by Cycling Canada, back in December of, last year, that saw nearly sold-out crowds cheer on the best track cyclists in the world - some of whom are Canadian!

Will you watch sports like Track & Field and Cycling, in these in-between years - between Olympic Games, either via Live Streaming online, or live and in-person, at the two events mentioned above? If your answer is, "no" - I'm very curious as to why, you will not be watching?

What happens when we take the 5-rings away?

** Link for Live Stream of the IAAF World Indoor Track & Field Championships - http://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/trackandfield/iaaf-world-indoor-championships-1.4555165 Link for the Live Stream for the UCI Track Cycling World Championships - https://www.youtube.com/user/ucichannel

Can Sport Still Awe & Amaze Us?

Long Jumper Bob Beamon at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games

One of my first distinct memories of the Olympic Games was watching the Long Jump competition at the 1968 Mexico Summer Olympic Games as a 7-year old live on TV - back when NBC actually showed stuff live! That was where American Bob Beamon broke the then world record of by an almost preposterous amount of nearly 2 ft( about 50cm), to push the new record to 29ft. 2 1/2 in.(8.90m)! That record stood for 22 years, until another American, Mike Powell broke it in 1991.

A short video of Beamon's jump can be seen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEt_Xgg8dzc

I looked on, watching on TV, in true awe and amazement. Even Beamon was completely overcome with emotion, not by the win, by by the magnitude of what he had done - ounce it sunk in. He fell to the ground and was unable to get up or walk for a good long time after the distance was announced. He had jumped so far, it was almost beyond the measuring system they had in place! It was beyond what many thought a human could jump! But it was all real!

Later that day I was out in our back-yard with my Dad. He got out a tape measure and we measured off 29 feet. I stood at one end and my Dad stood at the other and I had my second moment of awe and amazement looking at my now distant Father and wondering, "How could someone jump THAT far"?

Do we still feel that sense of awe and amazement today, when new records or sport performance reach new heights that seem, exceptional? I wonder.

The first final of the Rio Olympic Games in Athletics was the women's 10,000m race. In that race, running only her 2nd 10,000m on the track Ethiopian Almaz Ayana crushed the standing 10,000m record for women, running an astonishing time of 29:17.45 - completely solo! She left a field of world class runners WELL behind breaking the previous record by 14 seconds! It was one of those extraordinary Beamon-like performances, that has announcers running out of superlatives.

However, no sooner than the diminutive Ayana was across the line and social media started to light up with talk of how, the record could NOT be "clean"! After all, the the record being broken, set by the Chinese runner,  Wang Junxia     was, almost for certain set by a runner using some form of Performance Enhancing Drug (PED). A number of the Chinese women who were part of that training group, called "Ma's Army", after their coach, Ma Junren, have admitted they were all using PEDs of one form or another at the time!

Consequently with controversy and questions swirling around it's hard to be in awe and to be amazed any more.

The true believers, the really naive, and many sport officials, will say - "Look, there are no positive tests". We have to conclude they are clean". But we know now, that athletes can be tested over the course of their careers hundreds of times, and never turn in a positive test. Exhibit-A in this regard would be Lance Armstrong - tested hundreds of times, never positive (one suspicious), and 7-Tour de France wins! Of course, as we know Armstrong admitted after-the-fact that he was using various PEDs all along and stripped of all of those Tour de France wins.

Who can we believe? What are we to make of exceptional and extraordinary sports performances now? Are we to be immediately skeptical, or can we to look on in a state of awe and amazement?

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Walloped by Winter! What Are You Doing?

I saw a map this week online. It showed that  2/3 of Canada & the U.S., ie most of the North American continent, was covered in snow. I know that for almost all of Canada (save for the lower-mainland of B.C. and Vancouver Island) - that's normal. The snow-cover and deep cold has also extended much farther south in the U.S. than "normal" this winter.

We've been walloped by winter, actually. In my area, just north of  Toronto, ON, after a number of rather benign winters, it's been full-on this year with, from what I can tell,  record snow-falls and, the coldest average temperatures in over 10 years. For endurance sports athletes who for the most part train outside - runners, triathletes, and cyclists, it's been challenging to keep the training going. How have you been coping?

I've always had two views on this - you either take it inside, and shun winter as much as you can, or you embrace it, and make the most of it.

For the Shunners, the solutions, are obvious: For the triathlete - swim/cycle/run, can all be done indoors. If you are into this, and have access to the right facilities and equipment, in a perfect world, there can be minimal interruption in your training. True - the cycling and the running, on indoor trainers and treadmills can get a little tedious, but videos can be a great distraction and some of the interactive, computer driven indoor bike training set-ups are truly extraordinary! If you are just a runner or a cyclist, just plug into the above.

For the Embracers - the great outdoors can really open things up. Full disclosure - when I was training seriously for triathlon this was my approach. I was never a fan of the treadmill or the indoor bike trainer. What did I do?

First - I never stopped running outdoors. In fact, winter is when I would lay down the most overall volume of miles running. With the right apparel and attitude, you can run in just about any kind of weather, anywhere. Sure the footing, was lousy, the deep snow sometimes slowed you down, and the wind would force your pace to a crawl. Note the word "volume" back there - that was the focus . . not speed, pace or time. Just get the miles/K's in!

Second - I cross-country skied . . . a lot. Both classic and skating. Nordic skiing is the king of aerobic sports - it works more muscles in the body than any other single activity - upper body, lower body, core etc . . It all get's worked. When I had a great winter of skiing - where I put in the biggest volume of skiing and took my skiing to the highest level of performance, I noticed two things: 1) My cycling and triathlon performance the following summer was always better. 2) Despite very little cycling through Dec/Jan/Feb, come March, after just a few weeks of riding, I could ride 100K at a decent pace with very little ramp up!

Third - I did not eschew the indoor training completely. I would get in the pool maybe ounce a week, just to keep in contact with the feel of the water. I would also get on the indoor bike trainer, and would do one or two very high intensity sessions a week, lasting no more than 60 minutes. As to the latter, they say that even for the cyclist, who just rides, the time on the trainer in the winter, is better spent with a focus on higher intensity, power based riding, than slogging out long sweaty sessions on the trainer. These days, I only ride, and that's my focus: 3 - 4 very specific high quality session on the bike, and never more than an hour. Plus some cross country skiing mixed in.

As a Canadian, I've always had to put up and deal with a winter of some kind. It's part of being a Canadian, in my view - that's why I have always embraced winter. The Winter Olympics are about to begin, and I've found a great deal of truth, honesty and inspiration in the Canadian Olympic Committee official hashtag for the Canadian Olympic Team - #WeAreWinter.  For Canada and Canadians it's perfect!

Do you shun or do you embrace winter? What's your strategy to coping with this real winter we are having this year?

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PowerBar - An Early History

"Steve, I can't afford to buy an ad right now, but I can send you as many boxes of PowerBars, as you like"!

And so began my relationship with PowerBar, and PowerBar founder Brian Maxwell. I was trying to sell Maxwell an ad in the magazine that I was working for at the time. We agreed on a volume of PowerBars that would be the "payment" for the ad, and Maxwell was good on his word, the shipment of PowerBars did show up, and I used them regularly for my training and racing for triathlons in the late 1980's.

It's hard to imagine these days, but PowerBar had humble beginnings. The products introduction also started up a whole new category of sports nutrition. Prior to PowerBar, "sports nutrition" for endurance athletes was water, Gatorade and bananas! Maxwell, a world class marathon runner, had struggled to finish a few marathons, due to what we now term, "bonking", or what in physiological terms is called hypoglycemia - what happens when you start to deplete, your bodies carbohydrate stores, that start to dwindle significantly beyond the 90 min to 2 hour mark, when working at a moderately high intensity. You can keep going, but you need to take in more carbohydrate to replenish those stores.

Maxwell had qualified for the ill-fated 1980 Canadian Olympic team. It was the pinnacle of his career as a distance runner. Unfortunately, he never made it to the Moscow Olympic Games due to the boycott. He took a job as the Track Coach at his Alma Mater, University of California, Berkley. Maxwell and his wife Jennifer Biddulph, a nutritionist started to think about and try and come up with solution to this issue of, what then was commonly referred to as, "hitting the wall" in a marathon or other long distance endurance sport, when the body starts to run low on carbohydrates and the blood sugar starts to drop. They started making and baking energy bars in their kitchen of their home in Berkley, CA. It took a while to come up with a formula and a composition that would be functional. Eventually they did. By 1986, and with $55,000 cash, they started PowerBar!

It was a tough go, as many business start-ups are, particularly because, as noted, it really was a whole new category. There were many skeptics. A key strategy, was to get as many athletes, to try the PowerBars  - thus, the using of the PowerBars themselves as currency to "pay" for advertising, marketing and sponsorship opportunities. They gave away, a lot of PowerBars in the early years, and really launched as well, the whole business of experiential marketing  - try-this-ounce-and-you-will-then-be-a-customer! PowerBar and Maxwell also pioneered the concept of, "photo contingency sponsorship" - they would sponsor athletes, and then pay that athlete, either in cash or early on, in more PowerBars(!), only when they would get photo logo exposure in magazines and other media!

 FYI - The PowerBar logo colors, that are used to this day, are the team colors for the UC Berkley Sports teams!

Early competitor, Gary Erikson, who founded Clif Bar in 1990, pays tribute to the hard-work and legacy that Brian Maxwell laid down in Erikson's excellent book "Raising The Bar".

The first real boom in the sport of triathlon occurred in the late 80's and it coincided with the early years of PowerBar. Long distance races, such as the Ironman triathlon, that for the top competitors take 8 hours to complete, require that competitors take in significant amounts of carbohydrates for them to keep going for that long. Many triathletes were early adopters and fans of the PowerBar product - that gave them 220 calories of carbohydrates in a neatly wrapped, easily transported and easily digested package.

Other endurance sports, such as cycling, soon caught on as well and the growth in the early 90's for PowerBar was impressive! In addition to Clif, a number other companies jumped into the sports nutrition business and by the end of the decade it had become a world-wide, $billion business!

In 2000 Brian Maxwell and his wife, sold PowerBar to world-wide food giant Nestle, for a reported, $375 million. Sadly and tragically, by then a father of six, Maxwell died of a massive heart-attack, in 2004 while out for a short run!

After my phone-call and ad deal with Brian Maxwell, I met him the following year at the annual Interbike trade-show. We talked about sports. We talked about our shared Canadian roots, and we talked about sports nutrition. Of course, ever the promoter and salesman, he would not let me out of the PowerBar booth without, putting another box of PowerBars in my hands!

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What a Week? And a Tale of Temptation!

The shocking revelations in the sport of cycling just keep coming. What a week it's been? Of course if we had really been paying attention, we would have known or suspected much of this, so really it should not have come as much of a surprise.

Everyone has their limits. Real competitive sport at the elite high performance level is ruthless - endurance sports like cycling, particularly so. You either keep up . . . or you don't! When you reach that personal limit, when you know you have trained as absolutly as hard as you can and you still can't keep up, or perhaps the podium, is only a few minutes, seconds or steps away . . . . then what?

Maybe I was lucky. I always trained with guys who were a lot better then me - first in running and then in triathlon. Early on in the game, I knew that despite all the training, despite all the hard work, even though we did all the same work outs, there was no way I was going to beat the better guys that I trained with. Call it defeatist if you like. To me it just seemed to be reality.

In the early '90's, I was deep into triathlon. I had come close to breaking 9 hours for the Ironman a couple of times. I was training what seemed to be a crazy amount - kept wondering, if this was my limit. Had a reached the point of taking this as far as I could go? Nine hours at the time was an OK time, but to really break-though, you needed to go sub-9 to be taken seriously. Some potential sponsors had even said, "Call me when you break 9"!

Around that time, I was working out at a local gym and fell into conversation with a coach (note he was not a triathlon coach, but a strength coach who worked out of that gym) who I knew, and helped athletes with strength training. He said to me in a quiet moment of conversation one day, straight-up, that I would be the perfect candidate for a low dosage steroid program. Super-lean (read - skinny-bean-pole) endurance athletes like me, did well on these programs. It allowed us to recover quicker from really hard workouts and made us overall more durable. Meaning, able to train more at a higher level, and then go faster. There was no testing at all in triathlon, the coach said. It was the ideal situation, he concluded!

It could have been that easy for me. In Canada at the time, we were still reeling with the hangover from the Ben Johnson Seoul Olympic Games debacle. Taking steroids, was a no-no. I soon moved, never went back to that gym and never saw that coach again. I did not succumb. I continued to believe that, I could be my best, and get that sub-9 Ironman time, on hard-work and hope.

I tried a few more times, but the sub-9 Ironman remained elusive and by the mid-90's, I had moved onto others things and after my son was born in 1997, gave up on the sport at a competitive level completely.

Given all the news and the revelations this week, I keep thinking back to those days in the early 90's, and that conversation at the gym. How beat-up, battered and fatigued I was after heavy training, and how one conversation and the outcome could have changed everything.

Not making excuses for professional cyclists, but the pressures right through the peleton that they face, would I assume be significantly greater than what me, the sub-pro triathlete was facing in the early 90's. However, everyone will reach their limit, and when they reach that point, knowing realistically, that just more years of hard work is not going to do it, that's perhaps when you reach that junction in the road - one road, is more hard work, but you know not much is going to change. The other road, is to seek some form of outside illegal assistance.

The question is, what road do you take? If you are an endurance athlete, at the level I was at (or there abouts), where you ever tempted along the way?

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Simon Says: The Medals, London and The Legacy

Simon Whitfield at the Toronto Triathlon Festival. Photo by Bob Hatcher - MySportShooter.com

I was living in Vancouver, BC back in 2000. A small group of the Vancouver triathlon community gathered to watch the inaugural Olympic Games Triathlon in Sydney at a well known downtown pub.

Going into the Games, Vancouver's Carol Montgomery had been on fire on the World Cup circuit. Indeed, prior to even getting to the games Carol had accomplished an unprecedented feat in modern Olympic sport, which I don't think has been duplicated - she had qualified in one Games for two different sports. Triathlon obviously, but she had also qualified in Athletics in the 10,000m on the track for Canada as well, and was set to race in the 10,000m final for women on the track later in the games after the triathlon.

We settled into watch history in the making and fingers crossed - witness a win or at the very least, a medal for Carol and Canada. Alas, it was not to be as Carol crashed on the bike, broke her wrist, and was unable to go on. It also took her out of the 10,000m race on the track. We all left the pub a bit disappointed that night.

The next day was the men's triathlon.  For this race I found myself watching on TV with my three year old son, Matthew in the basement of our house, alone other than the two of us. We all know the outcome to this - Simon Whitfield raced to a gold medal, and into, not just triathlon history but into the history of sports in Canada in a big way!

When I realized that Simon had won, the tears started to pour out of me in a completely uncontrolled manner. My son, sitting on my lap, asked, "Dad, why are you crying"? I said, "Simon just won the Olympic games triathlon and the Gold Medal", as I sat there on the couch over-come with emotion. I am not sure if Matthew understood the massive significance of this.

In Canada, this was not just sports news, it was front-page-of-paper, lead-story-on-the-TV-news, news! In fact, a few days later, I was asked on as a guest on the CBC TV Morning News show, to comment on the significance of Simon's Gold Medal win and what it would mean for Canada and for the sport of triathlon.

In a way, we (the sport of triathlon in Canada) were not really ready for it - suddenly all eyes were on Simon and the sport of triathlon. This level of attention and exposure for the sport was completely unknown. But on the whole - looking back, it was the best thing that could have ever happened.

A lot has happened in the ensuing 12 years. Simon, "The Kid", who won in Sydney is now nearer to 40. He won another medal, Silver, in perhaps in even a more stirring and dramatic fashion, four years ago at the Beijing, Olympic Games. The sport of triathlon in Canada has grown up a lot and matured in Canada and elsewhere. We now have a history, and knowing Simon well, one of the things he is most proud of, is a legacy that is starting to build in Canada, because of his success - people take the sport seriously, and some of the current top talent in the country, in particular Multiple World Cup winner, Paula Findlay and a fellow London Olympic Triathlon team member, are a direct result of that legacy.

The ultimate symbol of this, occurred a few weeks ago when Simon was named the Flag Bearer for the Canadian team at the London Olympic Games opening ceremony. Wins and medals aside, there is really no greater honor than to be recognized by your fellow sportsmen and your country. No doubt a proud moment for Simon, and his family, but also for the whole sport of triathlon as well!

This is important stuff - this winning, these performances, the medals, the exposure, the legacy, the pride. I was a guest speaker at the Timex Triathlon Team launch back in February this year. In my remarks at the team dinner and awards, I said, that I really hoped that the United States, could win a  Gold Medal in triathlon at the Olympic Games - maybe even in London ( with apologies to Simon!). It would not only be a big shot in the arm for triathlon, and International Triathlon Union style racing in the United States, but for the whole sport, and business of triathlon - with much of the latter, on the product side, centered in the United States.

Something has not changed since Sydney - that glint you see in Simon Whitfield's eye. It's that slightly mischievous and comedic, look people have when they have something up their sleeve - that he knows something big and important is about to happen. Yet, he's still joking and jovial as ever! That's Simon. I think it's his secret weapon - as it's the polar opposite to the deer-in-the-head-light look of most other athletes at this level prior to the Big Race. I saw that look on Simon, yesterday at the Toronto Triathlon Festival, standing with him on the dock just before the start of the demonstration event that he was doing with Paula Findlay, Andrew Yorke and Mike Greenberg. That means he's ready!

I say watch out, London and make sure that you tune into the  Men's Olympic Triathlon coverage on August, 7th (6:30am Eastern Day Light Saving Time) to watch the final chapter. I know that I will be!

What are your thoughts on the men's Olympic Games Triathlon and what the results will mean?

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