Canadian Running on the Decline

The irony is, the global running boom is in effect in Canada at this time. Big increase of numbers post-Covid.

I mentioned the 2:09:56 marathon a number of times since last Sunday to people who run and non-runners alike. Blank stares. They don't know that 2:09:56 is ridiculously fast....for a woman and still fast for a man.

Many people didn't know Russia was banned for systematic doping (although they think they heard something-something, some vague recollection) or that Cam Levins' time of 2:05:36 in Tokyo is ridiculously good.

Athletics is not on the radar at all. Not that these people hate athletics, it is simply not there. They watch it during the Olympics and can't believe what they see, but never heard of the Diamond League and never watch World Athletics Championships or World Cross Country Championships. They don't know the personalities or relate to what they do.

Most people have no idea that there are hundreds of Kenyans that have been suspended. They still think Kenyans as mysterious god-like bi-peds.

The sport continues to be uninviting. Doping, not much money (for most), not quite sexy, with minor exceptions, and we don't tell the stories of the personalities.

The Netflix series Sprint actually did a good job of sharing the drama and stories, creating protagonists, antagonist, damsel is distress, symbolism..... We need more of that. Also, need to create more positive tribalism. Sounds oxymoronic, but the reason there are 100,000 people in a football stadium in the US is to do with tribalism. Same with Aston Villa versus Liverpool.

Another issue is that most of the champions come from East Africa. In football (soccer) great players come from everywhere.

I don't think Athletics is far from being able to grow the sport. But the doping thing is for sure a roadblock.

I wouldn't say Canadian distance running is doing awful, but I think there should be a lot of warning sirens going off for fans and stakeholders here.

Looking back to Tokyo our cupboards looked stocked everywhere really but the men's 1500m. Justyn Knight broke out as a 3:33/12:52 guy with Ahmed a silver medalist. We had three sub 15 5k women (Staehli, Hawthorn, Seccafien) with the oldest being just 30, and not including DeBues-Stafford who was going so well we would be disappointed when she ran 4:01, and her sister had just had a huge breakout to 4:02 missing the Olympic final by a couple of tenths of a second. Plus Elmore and Wodak made us proud with that 9th + 13th finish in the marathon. The men's marathon was possibly one of our weakest areas.

Fast forward and actually our men's marathon isn't looking too bad - Levins (35), Preisner (28), and Linkletter (28) have all gone sub 2:09 in the last 16 months and there are some other guys like Broatch and Alexander in the mid 20s making some baby steps in the event.

Our marathon cupboard on the women's side is utterly bare. Our top three women are still Elmore (44), Wodak (43), and Sexton (37) and they're all understandably not trending positively. The up and comers like Mawhinney and Comeau are okay age wise (28) but have very week top speed so likely are already pushing close to their overall marathon ceilings.

Hawthorn retired in her prime. Seccafien retired. McBride has vanished off the face of the earth. In the women's 800 in 2021 we had Kelly, Bishop, Butterworth all sub 2 plus Labach, Bouchard, Townsend all 2:01 or better. I heard Maddy Kelly is retiring, Melissa Bishop is presumably done, Butterworth TBD post baby, Bouchard retired, Labach and Townsend slowing to 2:03-2:05 women. Jazz Shukla is a bright spot if erratic, though still very green at the top level so understandable.

DeBues-Stafford and Knight have both been effectively broken the entire Olympic cycle, while Lucia Stafford has stagnated at 4:02 while the rest of the 1500m has moved on. Plourde and Current would have been fine in the old era of the 1500m where 4:05 could get you into a semi-final but both would need to take considerable steps forward.

All in all there has been a lot of top talent retiring or injured with the pipelines not yet showing replacements.

I think Hawthorn possibly illustrates it best - an Olympian in their mid 20s having just set big PBs in the 1500m and 5000m retiring in their prime and you can't blame her. Shoe companies pay Canadians a fraction of what they'll pay an equally talented American, and Sports Canada carding stipends have barely improved over the last 20 years.

The Toronto/Victoria hubs are good ideas in theory but look at the average rent in each city and you see a 1br apartment in each city costs more than you get in carding in a year. Canadians are in a situation where if they aren't ready to get a contract fresh out of college they can't afford to stay in the sport and keep improving. In other words if you aren't talented enough to be a finished product at 22 then you're "cooked."

I don't really have a solution since a lot of this seems caught up in general lack of money in our sport combined with the insane cost of living crisis the country is going through. My only suggestion would be AC work with Canadian coaches to try set up training groups sponsored by non-shoe companies. If Frisbee Golf can get corporate sponsorship than freaking track and field should be able to.

Some good results there still of course like Arop, and the Laval group of CPT, JSD, Fafard seem to be going okay, Ahmed is still world class, but we are pinning our hopes on a decreasing number of athletes. Just saw on Instagram pictures of the Stafford sisters working out with Keely Hodgkinson's training group in the UK. Haven't seen any announcements or anything but it is an official Nike group now so maybe a new setup for them both? I hope so - some faster training partners could be what Lucia needs to break her plateau and the Victoria experiment has been an unmitigated disaster for Gabriela so perhaps a return to a low volume British group could be a return to her running 3:56.

I believe Cam and Malindi are running Valencia and Rory NYC, so our 3 best marathoners are still yet to run their fall marathons.

This.

Could have had two Olympic bronze medals at the Paris Olympics.

Could have a future Prime Minister in Grant Fisher.

Time to entice him home.

The issue with this in its current form (and it's a problem with lots of initiatives that try and grow across Canada) is that 4/6 of this year's events were in Ontario (Calgary and Montréal were the others).

Yup - you either move somewhere that has training facilities that you can access through the winter or you go to Vancouver/Victoria where it's mild enough to get away with training outside. In any scenario you're probably training around your 9-5.

Running in Canada is largely seen as a recreational sport rather than an elite endeavor. Their marathons and other road races are actually doing record numbers. Running races as an activity is doing fine in Canada.

Everyone involved couldn't care less if their runners couldn't finish better than maybe sniffing a podium at the Commonwealth or Pan American Games on a good day. As others have pointed out, most avid Canadian runners couldn't tell you the first thing about elite track or distance running, and don't care to learn.

Go figure their best elite T&F athlete is a jack of all trades, decathlete Damian Warner.

And maybe that's fine. There's no do or die mandate that your country has to care much about elite athletics beyond fielding a team when requested.

I think this sums the picture up pretty well. Canada seems to be stuck in 2016 performance wise. Tokyo was an absolute high point for women, but in the last 2 years (outdoors):

1 woman sub 2:00 for the 800

0 women sub 4:00 for 1500

1 woman sub 2:25 for the marathon

Other distances are even worse.

0 women sub 15:10 for 5k
0 women sub 32:00 for 10k

Leafs Nation baby...deal with it

Cam is dealing with Haglunds-like issues

Moosehead 67:

"...with the pipelines not yet showing replacements."

Fantastic post all around, it's just that one line that I can't help but pick out.

For a country criss-crossed with some of the largest and most productive fossil fuel pipelines in the world, the irony is that in the athletics sense of the word, we don't have one.

Would it be fair to say that we have three provinces with sufficient high school track/xc competitions to blindly allow less than a handful of athletes to fall into the lap of canadian university recruitment through little to no effort or correlation to the official athletics infrastructure outside of those high school sports associations? Then add to that in opposition to the "but the USA also...." that Canada does not have paid, full time, qualified or specialized high school sport coaches by and large.

The point me as Debbie Downer over here is trying to make is that we magically end up with talent via last minute desperation use of a 40 million person population shotgun blast.

Ben Flanagan, Justyn Knight, Andre Degrasse, etc. are your quintessential products of the wet cardboard straw that is the canadian pipeline. Zero effort or cause/effect or support from the athletics system, wild ability surfaces at provincial school competition, snatched by US college system, Canada throws junior team spots at this short list of athletes and then crosses its fingers that we end up with a senior championship standard bearer out of whoever survives adolescence in the sport.

And while everyone is correctly pointing out that hobbyjogging is at an all time popularity high in Canada, that is masking that interest in competitive athletics is at an all time low. It is amazing that we are still propping it up with literally just the love and passion of fewer and fewer unpaid volunteer fans.

You should explain what "carding" means because most people outside of Canada and even in Canada have no idea about the meaning of "carding."

It's some kind of financial sponsorship of elite athletes.

Canada sounds like the rest of the western world just substitute football, baseball, soccer etc for hockey.

The $4500/year(?) athletic scholarship cap isn't much incentive to keep top high school talent from going to the NCAA if they're being offered a full-ride. Even from a development perspective, it probably makes more sense to go to the States than winning USports races from your first year onwards.

Yes, fully agree, and the diamonds in the rough do that. But the broader more depressing point is that we do not produce NCAA scholarship calibur athletes at a rate proportional to the size of our population, meaning the majority our mediocre talent just ends up in USports. Which ties into the point that the majority of our athletes participating in athletics are never on a path capable of achieving a championship standard. Some finally access high performance coaching in USport, improve and try to bridge to NCAA (Lumb comes to mind).

This board is full of folks sick of the NCAA being the olympic training ground for other countries around the world, but Canada can barely eek athletes in given the high standard.

Unless it's changed, the carding program provides $1765 a month ($21180 a year) in living support for a senior card. There may be additional top ups available - but that is still unlikely to cover rent in most major cities.

Average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria and Guelph are all in excess of $2000/month.

As others have noted - shoe brand sponsorships in Canada are significantly less than what you'd get in the US because it's a small market. So unless the athletes have another significant source of income (from multiple sponsors/another job), or have parents/a partner covering their expenses it's just not a viable career move.

List of funded Canadian athletes is now posted:

https://athletics.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024-CAPP-Year-End-Selection-OG-Oct-21.pdf