Now that the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Games have come and gone, Canada ended up ending lower within the medal count than in previous years.
On the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Canada secured 26 medals, and on the PyeongChang Olympics in 2018, the country won 29, marking these Games as essentially the most successful Canadian performance by way of overall medals on the Winter Olympics.
Canada also took home 25 medals on the 2014 Sochi Olympics and 26 medals on the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
With Canada waving goodbye to the 2026 Olympic Games with just 21 medals, many Canadians could also be wondering what was different this 12 months.
Canadian Olympic Committee chief executive David Shoemaker spoke at a press conference on Sunday, emphasizing the necessity for increased funding.
“Core funding for national sports organizations has not increased in 20 years,” Shoemaker said. “It must.”
“It’s the cash these organizations count on to fund operations, athletes, coaches and support staff. They safeguard the pathway from playground to podium.”
Ann Rucklinger, CEO of Own the Podium, a non-profit organization that “assists national sports bodies in Canada with their investment and training strategies,” said to Global News last week that Canada normally starts off the Winter Olympics slowly.
“We didn’t set an actual specific medal goal. We’re all the time attempting to improve on our previous performance, but we knew that our athlete pool was pretty shallow in comparison with previous games coming into Milan-Cortina, in order that was definitely a priority for us,” she said
Nevertheless, Rucklinger cites the actual “challenge” for the decrease in medals this Olympics to be federal funding.
The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees have pressed the federal government on behalf of national sport organizations (NSOs) for a rise in core funding, with the most recent ask a $144-million raise in 2025. Nevertheless, the federal budget had not allocated latest money for sport.
Core funding is money all NSOs count on to fund operations, athletes, coaches and support staff, and so they say it hasn’t increased since 2005. The 4 revenue pillars for NSOs are registration fees, corporate sponsorship, hosting events and government funding.
Two Canadian federal budgets have passed without a rise, although athletes did see a $410 raise of their monthly athlete assistance cheques within the 2024 budget.
Waiting for the 2030 French Alps Olympics, Rucklinger believes that NSOs will feel the strain.
“When it comes time to 2030, they’re [national sport organizations] really challenged to have the ability to speculate sufficient financial resources in coaching, each day training, environments, each day competition, opportunities for athletes as they gear up for 2030.”
In terms of the correlation between funding and athletic results, Rucklinger said it’s “very direct.”
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“For the national sport organizations, they’ve not had a rise of their core support funding for 15 to twenty years,” she said.
“So just layer that up against inflation and in order that they are having to do more with the identical sum of money — and actually it’s less money because the price of doing business within the high-performance program is higher.“
Added with other competing nations investing greater than Canada, Rucklinger called this “an enormous financial gap.”
“What meaning for a national sport organization is that they haven’t been in a position to give attention to the event a part of their high-performance programs.”
Bruce Kidd, a professor emeritus in sport and public policy on the University of Toronto, says that there are numerous expenses at large that athletes must take into consideration, amongst them “living expenses, child care, tuition money for those in university.”
“You should feel confident that you’re going to have the ability to place bread on the table and a roof over your head,” he said.
Kidd also said that the competition aspect of coaching will also be costly and may include travel expenses, paying to coach in facilities and equipment.
“Within the case of winter sports, it involves the prices of summer training camps,” said Kidd. “Most of those sports are very specialized, so there are only so many places where they’ll train. That’s an enormous area of costs.”
A part of this process is attempting to attract top coaches and support staff to Canada.
“[It’s] tough [trying to] attract the standard of coaches and retain a few of our top coaches because there’s not significant enough resources for us to have the ability to do this. Athletes are having to pay more fees to ensure that them to have the ability to totally commit to the high-performance program of their national sport organizations. So, all those things add up,” Rucklinger said.
Kidd said if he had to choose one area to speculate in for ” high-performance development,” it will be coaching.
“Canada has been lucky as a rustic that pulls immigrants to have the ability to draw coaches from other countries, but it is usually essential for us to develop our own coaches,” said Kidd.
“At a time when sport is underfunded, it’s not a terrific time to encourage young Canadians to develop into high-performance coaches.”
Nevertheless, despite the financial setbacks, the will to come back out victorious in Milan was still palpable.
“It goes back to that core message, that this sense of patriotism, pride in country, the aspiration to do great things on the world stage, to sing ‘O Canada,’” Shoemaker said.
Yet he said these Olympics also posed difficult questions.
“These Games brought us together, as they all the time do. In return, they provided a chance to ask ourselves, ‘How do we would like to indicate up on the world stage? What form of country do we would like to represent? Who do we would like to be?’” Shoemaker asked.
“In some ways, I believe waiting eight days for a gold medal emphasized this point.”