'E' FOR EFFORT: DRUG TRAFFICKER COACHING YOUTH SWIMMERS

Here's some ammo for the people who love to complain about how Canada is turning into a nation of namby-pambies with no idea of what's right and wrong.

There's a convicted drug trafficker coaching competitive children's swimming in the Toronto area, and there seems to be little legal recourse that anyone on a governmental level can do to keep Cecil Russell away from the pool. Naturally, Ontario's Opposition leader, John Tory of the Progressive Conservatives, is acting all self-righteous about it, as you would expect from a Conservative politician named Tory.

The Toronto Star is all over this today with the reaction to what was "revealed" in its front page story yesterday. Ahem. Here's a Christie Blatchford column about the Russell case that appeared in the Globe and Mail seven months ago. Where was John Tory's outrage then?

Never mind that funding opportunities in sport, along with the health and wellness of children, always fall very low on the priority list for our right-wing politicians, Liberal and Conservative alike. It's always way down the to-do list, below creating tax breaks that aren't really tax breaks and finding ways to make my generation foot the bill for Boomers who didn't take of themselves in their younger days to get their overwhelmed hip and knee joints replaced. But that's another column.

Russell, who's been implicated in steroid and ecstasy ring plots, is what us pretentious fops describe as a "grotesque" -- the loathsome figure who points out society's hypocrisies, both that of parents, politicians and the general public. Make no mistake, this man shouldn't be allowed to coach.

However, this is what you get when you have Canada's system, so-called, of amateur athletics. Former Olympian Bruce Kidd, who is the dean of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Physical Education, described it to the Star as "highly uncoordinated, decentralized, unregulated, and ... relatively unsupported."

Parents are hypocritical -- there's risk in writing this as a single, childless person -- for treating coaches as glorified baby-sitters. There's too many good people who get out of coaching since they can't deal with the headaches and lack of support anymore.

Politicians are hypocritical since they love to use Olympic athletes for photo-ops and pithy speeches, but when push comes to shove, treat sports and physical activity as if both were foreign to our culture. Even when they do, they get it wrong: as the Star's Dave Perkins points out, the federal government just handed over $27 million to help pay for "Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment's 'cash-grab soccer stadium' " (his words, not mine) in the wake of a Turin Olympics when, thanks largely to a lack of local support, not a single one of Canada's individual-sport medal winners hailed from the country's largest city.

The general public is hypocritical, since we don't demand more out of our politicians, demand that they wake up realize, as every other Western democracy does (with the exception of the U.S, where the capitalist motif takes over), that funding a well-organized system amateur sport is absolutely necessary for a healthy society and greater glory on the world stage.

No, we would much rather, in our self-loathing Canadian way, ignore amateur sports for three years and 348 days out of every four years, then complain about our best and brightest "choking" at the Olympics or shouting "We won the gold!" when really, we did very little other than sit in a BarcaLounger in front of a big screen with the channel-clicker in one hand and the other second-knuckle-deep in Timbits. This attitude is starting to get better, but it is what it is.

Put all of that together, and it all adds up to why you get someone such as Cecil Russell teaching kids how to shave precious seconds off their butterfly and backstroke -- and hopefully that's all he's teaching him. Qualified coaches who are also law-abiding are in short supply, and it's too much work for too little reward since we don't value what swimming or track and field coaches do to help raise our children.

Yes, it sucks. Yes, it's wrong. But can the faux outrage and the, "Please, won't someone think of the children?"

There's flies on all of us, people.

Now, far be it for anyone to suggest that the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports, which reinstated Russell last fall, would have been wiser to turn down his appeal for reinstatement and in effect say, "Take us to court." Drag out the process and and let the bastard's lawyers bleed him dry. That would have been nice.

Related:
Swimming coach helped burn body (Globe and Mail, Dec. 10, 2005)
Coach scandal spurs call for review (Toronto Star, July 9)

Parenthetical digs that interrupted the flow of the narrative:

• As a phys-ed dean at the U of T, whose football team has a 33-game losing streak dating back to 2001, Bruce Kidd knows from "uncoordinated" and "relatively unsupported."
• In re: Canada's ignorance of amateur sports: How many people are even aware Canada's women's softball team has a chance to win a medal today at the prestigious Canada Cup tournament in Surrey, B.C.? Quick. Name one player on the team's besides Lauren Bay, whom you likely know of since her brother's a major-league star.
• Perkins pointed out that none of Canada individual-sport winners in Turin came from the GTA, writing "Barrie's Jeffrey Buttle was the closest." Buttle trains in Barrie, but his actual hometown is Smooth Rock Falls, Ont. -- located northwest of Timmins, which in itself is about 30 minutes north of the end of civilization.
• Sorry, the way that small-town success stories are always claimed by a bigger city just rubs this country hick the wrong way. My own newspaper referred to Hollywood it-girl Rachel McAdams being from London, Ont.; she was born in the hospital there but is from nearby St. Thomas. People write Sidney Crosby is from Dartmouth or Halifax when he's actually from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. What's next? Avril Lavigne being from Kingston?
• If you want an anecdote about the steps athletes have to take to make the Olympics, consider the ice dance pair of Michael Coreno and Allie Hann-McCurdy, who you will know by the time Vancouver 2010 rolls around. They're both from Ontario. And where are they training? Burnaby, British Columbia.

That's all for now.