In today’s Globe, media typist William Houston scribbled the following: “New federal broadcasting regulations announced last week should help the Canadian Olympic Committee in its bid to launch an amateur sports channel.”
Great. The inaccurate beauty of that statement is in its oxymoronic brilliance. Putting “Canadian Olympic Association,” and “amateur” in the same sentence is a pure, unadulterated oxymoron.
Say what you will, there is nothing “amateur” about the Olympics. If one isn’t a full-time professional athlete, one isn’t competing at the Olympic level. Some of these professional athletes have more money than others, but Canada’s Olympic athletes are, for the most part, full-time, professional athletes.
For instance, it’s easy for speedskater Cindy Klassen to call herself an amateur. It’s just that the $250,000 a year she receives from MTS in order to continue training at the highest level, is little more than corporate communism. She’s paid to train and compete by a corporate giant instead of the federal government. That’s not a bad thing. It just isn’t “amateur.”
OK, so maybe trampoline competitors are amateurs. Trouble is trampoline isn’t a sport. It’s what you do at the lake after six beers and a bar-b-que.
What the COC wants is a TV channel dedicated to “obscure sports” not amateur sports (Obscure sports that very few people want to watch). The Globe can call it an “amateur sport” channel and so can the CRTC, but an amateur sport channel has nothing to do with the Olympics.
Do we need a CIS channel? Sure. Do we need another combatives channel? I don’t know. The Fight Network has a lot of trouble filling 168 broadcasting hours each week.
However, if an “amateur sport channel” really means it’s going to provide Canadians with live coverage of high school, college and club sports, then great. Just call it that. But don’t call it an amateur sport channel and hook it up with the Olympics. There are so few true amateur athletes who compete at the Olympic level that the COC would have a lot of trouble justifying a TV network dedicated to it.