B2ten has potential to make impact in 2010 and beyond

The unique B2ten initiative backed by well-heeled Canadian business executives to help put athletes on the podium (featured in the Star today) is something that the people involved hope to continue past the 2010 Vancouver Games.

“We’re in it to make sure that support continues for amateur sport when the funding gets turned off Feb. 28, 2010,” said Montreal businessman J.D. Miller, one of the founders. “I mean it’s not going to get totally turned off, but it’s going to be at a much lower level than it is now.”

Miller’s right. The funding’s going to take a huge hit from the $120 million invested in five years in winter sport leading to 2010. One of the few hopes of it being sustained at a reasonable level is if corporate Canada sees it as the worthwhile venture -- as the investors in B2ten have -- steps to the plate.

“Imagine if our 100 largest companies in the country gave $100,000 each to amateur sport,” said Miller. “Our system would be flying.”

It’s clear from talking to some of the contributors, principally Claire Angus Caplan of Toronto and Barry Heck of Calgary, that they’ve embraced the ideal beyond the financial investment.

“In professional sport, so much of sport is associated with fame and glory and money,” said Angus Caplan, a mother of four. “It’s amazing for us to be able to introduce to our children the whole idea of amateur sport and the sacrifices that they make.”

There’s also a lot of mentoring of the athletes by the business executives that is expected to last beyond their competitive days.

“I have no doubt when these athletes retire, that some of these B2ten sponsors will step up and really help these people,” said Heck, president of EL Merchant Capital in Calgary. “It is a two-way mentoring. They can mentor us and our kids and our families as to their experiences. We hope to be able to integrate these people into the workforce once their careers are over.”

As today’s article mentions, B2ten helps athletes with goods and services rather than cash. One example not mentioned in the story is that one of the executives lends their Whistler condo to Olympic skeleton silver medalist Jeff Pain so he can stay with his family when he trains or competes there.

Pain, a father of two, said those kinds of things can make a big difference.

 “One of the big things as an amateur athlete in Canada is sometimes I certainly feel like I’m out there on my own, flogging through the wilderness and I get remembered every four years,” said Pain. “Not an uncommon story.

“So having B2ten people or my other sponsors, Totalline Transport, who called me up after the Games and offered their support to me, it says ‘We’ve seen you, we’ve met you, we believe in you and we’re gonna help.’ That’s just a huge help.”

That’s the thing. Even with the increase in support and funding on several fronts for winter sports, many athletes still struggle to make ends meet. That’s why Canadian Olympic star Clara Hughes went public recently with a plea for more corporate support. The issue is also addressed here by Vancouver Province columnist Ed Willes.

So the B2ten investors deserve props for getting involved. Here’s a partial list of the western investors:

· Rodney McCann – President, Aristos Energy (part of the McCann Group); · Larry Moeller – Edco Financial; · Tony Dilawri –Dilawri Group of Companies (Calgary BMW, Bentley, Aston Martin, Calgary Honda and other auto dealerships); · Steve Rice – CEO, Summit Corporation (Eden Textiles and DSL Food Service); · Robert Kulhawy – CEO, Commerx Corporation; · Wade Sparks – President, Riley’s · Patricia and George La Borde;

Vampire Series Sinks Teeth Into Star Women's Skiers

The Twilight phenomenon has sunk its teeth into the Canadian women’s ski team.

It turns out that two of the team’s top skiers, Emily Brydon and Britt Janyk, have become hooked on Stephenie Meyer's bestselling series about a family of modern-day vampires living in Forks, Wash. The series is a phenomenon and a movie based on the first book, Twilight, broke box office records in its first weekend.

Brydon said she got hooked onto the series by her former teammate, Allison Forsyth, who had to retire this year because of knee problems.

“Allie said ‘Emily, you have to read this book,’” said Brydon. “I was like ‘Really? I don’t like vampires. This stuff does not interest me.’ She was like ‘Trust me, read this book.’ She knows I love to read books. She knew that I would appreciate a good book. She forced me to read it. And then after the first one, I said ‘You don’t have to force me anymore. I’m a convert.’”

Added Janyk: “The books are so amazing. Emily and I can’t put them down. I just finished the second book and I didn’t want it to end.”

At 28, neither Brydon nor Janyk fits the typical profile of the devotees of Meyer's books – they are a particular hit among teenagers – but it’s become pretty clear the audience is an ever expanding one. This comes from a household where both my wife and 12-year-old daughter have been greatly enjoying the genre.

“It’s huge,” said Brydon, whose season opens at Lake Louise in less than two weeks. “I love books that transcend age. I’m much older than your daughter and I love it. It’s like the best brain candy. It’s mindless but fulfilling. I alternate. I have serious books and then I have brain candy books. That’d be my brain candy.”

Brydon said she’s already passed one of the books on to teammate Brigitte Acton, and that one of the other skiers has asked for the set for Christmas.

“It’ll make it through our team. We’re like a mini book club.”

Kristina Groves: "Girl Train" & Other Tales From The Road

Kristina Groves is one of the world’s best long track speed skaters. Even if the Ottawa native is too modest to declare that herself, five medals including one gold at last year’s world single distance championships attest to it. She already has two World Cup wins this season.

She’s also a big supporter of Right To Play and a green warrior for Clean Air Champions.

 And it turns out she’s also a skilled writer who sends out regular missives to friends, family and supporters about life on the World Cup circuit. Here, she shares her first two posts of the season with us, the first “Girl Train” filed after the opening World Cup in Berlin and the second “Saving My Socks” dispatched this week after another big win in the Netherlands.

Thanks to Kristina for this …

Girl Train (Nov. 11)

In an effort to stave off the perils of jet lag, the girls and I headed to downtown Berlin on the train for a late afternoon excursion and decaf latte. When our search for the shopping district proved fruitless we landed instead at the local Starbucks (sorry) for a warm drink to heat up our damp and chilled toes. In a way that only girls seem capable of, much gossip and gab ensued and we spent a good hour discussing all people and things speed skating. And in a way that only gossip seems capable of, in some small way, we bonded.

I train in a group of five girls and four boys, and even though we are a tight group we rarely socialize together outside of speed skating, which is one thing I believe has contributed greatly to our individual successes. At the rink, our coach, Xiuli (Wang), keeps us focused on the work we are there to do and we are oft viewed by other groups as overly serious skaters that never have any fun. This is not an entirely unwarranted description as our group is comprised of serious and professional (in spirit at least, if not in salary) athletes, but we do certainly have our fair share of fun. It just seems that suffering like dogs and working harder than you thought possible doesn’t qualify as fun for most people. But no bother, we are branded the black sheep and we don’t care.

As a result of Xiuli’s high expectations, demanding training programs and our combined work ethic and commitment to success, we have found a way to train especially well together, but we all have interests and social networks outside of our sport obsession that keep us independent and mentally healthy. We generally all get along just fine, albeit with the odd bump in the road, but still, I was pleasantly surprised to find us all together that afternoon in Berlin, relaxed and fully enjoying each other’s company.

Earlier that day we hit the ice for the first post-travel session, which is always a bit of a shock to the system. Having arrived in Berlin sans coach Xiuli, who arrived two days later, we spent this first training session on our own, and with only the girls of the group qualified to race the first fall World Cups, we were really flying solo. It was a quiet ice session in the afternoon; we were nearly the only five skaters on the ice, and thankfully it was also an easy one, just easy sets of laps together in a train, taking turns leading.

There are not many ‘girl’ teams in the world today that can depend entirely on themselves to train together at an adequate intensity to achieve world-class results. Often you will see smaller groups of girls training primarily with the guys, who pull laps for them, pull accels for them and generally raise them up to higher quality training. There are even one or two teams where there is only one girl who employs male domestique skaters to train with her. We are pretty proud of the fact that we are strong enough and secure enough to pull our own laps and push each other to higher and higher levels. Not to say that we don’t still train with the boys in the group, but when we do we pull our fair share of laps at a pace fast enough to still benefit them.

After we were finished our ‘easy’ laps, which felt brutal after travel, as they always do, we were chatting with a Danish skater who has been training solo in Berlin for the entire summer and fall. Speed skating is quite on the fringe in Denmark and as such there is not much of a team or program to speak of, so it is constant struggle for this girl to find a place to train and people to train with. She was initially told that she would be allowed to train with the German B team, but in the end that fell through and she ended up entirely on her own. She commented on how nice it was to see us skating together and instantly I felt both incredibly sorry for her and incredibly grateful for what we have together. This sport is so unique in that we need each other, we need a team, to do the training, but come race day we are alone in our goals and on the ice and fight hard to beat each other and everyone else. I can’t imagine tackling this sport alone, it seems impossible to me. It is all too likely that sometimes this Danish girl feels brutal during laps too, but has no one to share the brutal-ness with, or laugh about it with afterwards. We are lucky to have what we have, although in talking to this girl I realized how very much we take it for granted.

After coffee, on the train ride back to our hotel from downtown, we realized that we hadn’t bothered to take note of the name of our stop. It was rather dark and foggy out so we had to keep a watchful eye on every stop to make sure we didn’t end up lost in some remote corner of Berlin. Thankfully we recognized our stop when we saw it and made it home safely.

Our little excursion made me think that someday I’m going to have to get off a different kind of train - this crazy skating train - and right now I have no idea what station to get off at. As far as I can tell there is no map, and I’m both the conductor and only passenger aboard! I can only hope that when the time comes I’ll just look out the window and somehow recognize it as the right one. Thankfully, when I do, it will be with the knowledge that an incredible journey has come to an end and that I was lucky enough to take this ride with a very special group of uber-fast, uber-fun, uber-awesome skater girls.

Saving My Socks (Nov. 19)

As we navigate our way through various airports around the world, we tend to draw a lot of unwanted attention to ourselves; we are conspicuous travelers. This is not because we are loud and obnoxious (although some may argue otherwise) but rather because we are a large group of people all wearing the same clothes carting around massive amounts of luggage. This may come as a surprise to you – what could we possibly need to bring besides skates and a skimpy skin-suit? Well, the list is long, and in my case it seems, only getting longer as the years go by.

The item that really gets people’s attention is the bike box. Many of us bring bikes on the road. We use them for training (we don’t just skate in circles), for warm-up and warm-down on race day, for getting to and from the rink, and for getting into town and away from the hotel. I pack my bike in a large plastic hard case made especially for this purpose. I put other important things in there too, like shoes, skate sharpening equipment, snacks, food and spare blades. It can get pretty heavy, is quite oversized and a tad awkward to maneuver even with wheels. Random people are constantly coming up to me asking, ‘What is in the box?’ Most of the time they don’t even say hello, they just want to know what’s in the box. When I tell them it’s a bike some are satisfied with that and just walk away. Others are intrigued, so they pursue the chitchat to find out what I’m up to. The ensuing conversation that inevitably leads to speed skating has happened to all of us so many times we try to avoid it like the plague.

So, there’s the bike. But then I have to bring a trainer for my bike so I can ride it in my hotel room, or for warm-up at the rink. That’s bag number two. In this bag I’ll also include more shoes, more food, and some bigger, but stuff-able, clothing items. This year I decided to bring a blender to make smoothies because I never eat enough on race day and somehow can stomach liquids much better. So I put the blender in that bag too.

Then there’s the main bag, bag number three. This is the big one where I have to pack training clothes, skating clothes, casual clothes, lounging clothes, toiletries, various jackets from each of our team’s sponsors, and more shoes (in case you’re wondering, I need: running shoes, weight lifting shoes, cycling shoes, flip flops, and usually one pair of casual shoes). No matter how many times I go on the road, I always feel like I never get it right. Too many jeans I don’t wear, not enough training shirts, endless pairs of socks…

When I’m getting ready to pack, I make little piles all over the place and it always seems so ridiculous to bring so much stuff. Every time, I ask myself, do I really need this shirt, or that jacket, can I make do with less or do I have room to bring more? It’s an art form really, one I’ve been working on for many years. Miraculously I always manage to make it out the door, and, now this may come as a shock, so far I’ve always survived the trip with what I have!

I’ve begun to realize that I have some peculiar habits when it comes to living out of a suitcase for weeks on end. It seems that no matter how many pairs of socks I bring, I always end up at home with at least a few clean pairs. Now, this is not the result of poor packing or bringing too many pairs, but something else entirely. I’m not sure if it stems from some sort of primordial human instinct to conserve, be it energy, food, or fuel, for the unknown days ahead, but for whatever reason, even when I have clean pairs of socks, I will root through my laundry bag and re-wear a previously used (read: dirty) pair so as to ensure that there will always be clean pairs left. I thought maybe it was because I’m too lazy to hand wash them in the sink, with the laundry soap I have dutifully remembered to bring from home, but I will always do that if I run out of clean underwear.

There are a few rare and glorious places we go where we can do an actual load of laundry for free. Like at the hotel in Berlin. But when we start a trip in Berlin and have two weeks to go I still have lots of clean laundry, probably because I’ve already begun my hoarding, so it doesn’t seem urgent or necessary. At the hotel I’m staying at now it costs €5.75 to get one long-sleeved shirt laundered. And €1.70 for a pair of socks, € 4.00 for a t-shirt, €5.75 for pants… you get the idea – it’s a rip off. While I am occasionally desperate for clean laundry I resolutely refuse to spend €100 to do it. So instead I squirrel away my socks for the long weeks ahead.

I’ve often thought that I might as well just lighten my load and bring less stuff. Then I wouldn’t have to cart around clean pairs of socks and other clothes I will strangely never wear. You’d think that the amount of times my many bags have careened off the luggage cart to land all over the place in a big mess would teach me a lesson or two. Pack light! Only bring what you need! I have actually done this once or twice in the past, and in hindsight, with great regret, so perhaps that is the root of my strange behaviour. I ended up wearing the same clothes so often, and got so tired of smelling like a buffet that now I overcompensate by bringing too much.

Over the years I’ve become immune to the staring and pointing and questioning I endure for my own and my team’s necessity for traveling with all the necessary equipment and creature comforts of home. It is clearly and understandably a life that is mysterious and peculiar to most everyone who has not lived it. Still, I can’t help but laugh to myself when I think that if they all think I’m strange only because of the enormous pile of luggage on my cart, then they don’t know the half of it.

Wotherspoon trying to look at bright side

FABRIZIO BENSCH/REUTERS

Canada's Jeremy Wotherspoon takes flight during a World Cup event on November 8, 2008.

Canadian speed skating star Jeremy Wotherspoon sounds resigned to the strong possibility he’ll miss the rest of the season with a broken arm, but isn’t professing much concern about it.

The thing is: Wotherspoon sat out the first year in this Olympic quadrennial to give himself a mental and physical breather, and he came back in his best form ever. He won nine of 10 World Cup 500-metre races last season, the world 500-metre and was named the top speed skater in the world.

Wotherspoon broke his left arm in the first weekend of World Cup racing in Berlin on Nov. 8. He was originally told he wouldn’t need surgery, but a second opinion upon returning home to Calgary convinced him otherwise. He said his humerus bone was fractured in about six pieces and that a plate with eight screws was needed to hold it in place.

Ideally, Wotherspoon would like to race in the world single distance championships March 12-15 at the Richmond Olympic Oval, but the odds of that happening aren’t great because he’d have to either have enough World Cup points or have a fast enough time to qualify him. He had only one race before the accident and it wasn’t his best.

“Of course, it’s disappointing,” said Wotherspoon today during a news conference in Calgary. “But I know from past experience that I can do things a little differently than other people have and take the time off. It hasn’t hurt me. I’m going to make sure I use the time I have off to my full advantage to make sure I’m rested and mentally ready for when I do get back into skating again.”

Teamate Mike Ireland, who dislocated his shoulder in a 500-metre race the day before Wotherspoon went down, voiced concerns about unsafe conditions at the Berlin track. He’s also unsure when he can return.

Lueders mellowing as 2010 Games approach

PAWEL DWULIT/TORONTO STAR

Pierre Lueders, right, looking accomodating, and Helen Upperton.

Canadian bobsled ace Pierre Lueders seemed a pretty relaxed and contented guy in Toronto on Monday at a season kick-off news conference for the team before they headed for Europe.

Lueders has always been a guy with a chip on his shoulder, never reluctant to let a reporter know if he thought a question betrayed a large ignorance of his sport.

But he couldn’t have been more accomodating at an event where he was subjected to a series of long interviews, happy to hang in there until the last question was asked.

That should bode well for his sport heading to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics as he certainly remains the team’s chief spokesperson, although Helen Upperton and Kaillie Humphries are doing their part to bring attention to women’s bobsleigh with their podium results.

It’s clear the other sledders look to Lueders to set the tone. Said Upperton:

“I think we’re really fortunate to have somebody like Pierre in our program. Since I first started on the team, he’s been a great source of guidance and advice and tips and driving instruction. Tips on lots of stuff, equipment and sleds. I think also he’s been so successful that everyone who’s come into the program since he’s been a part of it, they’re just trying to achieve a similar level of success. He just raised the calibre of the whole program.”

And while he seems to be mellowing, the good thing is it doesn’t look like he’s lost his competitive edge.

Tornado Hopes Sunk: Sailor Kevin Stittle of Orangeville got the bad news today that the Tornado class is officially out of the program for the 2012 London Olympics.

Stittle, who finished an excruciating fourth with helmsman Oskar Johansson of Oakville at the Beijing Games, was hoping to continue competing in the fast and popular Tornado division, while Johansson had got married and started a business.

“I haven’t spoken with a single person in the sailing community that agrees with the decision,” said Stittle. “It’s spread across the board with people wondering ‘Why the heck did they do that?’ I can only assume it was a political decision.”

Posh Job for Buttle? One of the scandal rags is reporting that Victoria Beckham wants her husband’s new football team, AC Milan, to provide an ice rink for the kids and has drawn up a list of prospective teachers at 1,000 Euros an hour. It includes retired world champion Jeffrey Buttle.

Bet he’s going to race to do that job.

Heymans commits through 2012 Olympics

AP FILE PHOTO

Taking it down a level for 2012.

Emilie Heymans announced today that she’s committing to compete through the 2012 London Olympics, but it won’t be in her speciality, the women’s 10-metre platform.

Heymans won silver in a brilliant duel on 10-metre with her China’s Chen Roulin at the Beijing Games, her third straight Olympics in which she’d won a medal on the tower, the first two coming in the synchro event with Anne Montminy (2000) and Blythe Hartley (2004).

But Heymans and her coach Yihua Li believe the 10-metre will exact too much of a pounding on the 26-year-old Montrealer’s body over the next four years and will have her instead concentrate on the 3-metre springboard, where she’s also enjoyed success, but not to the same degree.

“It’s an enormous challenge,” Heymans said in a statement. “But Yihua Li and I are confident I can be a medal contender in London.”

Heymans added she won’t put too much pressure on herself early in the Olympic cycle.

“I have no objectives with regards to results for the next two years,” she said. “My main focus is technical work and increasing the difficulty of my dives. I want to start with a solid technical base and build a competitive diving list that puts me on par with the best in the world.”

FairWother fans knock speed skating star

It didn’t take long for a moron to come crawling out of the woodwork when Canadian speed skater Jeremy Wotherspoon broke his arm in a 500-metre World Cup race on Saturday in Berlin.

The first comment posted on the CBC Sports website was a totally crass entry that harkened Wotherspoon’s past Olympic failures and suggested his career is done. A number of subsequent entries have taken this fool to task.

It would be nice to just pass it off as incoherent babble from a random idiot, but there’s a pattern here as you can see from this article before the 2006 Turin Olympics. Some Canadians seem to get a real joy out of rubbing Wotherspoon's face in his mistakes. It's a similar phenomenon with hurdler Perdita Felicien.

There’s no question Wotherspoon’s career is coloured by his failure to deliver on his potential at the last two Olympics, especially in Salt Lake in 2002 when he was the favourite and fell on his opening steps.

No one knows that more than Wotherspoon. It’s a big part of the reason he made the decision to keep going through the 2010 Vancouver Games. After taking a year off, he came back and dominated by winning nine of 10 World Cup 500-metre races and the world title last season. He won speed skating’s equivalent of the Oscar as a result.

That’s the thing, Wotherspoon has had the kind of international career few Canadian athletes have ever enjoyed in any sport. He is a huge star in the Netherlands, where they know speed skating like we know hockey.

Those who understand the sport have a tremendous appreciation for this guy. It’s clear that there’s a segment of the Canadian population that doesn’t have a clue. Hopefully, it shrinks a bit at the 2010 Games fast approach.

Burka Documentary: There’s a compelling documentary on legendary figure skating coach Ellen Burka, entitled Skate to Survive, on OMNI.1 this coming Sunday at 8:30 p.m.

Directed and produced by her daughter Astra, it details a colourful skating career that included coaching her other daughter Petra to a world title as well as guiding Toller Cranston, but also tells about her upbringing in pre-war Amsterdam and surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, during which her parents perished.

Wotherspoon out for the season?

Canadian speed skater Jeremy Wotherspoon might miss this last full season before the 2010 Vancouver Olympics after breaking his arm today in a crash in a World Cup 500-metre race in Berlin.

Wotherspoon was coming off one of his best seasons ever, winning nine of 10 World Cup 500-metre races in the 2007-08 campaign after returning from a year away from competition.

But in his his second race of this World Cup season, the 32-year-old native of Red Deer, Alta., lost his balance as he was pushing off with his left skate and went careening into the protective mats. He broke his upper left arm when he put it up to protect himself as he slid into the mats.

Wotherspoon, who’d never broken anything before in his career, was taken off the ice on a stretcher. His arm in a cast, he later returned to have supper with the team at their hotel.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Wotherspoon, understandably not in much of a mood to talk, in a phone interview. “I just went down and hit the mats pretty quickly. I didn’t have time to right myself because I was in the outer lane.”

Finn Halvorsen, director of the Canadian long track team, said that if there are no complications with Wotherspoon’s broken arm he could be back for the final World Cup event March 6-8 in Salt Lake City and then compete in the world single distance championships on the new Olympic Oval in Richmond, B.C. the next week.

But Halvorsen said there is a chance Wotherspoon might not be ready in time for the worlds.

It was the second serious crash for a veteran Canadian sprinter in as many days as Mike Ireland of Winnipeg separated his shoulder in a fall on Friday.

“I’ve been in speed skating some years and I’ve never seen something like this,” said Halvorsen, who has piloted to the Norwegian and American teams to great Olympic success in the past. “I would say it’s absolutely bad luck. Mike and Jeremy never fall.”

Olympic 'boarders get dose of reality on MTV

Kimiko Zakreski of Calgary struts her stuff.

It’s hardly a surprise that when MTV chose to do a reality show on a Canadian team preparing for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, they picked the snowboarders.

They must have figured there’d be plenty of personalities (read characters), not to mention drama. Judging from the premier episode of Summer Sessions featuring the Canadian snowboard team – premiering Thursday on MTV at 10 p.m. ET/PT – they appear to be on to something.

It was a smart move by Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium to commission something like to this to give the public more of a feel for some of the athletes they’ll be cheering for at the 2010 Games.

The athletes and coaches know the cameras are rolling, so you definitely gotta wonder how much is reality and how much is just plain staged – it certainly does seem forced at times. But it does give one a feel for what they’re going through as tensions mount as the Games get closer.

You get to see tearful veteran boarder Alexa Loo of Richmond, B.C., after she learns her Sport Canada funding has just been axed, as well as the shenanigans and attititude of bad boys Michael Lambert and Simon Bonefant (these dudes definitely love the camera).

Dominique Vallée extols the virtues of her new discovery, “woga,” where “you reach for your glass of wine and it’s always with your heart first.” (Something like that could catch on as an Olympic sport!)

Coach Mark Fawcett plays the heavy, taking on a Bull Meecham-type attitude, with his shaved pate, perpetual scowl and desire to run the training camp as a more of a boot camp. He continually criticizes the boarders for being too soft.

“You’re pussies,” Fawcett tells them.

Fawcett recalls how tough it was when he was a competitor and he had to sleep in the back of trucks. He doesn’t mention how he also used to sell cookies to fund himself (Might be bad for his hard-ass image if they know he can bake.)

This is the prequel to a half-hour series, Over The Bolts, which will air on MTV in 2009.

O is for Obama. O is for Olympics …

There’s a growing feeling in many quarters that President-elect Barack Obama could be the man to put Chicago over the top in their bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics against competitors Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid.

As longtime Olympic watcher Philip Hersh notes in his column, not only will Obama be a powerful ally for the bid, but McCain would have been a liability because he is not well-liked by IOC types because of his tough questioning of them during the Senate Commerce Committee hearings that followed the Salt Lake bribery scandal.

As one Chicago resident told a local CBS affiliate: "I think instead of having Michael Jordan and Oprah representing Chicago, we now have the president of the United States representing Chicago and I think we have a good shot now."

Patrick Ryan, the head of the Chicago 2016 bid, certainly thinks their chances have improved.

The spokespeople for the Tokyo bid are also quickly backtracking from comments that bid members have made that they’re worried about the Obama factor.

Chan's the Man ... and other stuff

Patrick Chan did something rarely done in the figure skating world or anywhere else in the sporting world for that matter – he apologized after a win he wasn’t sure he deserved.

Chan made a number of mistakes during his long program on Saturday at Skate Canada in Ottawa, but still managed to pull off the win in the men's event. He wasn’t sure it was merited and he even said so, another example of the young Torontonian’s class.

Sweetland Down Under: Triathlete Kirsten Sweetland of Victoria, considered the top prospect for Canada on the women’s side heading towards the 2012 London Olympics, is now training in Brisbane, Australia, with Olympic bronze medalist Emma Moffatt.

It’s a big move for the 20-year-old to leave Simon Whitfield’s training group under coach Joel Filliol, but obviously she believes it’s the right one to get her to the next level.

Charity Will Take Hit: Right to Play, the Toronto-based humanitarian organization, expects that its $35 million annual budget will take a 15 per cent hit next year as corporate funding is affected by the credit crisis, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

“At the moment, some of the companies are hard to even get to talk to,” Koss told Bloomberg at the FT Sport Industry Summit in London. “This is not the priority at the top of their minds.”

Still no word yet from the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) on whether they might relent on their decision to bar Right To Play from the Olympic village at the 2010 Winter Games because they have competing sponsors.

Touching Tributes: The passing of Canadian shot putter Bishop Dolegiewicz has been greatly mourned in the track and field community and there are a lot of touching tributes to him on MastersTrack.com. Former discus thrower Rob Gray and some other of Dolegiewicz’s teammates are planning to raise a few in his honour this week in Toronto.