This story in the Globe talks about how after 4 days Canada has no medals yet at the Beijing Olympics, and there are already grumblings amongst Canadian athletes about how little support they get from the government with regards to funding as compared to other countries.

A few thoughts on this:

1) It’s still early in the Games - there is still a chance the medals will come and that the goal of 16 medals is met.

2) Corporate sponsorship in this country lags just as badly,  if not worse then government funding does, in my view.

I think obviously everyone wants our athletes to do well.. but if we do poorly at the end of these Olympics, it will be interesting to hear the Conservatives defence or explanation regarding current funding. I’ve read at Red Tory’s site from a commenter in his post on this that “this is the first year that  Canada is offering money for medals all the while cutting funding“, and he blames Harper’s and the Conservatives free market approach for this result.

I don’t know if that’s correct or not, but even if it is, I have my doubts anyone in Canada will vote against the Harper government  because of how they choose to spend funding on the Olympics.  If this Olympics turns out to be a disaster for us medal wise by the end of it however, it might bring pressure on the Harper government  to make sure we wouldn’t have a repeat of this in Vancouver (though we do better at winter sports anyhow).

While watching all this rain and thunder and lightning occur (as Matthew over at Pample the Moose observed, I didn’t know Ontario had a monsoon season), I thought I’d ask if anyone’s interested or excited in watching the Olympics.

For myself personally, I don’t know if it’s the time zone difference, or the bad publicity surrounding the games (ie. Tibet, ridiculous air pollution, or China going back on its promises and stifling freedom to access sites they may not necessarily like politically), or getting depressed reading some Canadian sports journalists saying there should be low expectations for the Canadian team and its medal haul, but I’m really not into watching the Olympics. I wonder what others feel about that.

As we see more news stories today of China sending in more troops to try and quell Tibetans, and we also see evidence that they  are doing a preventative crackdown on other minority groups in order to stop them from joining in on the protests, I think I’ve come to a personal decision on my earlier question about whether Canada needs to do to show China we disapprove of their behaviour. I believe we now do have to send a signal.

A boycott of the Opening Ceremonies is at least one thing we can do - the European Union has talked about doing this - but if the repression gets worse, and/or we see the Chinese killing demonstrators or executing them, I think nothing less then a full-fledged boycott will suffice.