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How Canada's Olympians find the money to fund their journey

[ RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - AUGUST 9, 2016: Judokas Antoine Valois-Fortier (L) of Canada and Takanori Nagase of Japan fight in their men's -81kg judo repechage event at the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games, at Carioca Arena 2. (Photo by Stanislav KrasilnikovTASS via Getty Images) ]
[ RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – AUGUST 9, 2016: Judokas Antoine Valois-Fortier (L) of Canada and Takanori Nagase of Japan fight in their men’s -81kg judo repechage event at the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games, at Carioca Arena 2. (Photo by Stanislav KrasilnikovTASS via Getty Images) ]

Dominick Gauthier is buzzing. Antoine Valois-Fortier, a Team Canada judo athlete and one of a handful of gold medal hopefuls sponsored by Gauthier’s athlete-focused charity B2ten, just clinched the win against France’s Loïc Pietri at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

“(Pietri’s) one of his biggest nemesis (but Valois-Fortier) managed to have one of his best matches ever,” says Gauthier, a former Olympic coach. The judoka didn’t make it to the podium this Olympics but for Gauthier, Valois-Fortier’s preliminary win is just the sort of success story that the group of private donors who have contributed to B2ten are looking for.

“They all have their different motivations to support B2ten but one common trait is that they all want to contribute to Canadian pride,” he says. “They see the athletes as being the greatest avenue for unifying the country and making everybody proud.”

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Since the organization launched in the lead-up to the 2010 Games in Vancouver, they’ve raised $33 million from philanthropists to support high-performance Olympians. In Rio, B2ten is supporting 12 individual Canadian athletes and the bronze medal-winning Women’s Sevens rugby team, having contributed anywhere from $5,000 to $120,000 towards training and preparing them for the “big show.”

But the costs of being an Olympian can be high and support is fragmented.

“Some sports are more expensive (or) poorly financed and poorly organized while some are better financed and organized,” he explains.

Through Sport Canada, the branch of the federal Department of Heritage focused on Canada’s elite athletes, the federal government has set up an Athlete Assistance Program. Just shy of 2,000 Olympic hopefuls or past competitors receive a monthly stipend – $1,500 per month for senior athletes and $900 to first time and development carded athletes. But it isn’t much to live on.

According to Sport Canada’s quadrennial High-Performance Athlete Study, the most recent of which was released in 2014, our nation’s best athletes spend $13,900 per year more than they earn. With roughly 2,000 “carded” athletes, their cumulative debt sits at around $27.5 million a year.

But there are more streams of funding than just the AAP program says Anne Merklinger, CEO of Own the Podium (OTP), the organization responsible for assessing the performance of individual sports and guiding the federal government on where to spend its “top-up” money. For Summer Sports 2016 to 2017, OTP handled $28.9 million in investment.

“The Government of Canada provides a core level of financial investment for every national sport organization,” says Merklinger, adding that those organizations in turn use those funds to support athletes in those disciplines. But OTP isn’t out to distribute funds equally; it’s more akin to a hedge fund looking for results.

Case in point, Canada’s female wrestlers were looking solid going into Rio so it’s no surprise the organization received more than $1.3 million. Athletics Canada banked over $4.1 million in funding. On the other hand, boxing, which has no projected medalists, only collected $310,000. Valois-Fortier’s discipline, judo, received just shy of $1 million.

“There are a number of athletes that have individual sponsors,” says Merklinger.

Sprinter Andre De Grasse, for instance, just inked a US$11.25 million deal with Puma last fall after winning two gold medals at the Pan Am Games. With bonuses that figure could climb to US$30 million. Kayaker Mark de Jonge, high jumper Derek Drouin and swimmer Ryan Cochrane all work with BMW and Canada’s flag bearer, Rosie MacLennan, was featured in Procter & Gamble’s “Thank You Mom” campaign.

But not everyone sees the sponsorship love after all, becoming an elite athlete is a long and arduous process. A poll of over 1,000 parents of elite athletes in the U.S. commissioned by TD Ameritrade, found that while parents spend around $500 a month on their child’s athletics, 33 per cent say they don’t regularly set aside money for retirement. Further to that, 67 per cent had high hopes their kid would get an athletic scholarship and 34 per cent believed their kid had a shot at making it into the Olympics.

The reality, unfortunately, was only 24 per cent of those did get a scholarship and a mere two per cent made the Olympics.

Merklinger points out that the federal government has stepped up its commitment to Olympic hopefuls.

“Canada has added a further five million a year for the next four years that is focused exclusively on those athletes five to eight years away from a podium result,” she says. And once they get there, well, the Canadian Olympic Committee takes care of the rest. “They cover virtually all the costs for athletes when they’re at the Games and they also provide athletes with one of the best at-Games environments in the world.”