Canadian Olympic Commercials: Providing False Hope for Canadians

The Olympics are back, and this year Canada has been blessed with the ultimate honor, the hosting of the games. Any Canadian, no matter how avid of a sports fan they are, will likely be tuning in to at least one event featuring a Canadian athlete. Now I do not consider myself to be an extremely patriotic individual, but the Olympics have a strange way of bringing even the humblest Canadian a sense of extreme pride for our great country. I have tuned in to almost every event featuring a Canadian athlete or team and I must say that overall we have done fairly well. As a realist I never expect Canada to win the games, or even place in the top three for that matter, but I do expect our athletes to perform at the best of their abilities. As any other Canadian Olympic viewer will tell you our country prides itself not only on our athletes, but also on our extremely patriotic commercials. At first the Olympic commercials really did not bother me, as I usually mute the television for ads of any type, but as the games went on so to did the commercials, their messages becoming less and less clear as our athletes performed worse and worse.

Now for anyone living outside of Canada who has no idea what I am talking about let me give some examples. We have commercials by several food companies stating that since they feed the athletes if Canada wins they wont take all the credit, they'll take some. A bit of a bold statement for a sponsor, but what do I know? Does this mean that if Canada doesn't win they'll take some of the blame too....? I didn't think so. We have commercials sponsored by Coke telling the viewers to let them know who's game this is, game referring to hockey, but we just lost to team USA, so I'm a little confused. There are several other ads featuring many different athletes all tailored to promote patriotism, and if I tried to explain them all my hands would be mighty sore. The point is, when you create these commercials with the hopes of gathering a larger viewer audience, pressure is put on the athletes to perform, and Canadian athletes don't seem to perform well under pressure. Only two of the athletes I have seen on these commercials has placed on the podium, and I have seen at least fifteen different athletes faces scattered among several commercials. So my question to these massive companies is why? Why place athletes in commercials speaking about their skills when they clearly do not perform. For me it is almost depressing to get hyped up for an athlete whose commercial has just assured me that this is their year for gold etc.... not even place on the podium. Perhaps a better approach would be to simply say good luck Canada, good luck.

I think Canada was too excited to be hosting the games to realize that perhaps the caliber of our athletes does not live up to the so called commercial hype. I will continue to watch the games, I will continue to root for my country, and of course I will continue to mute the television when the Olympic ads come on.