I think the concept of an athlete being a role model dosen't work for the average person, people are still sitting on thier couch eating thier crap and watching the olympics, and thats not going to change no matter what our Olympic athletes do whether its Canada or the U.S.
When I spoke about role models I'm going to slightly retract it.
A big part of a winning tradition is having the next generation of athletes looking up to the current generation, and the only way of that working is if the athletes win on a global stage.
Going back to swimming we had a whole next generation of swimmers that tried to surpass the previous generation of Bauman (sp?) davis etc. Same with track and Ben Johnson (bad example) but he spawned Bailey and Surin and others.
I believe our minister of sports is way off of track on his response, nobody is going to jump off of the couch and start doing jumping jacks because Canadian X won gold, he's going to spill his beer and nacho's and waddle to the fridge to get a replacement
make sense??
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