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In early 2004, the people in charge of Canada’s “high-performance” sports ecosystem met in Calgary to decide how to stop their worst nightmare from coming true.
Vancouver had recently been awarded the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. And these folks — including officials from the government, the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees and the various winter national sport organizations (NSOs) — wanted to avoid the humiliation of Montreal 1976 and Calgary ’88, where Canada did not win a single gold medal. In fact, they set a far more ambitious goal: to put Canada on top of…