Natalie Spooner, named to Canada’s Olympic hockey team, acknowledges gold comes at a price

While hockey veteran Natalie Spooner celebrates her Olympic team selection, many Olympians face financial strain. John Vennavally-Rao reports.

Natalie Spooner is heading back to the Olympics, thrilled to be part of the Canadian women’s hockey team once again, but her selection comes amid a growing chorus of concern regarding the financial sustainability of being an Olympic athlete in Canada.

The team roster was announced on Friday afternoon, confirming the three-time Olympian will have a chance to defend the gold medal her and her teammates won four years ago in Beijing.

“I mean, it’s a dream come true. I’m so excited. Overcome with emotion. But (I’m) really just looking forward to getting there with our team,” said Spooner.

Pointing to the depth of the newly announced lineup, Spooner believes the squad is poised to top the podium again.

“Look at our roster, we have a lot of experience, a lot of talent,” she said. “I think we have a good shot.”

However, the road to the Olympics is becoming increasingly expensive. While celebrating her selection, Spooner highlighted the critical importance of funding initiatives like the Ontario Quest for Gold program. Supported by the province’s lottery and gaming corporation, the program provides funds to athletes to cover expenses.

“For me, Quest for Gold has helped me a lot throughout my career, whether it’s training costs, gym costs, physio costs or accommodation,” Spooner said. “If you look at the world now, things are more expensive, and as an athlete, to travel, to train, to be fuelling your body properly, it’s really expensive.”

Spooner’s comments reflect a wider concern across the Canadian sports landscape ahead of the upcoming Winter Games in Italy.

The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) has lobbied Ottawa to increase funding, noting that costs have risen significantly while federal funding for national sports organizations has remained stagnant since 2005.

Canadian athletes are facing a perfect storm of inflation, rising team fees and expensive travel, exacerbated by a low Canadian dollar for those training abroad.

“We should pay more attention to them and fund them better,” said David Shoemaker, CEO of the COC.

Shoemaker argues that the lack of new funding is shifting the burden onto the athletes, putting Canada at a “real competitive disadvantage” compared to nations like Italy and France, which he says spend upwards of 10 times more on federal sport.

While Shoemaker acknowledges the latest federal budget was focused on trade threats and other priorities, he believes sport is a “nation-building project unto itself” that deserves attention.

“Certainly many, many go into debt to fund their Olympic careers, and I worry that their Olympic careers are shortened because of the financial burden that puts upon them,” Shoemaker said.

The financial strain has forced many athletes to get creative, cobbling together income from crowdfunding, side gigs and sponsorship.

Hayden Mayeur, a two-time world championship medalist on Canada’s national speed skating team, started a mobile coffee company called “Hayloft” in Calgary to pay his bills.

The venture has been a success, and he recently added a seven-metre trailer dubbed the largest mobile espresso bar in the country,” and he now employs more than a dozen Team Canada athletes.

The job allows athletes to pick up shifts around their rigorous training schedules.

“They can work once a month. They can work once a year. They work when they can,” Mayeur said.

Mayeur says receives $2,275 a month from Sport Canada, plus a roughly $400 performance bonus per month for his world championship medals.

“It’s not much to live off of,” he said, noting that high-performance athletes cannot survive on cheap, low-nutrient food. “I’ve heard a bunch of people say, ‘Oh, why don’t you just buy Kraft Dinner?’ We’re high-performance athletes ... we cannot do what we do without proper nutrition.”

Other athletes share the struggle. Trinity Ellis, one of the nation’s top luge athletes, recently wrote about resorting to restaurant work and catering gigs to pay bills while continuing to train. Many athletes believe to have success on the world stage, they need to train like it’s their full-time job.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Canada’s Secretary of State for Sport, Adam van Koeverden, called Canada’s athletes “invaluable national ambassadors.”

They noted that monthly living and training allowances under the Athlete Assistance Program were boosted by 23 per cent in the 2024 budget, and $3.1 million was allotted in October for mental-health services.

The statement added that the government encourages National Sports Organizations “to diversify revenue streams, including private and corporate investments.”

For athletes like Mayeur, however, the gap between funding and reality remains wide. He notes that he knows bobsledders and lugers who pay “tens of thousands” of dollars in team fees just to compete.

“A lot of athletes have to indebt themselves to pursue their Olympic goals,” Mayeur said. “It’s just part of chasing that dream.”