The Canadian Olympic Committee yesterday announced that it will “inject nearly [all figures C]$100 million into high-performance sport over the next four years, double that of the previous four-year period,” according to Gary Kingston of the VANCOUVER SUN. The COC said that it “managed to ‘succeed against the book’ by working extremely hard to keep long-term partners and to find new ones.” COC President Marcel Aubut said that the COC was “able to re-up with companies like the Bay, RBC, Suncor, General Mills, Bell Canada and Air Canada and announcements about new sponsors will be made in the coming weeks.” He said that a “detailed breakdown of which sports will receive money will also have to wait, but he did say the $100 million will be for both summer and winter sports and will be directed at four key priorities -- high-performance sport, Olympic and other multi-sport games preparation, ‘best-in-class’ national sport federation development and a specific envelope for the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto.” Canadian Freestyle Ski Association CEO Peter Judge said that the COC's “aggressive pursuit of corporate sponsors the last year has had some effect on the ability of winter sport federations to sign up their own sponsors.” Judge said, "Although, we are targeting different groups and different partners. It's just a matter of finding a good match.com or one of the other alternatives out there. We're very encouraged by what we're hearing back." Aubut also said that the COC will “work hard to create an environment where revenue generation becomes ‘automatic’” (VANCOUVER SUN, 11/15). Aubut said that the COC “spent somewhere just over $50 million over the last four years, with almost all of it coming from corporate donors, and is only able to increase that amount because of their support” (GLOBE & MAIL, 11/15).
