Once More, Olympic Myopia In Vancouver: Canada Sits Skier Brian McKeever

Olympic dream over. Don't think I've ever been so sad.

That somber tweet is how Canadian skier Brian McKeever announced he would not be racing in Sunday's 50-kilometer event. The decision by Canadian ski team coach Inge Braten to race four stronger skiers than McKeever makes sense: it gives Canada a better chance to win its first-ever medal in cross-country skiing.

Not letting McKeever start only prevents him from becoming the first winter athlete to compete in the Paralympics and Winter Olympics. Oh, and it absolutely destroys the nice little ad campaign Visa had put together in support of McKeever, who has less than 10 percent of his vision thanks to a genetic disorder.

How is it that everyone around McKeever is so blind?

It's arguable that Team Canada was in a no-win situation entering today: start McKeever over a better skier, and risk criticism for playing to the cameras; start a better skier over McKeever, and get torched for stringing him along before dashing his dream. The only theoretical feel-good scenario left -- another Canadian skier refusing to race, ceding his spot to McKeever -- just shifts the anguish to another athlete.

There were three ways to head off this situation, but they were closed off long ago, and two aren't much better. Those less-than-stellar alternative? Canada not inviting (and not exploiting) McKeever in the first place, or taking just four skiers and including McKeever. Both would have been embarrassing, but neither would have been as massive a blunder as inviting him has proven to be, even if it meant choosing between not taking a skier who won a race at the Olympic Selection Trials in December or not taking a medal contender. Few were paying attention to Canada's Olympic team outside its borders at that point; now, the powers that be are subject to the rancor of sports media as a seething body.

Or the Canadian officials could have taken a stand behind something unorthodox: petitioning the IOC for an extra spot in any event -- which they did, limited only to this event -- for Paralympians who demonstrate athletic excellence of Olympic caliber, and threatening to not compete in this event as protest. It wouldn't be affirmative action for Paralympians, but an assurance that if they can compete with Olympians, they will, politics and medal hopes of nations be damned. (Who wants to bet the first writer to complain about a Paralympian being given a spot will have a name that rhymes with Shmariotti, Shmayless, or Shupica?)

For Canada, it would have been a nice gesture of faith in a meritocracy for all, not just medal contender, and helped save any Olympic body from falling into a McKeever-style catch-22. For the world at large, a having a nation with Canada's stature as a Winter Olympic power and status as the host, might have force the IOC to descend from its throne and listen.

Brian McKeever earned his chance to compete in the Olympics as every Olympian should: by beating other great athletes. Barring an extraordinary act of selflessness from another Canadian skier, he will not get it.

But Team Canada could have done more to both preserve their chances at garnering a medal and uphold the Olympic ideal of letting the best compete.

And down the road, that short-sighted decision will leave more than McKeever out in the cold.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.