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Xiuli Wang is bringing to her Canadian Olympic coaching duties the same laser focus she expects of her charges, among them some of Canada's brightest medal hopes in the coming weeks.

"Until the Games are finished at the end of the month, my athletes are all I'm thinking about," she says.

The decorated long-track speed skating coach sees only the task at hand: coaxing every last ounce of speed and power from skaters such as Kristina Groves and Clara Hughes.

But the question Ms. Wang, or anyone else, can't answer as the biggest and most expensive celebration in Canadian sports history gets under way is: What will happen next?

Will Canada take its (projected) puffed-up medal count, its big budget, and become an Olympic power to be reckoned with in the foreseeable future? Or will it revert to being a nation in which elite performance is a collision of accident, will and just enough money to get by?

Some answers might come today, when federal Minister of State for Sport Gary Lunn makes an announcement about the Own the Podium program, a fund to support winter athletes for the 2010 Games in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C.

Ms. Wang, the former world champion for China who arrived at the Olympic Oval in Calgary in 1998 looking for work as a coach, is as good a test case as any.

Recognized as one of the leading coaches in the world, Ms. Wang theoretically will be out of a job not long after the Games end. Like many of her peers, her contract with Speed Skating Canada runs out at the end of March.

She's not worried. "I prefer to focus on the Games. I'm not worried that I don't have a job," she said in a telephone interview. "If I do good job, I'll have a job. If I don't do a good job, I won't have a job."

But her calm masks a larger question: Now that an amateur sports machine capable of lifting Canadian athletes to the top of the medal podium in unprecedented numbers has been built, what do you do with it?

"This is the most prepared and successful Olympic team ever," said Catriona Le May Doan, the two-time Olympic gold medalist speed skater and broadcaster who has experienced the coming funding challenges first-hand as a board member of the Olympic Oval in Calgary and the Canadian Sport Centre Calgary (CSCC), which provides a range of additional expertise to athletes in nine of the winter sports. "And that's from the funding."

But the pot is shrinking. The CSCC is looking at a $1.5-million shortfall from its current budget of $5.2-million. For example, this year, even in an Olympic year, Calgary's speed-skating oval required a $300,000 top-up from Own the Podium to stay open as long as the skaters needed it for training.

The primary driver in the Olympic build-up has been the $117-million committed to Own the Podium over the past five years to provide winter athletes an unprecedented level of support for equipment, coaching and training. The pool available is slated to shrink by $17-million in 2010-11 from $28-million for 2009-10.

As the Olympic spotlight dims, athletes and sports organizations are also likely to lose the additional support from private-sector companies that scrambled to attach their brand to a homegrown success story.
"We want to shine in our country, that's understandable," Ms. Le May Doan said. "But we can't build up these inspirational role models and then just stop."

Many fear Own the Podium, which is funded by the federal government and the Vancouver Games organizing committee (VANOC), will go the way of the Best Ever program from the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. That fund provided $5-million a year for five years for athletes and ended after the Games.

So uncertain is the post-Olympic funding picture that the CSCC has issued layoff notices to 37 staff. While president Dale Henwood is at least cautiously optimistic that some will be retained, the possibility is looming that Canada will be the victim of its success and lack of long-term financial planning, because other nations are circling around some of Canada's top coaching talent.

"Many of these are among the best in the world and we may lose them," Mr. Henwood said. "It will happen, it's happening now. I know people who have committed to work for other countries as of April 1."

Canada's future Olympic prospects should be helped by a new strategy that connects the country's wealthy and powerful people with athletes in need of financial aid. B2Ten is a charitable organization that came together in 2005 to support moguls star Jenn Heil and has raised $3-million for 24 of Canada's top medal hopefuls. Canada's success in the buildup to the Games - Canadian athletes won at least 29 medals at the world level in the 2008-09 season - has proven the link between financial support and performance, said Dominick Gauthier, the B2Ten program director and Canada's Olympic moguls skiing coach.

Momentum seems to be building. "If our politicians don't see this now, they'll never get it," Mr. Gauthier said.

More private-sector money came last week, when Sprott Asset Management and the Sprott Foundation announced plans to donate $100,000 to the Canadian Athletes Now Fund (CAN Fund) for every gold medal Canada wins at the Vancouver Games. The money will go to support the athletes preparing for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

The Toronto-based firm also promised $210,000 to spread among 35 athletes on the waiting list of CAN Fund, a Toronto-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to supporting Olympians.

It's a big leap forward, Mr. Gauthier said, but it's not a long-term solution. The hope is there won't be a fall-back when the 2010 Games end.

"We're not here to replace OTP or Sport Canada funding," he said. "We're a top-up."