Higher, faster, stronger and fuelled by Canadian beef.
Canada’s beef industry is trying to convince the federal government to make the diplomatic arrangements necessary so Canadian athletes at the Beijing summer Olympics can have access to Canadian beef.
“It would have to be considered diplomatic cargo,” Canadian Beef Export Federation president Ted Haney said March 11. “It would require action by the government and we have made a pitch to Agriculture Canada to get the ball rolling but we haven’t heard back from them yet. It has to happen pretty quickly.”
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Canada would be following the lead of the United States and Australia. Both countries are planning to get homegrown beef to their athletes competing this summer.
For Canada, the complication is that China has not opened the border to Canadian beef since the 2003 discovery of BSE in an Alberta cow.
Haney said the move toward having home-grown meat protein for the athletes in China started after the Americans took chicken from a Beijing store and tested it. They concluded that an Olympic athlete consuming one meal of that chicken could have failed an Olympic hormone test.
“It would be embarrassing and inappropriate if one of our athletes failed a hormone test after a chicken dinner,” Haney told the semi-annual meeting of the CBEF.
“It will be a minister’s decision but the idea has to come up from officials and we still haven’t had a response from them,” Haney said in an interview.
He said feeding Canadian beef to athletes, particularly if they do well, could be an opening for Canadian beef in the Chinese market.
