The National Flag of Canada Act defines the Maple Leaf as our national flag, and the government clearly and unambiguously defines what the flag should look like - its colour and dimensions.

Like this.

Similarly, the National Anthem Act defines the music and lyrics of O Canada. This is how it goes:

(The eagle eyed will notice a notation error in bar 10. I’ve already complained about THAT. But not now.)

Why does the International Olympic Committee get them both wrong? Shouldn’t we say something?

How the Olympics get these wrong

Let’s start with the anthem.

Here’s a brief excerpt as O Canada plays at the medal ceremony after the great Mikaël Kingsbury won gold in Men’s Dual Moguls.

You can hear the Canadians in the crowd singing along enthusiastically. Listen to the last bar. Notice how the fans finish singing before the orchestra finishes playing?

The final three notes in the orchestral arrangement are all twice as long as they should be.

how it’s supposed to go

Here’s how it SHOULD go. The National Anthem act defines the music, the way it is in the first staff. Most people sing the last two notes up an octave, as shown in the second staff. That’s cool. More heroic. Frankly I think we should change the National Anthem act to fix that, but that’s not my point.

The third staff shown here is how you hear it at the Olympics.

The last three notes are twice as long as they should be! People singing along will be out of sync at the end!

where did this version come from?

In 2011, English musician Philip Sheppard took on a herculean task of arranging, conducting and recording 205 different national anthems with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios.

The International Olympic Committee used these versions at London 2012 and plans to use them for the next 25 years. (It’s what we heard in Milan.)

I’m in awe of how much work this must have been. I can barely scratch out a band arrangement of “Happy Birthday” in under a week. He had to do 205 different anthems, which surely required a tremendous amount of research. In this video he mentions the challenges - the anthem of Uruguay is six minutes long, the anthem of Uganda is only 9 bars long, and he had to come up with versions of them all that would fit within the time frame of an Olympic medal ceremony.

Great Job!

But …. The lengthening of O Canada doesn’t make any musical sense, and I’m not sure why it happened.

Can’t we fix this?

We don’t get a whole lot of chances to sing O Canada at the Olympics, and it’s a shame if the orchestra and the crowd aren’t quite in sync.

If the Olympic committee has its way, we’re stuck with this incorrect version of O Canada for another five or six Olympic Games.

OK What about the flag?

Flags have well defined aspect ratios - the proportion of width to width.

Canada’s is 2:1. Twice as wide as it is high. (And the middle is a square, and the red bars are each exactly half the width of the square.)

Wikipedia has an absurdly detailed construction sheet defining its shape right down to the radius of the curves. People take this seriously.

OK? Ours is 1:2 - one high, two wide.

Not everybody’s is.

Wikipedia, of course, has a very detailed table of all the flags of the world, and their aspect ratios, which you can study here.

Canada is 1:2. We’re joined in that shape by our friends from 52 other countries.

Lots of countries are 2:3 or 3:5. (The United Kingdom allows both 1:2 and 3:5). The United States is 10:19, of all things. And there are more unusual ones - Qatar is 11:32, Iceland is 9:16, El Salvador is 189:335 Mexico is 4:7, Norway is 16:27 …

It seems, though, like the Olympic organizers want all flags to be exactly the same proportion, which means a lot of them are just WRONG.

Here’s Canada’s flag being hoisted after our women’s team pursuit speed skaters won gold. (alongside the Netherlands and Japan) You can tell at a glance it’s wrong. The middle part isn’t a square. It’s too tall.

Canada’s Flag, the right way, and the wrong way.

It just looks wrong if you don’t draw it at the proper 1:2 proportion.

See? I squished that 2nd one to be 2:3 instead of 1:2. It’s wrong.

what I suppose is happening

Perhaps the Olympic people want all flags to be exactly the same size so that they can all fit on a standardized flagpole.

I don’t think that’s a good enough reason. Fly the proper flag. It’s the Olympics. It has a multi billion dollar budget. And it’s the right thing to do, for every country.

Korea speaks out

While I was collecting my thoughts on this, this news article came out -

Korea’s flag was displayed incorrectly after the medal ceremony at the womens 3000 metre relay. The Taegeuk symbol in the centre of the flag is incorrectly rotated counterclockwise.

(And, what do you know, the Canadian flag on the right is wrong, too.)

I’m not a Korean flag expert, but it does indeed look to me like the symbol in the centre is rotated maybe 20 degrees too far counterclockwise.

Here’s an article with more detail on exactly what’s wrong. That article included this illustration. You can see that the flag on the left is a little off.

The Korean Olympic Committee complained to the IOC.

"We provide the organizing committee with the official government-approved Taegeukgi design file and the national anthem audio for every Olympic Games," the KSOC said in a statement.

The IOC and the organizing committee apologized for the error and promised to take immediate corrective action, it said.

Korea spoke up. Why don’t we?

We should complain too, about both the flag and anthem.

I’m going to write to the Hon. Adam van Koeverden, Canada’s Minister of State for Sport, who is an Olympic gold medallist himself, and see what he’s going to do about this.

You bet I’ll keep you posted.