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AUSTRALIA: Road to Olympic Success Paved With Gold

Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Aug 1 2008 (IPS) - While Australia is expected to feature prominently during medal presentations at this month’s Beijing Olympics, success will have come at a price.

“We have always maintained since the curtain closed in Athens that we wanted to achieve a top-five finish in the overall medal tally in Beijing,” stated Fiona de Jong, the Australian Olympic Committee’s director of sport, at a press conference on Jul.18.

Such anticipated success is now the norm for Australian Olympic teams with the nation having a proud history of achievement at the summer games.

Australian performances have enabled the country to finish fourth on the medal tally in the last two Olympics – 17 gold medals at Athens 2004 and 16 four years earlier in Sydney – continuing a long tradition of success that began at the first modern games in Athens in 1896, where Australia, with two gold and two bronze medals, finished 8th overall.

But the country has not always enjoyed such success. Despite finishing in the top ten medal winners in each Olympics from 1952 to 1972 – with a best result of 13 gold medals at the 1956 Melbourne games and a relative low-point of five golds in Mexico City in 1968 – Australia performed below par at the 1976 games.

Hosted by the Canadian city of Montreal, Australian athletes failed to win an event, returning home with just one silver and four bronze medals.

Australia’s ‘failure’ in Montreal – as it is often perceived – led to an overhaul in how sport was viewed and administered.

Director of the Australian Centre for Olympic Studies (ACOS) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), adjunct professor Richard Cashman, says that until the 1970s, Australia relied primarily on the amateur system for sporting success.

This involved “the belief that natural talent would rise. But the rest of the world got more professional, got commercial and the GDR [German Democratic Republic] had a lot of drugs. Australia just couldn’t keep up,” says Cashman.

He argues that the 1970s witnessed the “death of amateurism and it died without a whimper.” Cashman points out that the decade also saw the establishment of professional tennis and Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket.

In the wake of Australia’s disappointment in Montreal, the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) was set up in 1981.

The AIS “was a very important reason for the improvement [in Australian performances] in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s,” says Cashman.

Although moves were already in place to upgrade Australian sport prior to 1976 – the 1973 Bloomfield report recommended that the government set up a sports institute similar to those already established in Europe, while the 1975 Coles report on the feasibility of such an institute recommended that one be established – the dismal performance at the Montreal games was the catalyst for popular support for the AIS.

Cashman told IPS that the sports institute received support from both major political parties, while the public – whose tax still funds the AIS – also backed the plan.

“People realised that Australian athletes, unless they had better coaching, better training, better travel [arrangements], just couldn’t compete and people actually voted to spend the money on elite athletes,” he says.

The 1984 Los Angeles games saw a big improvement by Australia, with four golds among the 24 medals won. The government recognised this achievement in the 1985/1986 federal budget, increasing funding for the AIS by 60 percent.

It is a situation which has continued.

The Australian Sports Commission (ASC) is the federal agency responsible for the management and funding of the AIS. Of the AUD 264.475 million (247.7 million US dollars) allocated to the ASC in the 2008/2009 budget, more than AUD 150 million (140.4 US dollars) was allocated to elite athlete development.

Australia is wealthy enough to fund sports development and what it spends is vital to athletes’ continuing success at the highest level, argues Cashman. “You’ve got to have the money, first of all, to invest in sport,” he says.

The ACOS director argues that investment in sport has also been the key to the improvement made by Chinese athletes. At each Olympics since 1992, China has finished in the top four on the medal table and is the only country in the Asia-Pacific region at recent games to have consistently won more medals than Australia.

The link between funding and Olympic success was also made earlier this year, when the president of Australia’s Olympic committee, John Coates, warned that Australia risked slipping from the Olympic’s top five if funding for athletes was not given a significant boost.

“They’re going to have to find some more money if they want us to be there [in the top five],” Coates said in May.

According to Cashman, a range of other factors have also played major roles in Australia’s performances at the Games. He told IPS that “one key reason is a long tradition of Olympic success,” as well as Australia’s history of attending every Olympics.

Additionally, Cashman argues that the federation of several former British colonies into the commonwealth of Australia in 1901 coincided with growing interest in the games.

But he also points out that Olympic sports such as swimming and athletics – in both of which Australia has experienced much success – gives Australians an opportunity to “strut on the world stage.”

This equates to a different kind of attraction to that provided by other sports such as cricket and Australian-rules football, says Cashman, referring to such sports as “flagship sports.”

These are “sports that are identified with the Australian nation,” he told IPS.

The country’s sporting culture – Australians often refer to their nation as ‘sports-mad’ – is also strong, with major sporting venues, especially in Melbourne, “located very central to the city and are very dominant,” says Cashman.

Sport in Australia has also been well supported by politicians and the media, yet access to facilities and clubs is available to most Australians, to an extent “which is not true in a lot of other countries,” he says.