It was a glittering and naive era when politicians were free to wage frivolous international bets, and our sporting amateurs were worshipped with postage stamps and lucrative sponsorship contracts.
Wooed by their green and gold allure, we let them sell us everything from home loans to muesli bars. We were a nation captivated by our impending victories. Australia was about to win big at London 2012.
» VIEW THE OLYMPIC MEDAL TALLY HERE
Obviously.
Almost four years on and the images of bragging billboards and tears over Twitter have faded, but we still lost that bet. Then Sports Minister Kate Lundy, inspired by our brashness, had gambled with her British counterpart, waging that Australia would place higher than Mother England on the 2012 medal tally.
Home ground advantage be damned. We all knew the Brits could never withstand our fierce, sun-soaked sporting prowess.
The exact time of death remains unknown. But somewhere between James Magnussen’s dead heat defeat in the 100 metres freestyle and BMX World Champion Caroline Buchanan skidding out of medal contention, the media (and then the public) started calling it. London was a bust.
It was our worst Summer Games performance in 20 years. The New York Times called it a ‘blow to the ego’. A blow to the ego indeed. Leading up to London 2012 Goldman Sachs had predicted a fifth place finish for Australia.
That sounded about right after placing fourth in Athens and fifth in Beijing. We loved sport and sport loved us right back, that was the way things were. Now midway through this PR disaster, AOC President John Coates was telling us to forget about a top five finish. Were we even going to crack the top ten?
With a last minute showing by the sailing team (Men’s 470, 49er and Laser) we finished with what some would call a respectable seventh place. We are not those ‘some’ and as the the rest of the world hummed Hey Jude and packed away their national flags, back home accusations flew.
Our coaches were poached, or so The Daily Telegraph theorised. “Australian coaches are giving Australians black eyes all over London”, Paul Kent chided, arguing that 2012 was the price we had to pay for selling out. Sure, Aussie trained foreign athletes won 14 gold medals in London but the international coaching market is hardly a new phenomenon. “We’ve known it has happened for a long time,” AOC deputy chef de mission Kitty Chiller said at the time.
This explanation, weak as it is, makes a convenient case for more federal and state funding to be pumped into Olympic efforts. Before the athletes were even back on home soil Kevan Gosper, Australia’s senior representative on the International Olympic Committee, was telling anyone who would listen that public funding had been lacking for some time and that if we wanted gold, we were going to have to pay for it.
Meanwhile, others screamed across the world wide web that our spoilt swimmers wasted away their talents and our taxpayer dollars. The swimmers themselves didn’t entirely disagree.
Sprinter Emily Seebohm, who managed ‘only’ a silver in the 100-metre backstroke with a time less than her best, held Facebook accountable. “I just felt like I didn’t really get off social media and into my own head.”
Or perhaps, we reasoned, it was the states that weren’t pulling their weight. As a 2012 Roar article contends, Victoria didn’t bring home any gold medals. In fact, there are Sydney suburbs who fared better than the premiere sports state.
And then there is the adage that as a nation we were putting too much time and energy into cricket and football codes that would never deliver any medal, let alone a gold one.
Investigations were launched and money has now been spent. In May 2014 new Sports Minister Peter Dutton announced that 650 Australian athletes with medal prospects would receive a share of $1.6 Million in reallocated funding and the AIS was given a $120 Million budget for the 2014-15 tax year.
The swimmers, who arguably disappointed the most, have since infamously been labelled as “culturally toxic” and suffered through two separate damning reports.
With each press release and media conference, we are once again lulled into that familiar and comforting sense of Olympic entitlement. On the eve of Rio, we’ve made amends for London.
We’re paying our bills, we’ve persecuted necessarily and now all that’s left to do is sit back and watch the gold rush in.
Or maybe not.
At the conclusion of London 2012, The Guardian studied previous games and traditional success indicators such as GDP, population size and the number of athletes in each nation’s Olympic team. What the research found was an all round lack of clarity. This is sport after all.
A once in a lifetime talent like Usain Bolt can skew the data off the charts. As can Liu Xiang who walked out of Beijing National Stadium in 2008, just moments before his 110-metre hurdles heat, with the dashed hoped of the host nation weighing him down.
The medal tallies of games past do illustrate the dominance of highly populated countries. The United States, China, the USSR turned Russia. In this realm, our 23 million is all but irrelevant. And yet even this gauge isn’t reliable. One only has to point to Jamaica’s success and India’s lack of it.
The fact is that when it comes to Olympic sports, triumph is not the result of a complex equation with clear inputs and outputs.
There is no direct correlation between medals won and well, any other factor. Rather, it’s a cryptic riddle that we are yet to solve. Money alone will not guarantee success, nor raw talent. And yes, as a nation we have an immeasurable passion for sport, but this is not an exclusively Australian quality and we can’t rely on it as a force so uniquely ours.
Perhaps we were unprepared for the realities of London. But let’s not fool ourselves that higher spending and a stronger conviction will guarantee wins in Rio.
Despite the ability to punch above our weight, we are not entitled to victory. It is a competitive world out there and we are only one player. If there is a lesson to take away from London, it is that our love of sport shouldn’t be measured in medal tallies. In Rio we may learn to celebrate the challenge.
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