Tiger Woods has just touched down and the inevitable politicking has started in Victoria about whether the government should or should not pay for Tiger and other top golfers to come to our shores, and whether it is or isn’t worth it.
I don’t want to engage in that debate, at least not directly. What I do want to run up the flagpole is the proposition that athletes who we taxpayers help train and develop should be required to give back. And I’m not talking about giving back their time or their general aura, I’m talking about cold hard cash.
At the outset, let me acknowledge that the number of athletes who actually make a decent living from sport is, as a percentage of those who enter government-funded programs, minute.
And many of those who ultimately make it, do so after tremendous personal and family sacrifice.
But why should that mean that those who do end up making a living from sport should not repay the funding that helped get them there in the first place? Uni students have to pay for their education, so why not elite athletes?
Internationally, it’s not uncommon for junior athletes – particularly in tennis – to have their development privately funded in return for a share of future earnings that has no relativity to the actual funding. This type of arrangement carries with it significant social and ethical issues that we should try to avoid in Australia.
At a time when every other aspect of government spending is, rightly, coming under increased scrutiny, we should be exploring all options for making our sports funding pay back in real terms.
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