Is Australia’s sporting dominance over?

Australian sporting triumphs are no more (AAP Photo/ Pablo Ramire)

When our cricketers exited the World Cup a week earlier than they would have liked, it was the last remaining piece of evidence to confirm what we already knew: Australia’s dominance of world cricket was well and truly over.

Having already relinquished the Ashes earlier in the summer, and the number one Test ranking position the year before, we had now also surrendered the World Cup trophy. And with it, the title of best One Day International team in the world.

However, many pundits believe that our fall from grace in cricket is merely symptomatic of a much greater issue.

Include the Kangaroos loss to the Kiwi’s in the Rugby League World Cup in 2008, and the Wallabies inability to hoist the Rugby World Cup since 1999, and it’s probably not surprising that we hear the sweeping phrase “Australia’s sporting dominance is over”.

Firstly, I think we need to be very careful ever using the term ‘dominant’.

It implies that we are unequivocally the best sporting nation in the world, and I’m not sure how you could ever claim such a title. It’s very hard to quantify, and any system of measuring such a title is inherently flawed.

You could add up every country’s world champions, world cups, number one rankings, gold medals, etc, and whoever has the most could potentially be deemed the most dominant.

But surely some sports will have a greater weighting than others? Likewise, should factors such as the size of the country’s population come into play? And I personally have always felt that consistency should be an important variable as well.

The truth is, it’s a very hard adjudication to make.

But I appreciate that fans can simply be prone to hyperbole, and perhaps a more accurate synopsis would be that Australia has, quite simply, had some great success in world sport.

Jumping into the time machine, no point in time signified this success better than the period before, during and just after the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Apart from hosting the ‘best Olympics Games ever’, we also finished 4th on the medal tally, a truly remarkable feat. We were the holders of the World Cups in rugby union, rugby league, netball and cricket.

Pat Rafter was (very briefly) ranked the number one tennis player in the world. And you can name many, many more Australian great sporting accomplishments around that time.

Critics will point out that football, the Winter Olympics, and a myriad of other sports are missing from that ‘success’ list for Australia.

However, that merely backs up my point that we could never claim ‘dominance’, but could legitimately declare ‘great success’ just over ten years ago.

But let’s jump back to the present and reassess how we’re currently placed.

After the stunning 58 Olympic medals won in 2000, which placed us 4th on the medal tally, we won 46 at Beijing in 2008, to finish fifth.

Still fantastic numbers, but the latest annual analysis of Olympic sports predicts Australia will slip further to eighth on the medal tally in London.

The Wallabies were bundled out in the quarter finals in the 2007 Rugby World Cup. They last held the Tri Nations trophy way back in 2001, and haven’t hoisted the Bledisloe Cup since 2002.

Whilst they are currently ranked second in the world, the team above them (New Zealand) has won 10 of the last 11 encounters and that solitary Wallabies win was a dead-rubber in Hong Kong.

And it was little more than an exhibition match for the All Blacks.

I’ve already mentioned the loss of the Cricket Word Cup, and in terms of Test rankings, we’ve slipped all the way to fifth on that particular ladder. And I would argue that we still haven’t quite figured out Twenty20 cricket yet, let alone be rated the best at it.

Whilst the NRL is the prominent rugby league competition in the world, at international level the Kangaroos failed to capture the 2008 World Cup, and the 2010 Four Nations tournament, which were both won by New Zealand.

As hard as it may be to swallow, Australian rugby league fans simply cannot claim that Australia is the number one rugby league nation at present.

Despite currently having three players in the NBA (Andrew Bogut, Patty Mills and David Andersen), the Boomers world ranking in basketball has slipped to 9th.

Lleyton Hewitt is our only male tennis player ranked in the top 100, placed at 64 – and that’s a pretty generous ranking.

In football, we’ve qualified for two World Cups, even (controversially) losing to eventual winners Italy in 2006. But we are not currently ranked within the top 20 teams in the world.

For now, I’ve excluded AFL and some female sports on purpose, and I’ll cover why tomorrow.

Admittedly, this is just a selection of sports and doesn’t cover the entire spectrum. I’m sure many readers will comment on other Australian athletes and teams that are, in fact, world champions or ranked number one.

But, nonetheless, the above sports are the most popular in the country, and the ones with the most media coverage, highest financial backing, largest crowd attendance figures, and generate the most overall interest.

It stands to reason that these are the sports we want to be number one at.

But we’re not.

Australia prides itself on being a sporting nation. Such is the value we put on athletic pursuits, that only in this country do states squabble over which is the ‘sporting capital of the Australia’.

Rightly or wrongly, we place a heightened importance on sport. This is not the forum to discuss whether or not that importance is misguided or foolish. In fact, considering it’s a sports website, I’m sure we’re all a little biased.

But thankfully for us, the importance we place on sport has been reflected in the results we have achieved. Whilst saying that we have dominated global sport is an over-claim (and arrogant), there is no doubt that we have achieved some fantastic results, and punched well above our weight.

Yet, what is also not in doubt is the fact that, in the sports that seem to matter most to us, we are not performing as well as we have in the past.

Pessimists would say we’re at sporting nadir.

Whilst I don’t think it’s anywhere near that dramatic or bleak, the question does need to be asked: why?

As you would expect, it’s probably a complex answer.

Some claim that 2009’s Crawford Report has resulted in government sports funding being slashed.

But that’s not entirely accurate, and even if it was, the effect would be lagged, not acute, meaning any effect that less funding has would be unlikely to have taken affect yet. Nor would it affect most of the sports I mentioned anyway.

Others claim it’s a simple case of the laws of gravity: what goes up, must come down. We’ve had our time at the top, and now we’re coming down.

Similar to the gravity analogy, others believe such periods are cyclical, and we are simply in a downward trend at present.

Yet another reason offered is the belief that some of the individual major sports haven’t been well run of late, and we are suffering the consequences.

Cricket Australia, for example, is currently under fire for slide in the rankings, with board members, the Sheffield Shield, selectors, coaches and the players all identified as reasons why we’re no longer number one.

Perhaps our smaller population size is finally catching up with us, as larger countries capitalise on the sheer amount of people at their disposal.

Many countries have also dramatically increased the financial investment in their sporting programs, and are thus reaping the benefits.

Linked to that point, many nations have poached our best coaches and sports scientists.

Perhaps the proliferation of sport in the country is doing us damage? It does seem like we want to be the best at as many things as possible, rather than choosing a few to concentrate on. You could call it fragmentation due to choice of sport.

Was it luck? Shane Warne, Ian Thorpe, Joey Johns, Tim Horan/John Eales, etc, were arguably the best ever at their respective sports, and at the height of their powers ten years ago.

Complacency, lazy administrators and ‘Olympics hangover’ have all also been mentioned.

What it definitely won’t be due to is participation rates, facilities or issues with the climate, which are all variables in which we have an edge over other countries.

Is it all of these things? None of these things?

Tomorrow I’ll discuss my left-field theory.

But whatever the reason for Australia’s slip in international sporting status, let’s hope it’s temporary, not permanent.