Every time I see a headline or hear a report about the London Olympics, I have to look at the calendar to make sure I have not been spirited back in a time machine to 1976.
The whole scenario seems a complete déjà vu not only for the results but also for the promised ‘reviews’ into our “poor performance”.
For those of you old enough to remember, Australia enjoyed some golden years in sport in general during the sixties and early seventies, especially in swimming.
The impressive gold medal haul in Munich by teenage wonder kids like Shane Gould and Beverly Whitfield etc gave us a feeling of great accomplishment that inspired a whole new wave of youngsters to follow them.
In 1975 Jenny Turrell held the world record at fourteen and the ‘Superfish’ Stephan Holland seemed to break his own world 1500 metre record every time he got wet. On the track our media darling Raelene Boyle gave us every confidence she could go one better than her two silvers in Munich.
Montreal rolled around with Australia buoyant of another medal haul like Munich. Turrell finished last and was accused of being overweight and under fit, Holland was criticised for getting poor coaching, and Boyle’s disqualification in the final of the 200 metres, when she was the fastest qualifier, just plain broke our hearts.
The same feeling of ‘what has gone wrong’ beset the Australian public as it has now. However, our disappointment was not over yet. We had one last chance to grab a gold and salvage pride, the men’s hockey final. Australian had beaten the seemingly ‘unbeatable’ Indians in the lead up and ‘only’ had to beat our cousins from across the ditch to salvage some pride.
Ask Ric Charlesworth and he still names it as one of his darkest days in his hockey career and one where New Zealand has every right to gloat over us. In addition to the Stephen Holland race the gold medal in hockey was the only one beamed ‘live’ to Australia.
I will never forget getting up very early on a bitterly cold morning to watch the match. My father never needed to ask who won when he joined me in the lounge room and saw the length of my face. We finished the games without a single gold.
It took a long painful 28 years to get that “monkey of the back”, as the late great Wally Foremen called it, in Athens when the Kookaburra’s reached their destiny in winning that elusive gold medal. The hex was broken.
Now it seems to be occurring all over again with Swimming Australian announcing a review of into its London Games performance. As Nic Green and many others all have pointed out, the peaks and troughs of Olympic success perhaps are just a generational thing that goes in cycles.
One of those cycles could be also the inflated expectations by the public and media of one games performances based on the results of the successful previous one, rather than the current world rankings and lead up results.
The review in 1976 resulted in the formation of the Australian Institute of Sport. Perhaps it was naively modelled on the Eastern Bloc styled ‘sports factories’ that seemed to produce the stunning results in Montreal, especially in swimming.
The only thing that Australia did not replicate at its institute was the ‘vitamin’ program for athletes, and as we now know was the true reason for that Eastern Bloc success and not the centralised training programs.
Maybe now the one thing that may come out of the ‘reviews’ into the London games, is perhaps the questioning of the relevance of the AIS. Has it served its purpose and have we moved on?
However, it was desperately needed at the time as funding for coaching and biomechanical research etc was woefully lacking.
Maybe getting all our coaches back that have been poached overseas may be one solution to help our results or should we take that as a compliment that they were so valued.
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