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.
Albs
Guest
Paul, no-one's blaming Australian coaches for going overseas and coaching. Nor is anyone being hypocritical, we have no problem with Australian coaches coaching overseas or foreign coaches coming to Australia. People are actually criticising Australian governments for failing to poor enough money into elite sport (compared to other countries), no surprise that coaches coach overseas when they get paid three times more. The Australian government is responsible for the coaching drain.
Jocelyn McLennan
Roar Guru
Everyone lighten up...you are going to have to learn to recognise satire when you read it
Paul
Guest
I've read a few stories now which have included reference to the coaching 'drain' - Australian coaches now overseas with other teams. I find this such a simplistic and hypocritical argument. How many coaches have we recruited from O/S over the last twenty years? I beleive the head coach of the sailing team, and could be argued the only team living up to expectations for London, is Ukrainian. Surely if it's ok for us to use the knowledge and perspective of foreign coaches, we've got to accept that a few of ours will go the other way?
Karen
Guest
No wonder the Poms have gold they spent 720 million dollars to get them compared to Australia's 150 million - over 4x times the Australian budget.
Jocelyn McLennan
Roar Guru
Tom I refer to them as the Brits or team GB if I have ever used Poms it is only repeating someone else's terms. And yes they have well and truly exceeded our home Olympics effort. Game, set and match to the Brits. And no need for such vitriole Tom to make your point. The point of my article is that Australia is undertaking the same reviews of its performance that it did in 1976 as I am sure the British did after the 1996 Atlanta games where they only won one gold.
Tom Callaghan
Guest
Jocelyn, You wrote a few days ago that 'The Poms' had to get to 16 medals to make their achievement at London 2012 the equal of Australia's performance in Sydney. 'The Poms now have 25 golds and counting. 'The poms' have won golds across more sports than the USA.'The Poms will finish at least third in the medal table.When can we expect the Aussies 'charge' into the top five? How do 'The Poms' achievement at London compare with that of the Aussies at Sydney? Are you 'stoked' for 'The Poms'?
Albs
Guest
Why have we done poorly in London 2012? There's no single answer but a bunch of them. Part of it is that some of those who could have won gold medals if they'd matched their PBs choke. People like Emily Seebohm and James Magnussen. Part of the reason is that talent is cyclical. The cricket team's really feeling that effect now. Some years you have a bad harvest. Part of the reason is that money is misspent at the AIS, etc., some athletes shouldn't be using up public funding when they are past it and pretty much no-hopers. But sadly the main reason is that we're not spending enough money at either elite or grass-roots level, regardless of wasted money in the AIS. The Australian Government is spending $150m (Aus) on the Olympics this year, while the British Government will have spend $720m (Aus) on their Olympic talent (not counting infrastructure for hosting the games). I'm sorry but things are only going to get worse and worse unless we make drastic changes to the funding. Why are so many of our brilliant coaches coaching in the UK? Because they get paid more to. Grant Hackett's old coach gets paid half a million dollars a year to coach that 6"8 Chinese guy to smash world records. Even if we become smarter with how we spend our money, there still won't be enough. Money buys gold medals. Sure it shouldn't come at the sake of health or education or anything like that, but it's ludicrous to forsake the Olympics. The reason the UK can afford to spend much more on their Olympic team than we can ours is because unlike our funding (which comes from tax revenue), they have a single lottery system which was nationalised then privatised (but with so many stipulations) such that the group that runs that lottery only gets 0.5% of the revenue as profit and most of it goes towards sport and the arts. We really need to look at doing something like that here. Obviously it would be more difficult to nationalise Tatts Group (short of the Federal Government buying it out) or for the Federal Government to create a rival lottery group (which would founder because of the competition), but maybe we can find a way of extra taxation revenue from our lottery, pokies and casinos going towards sport-funding.
Johnno
Guest
-Reaility is this too,. Bruce Jenner one of the reaility tv stars in Kepping Up with the Kardashians actually won the gold medal for decathlon in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. When ever i hear about montreal i think of the keeping up with the kardashians show, you want think Bruce the man he is today and the silliness that goes on that show was once a gold medalist. -We need to start sending athletes who are in with a medal shot not, not just there to make up the numbers.London 2012 too manta athletics and swimmers who have only been there to make up the numbers. Not good enough. As it is public money actually send athletes in the sport who can win even if it means no Australians in that specific event.