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I have been stewing on this article for a couple of years now, since about the time it dawned on me our national sporting slide was no short term blip, but might be here to stay.
Like some other Roarers, I was searching for answers as to why we have become sport’s also-rans.
Eventually it occurred to me I might be looking at the problem in the wrong way. I mean, why should a nation of 23 million people, ranked 52nd in the world in terms of population and 16th for economic size (thanks Wikipedia), expect to outperform the globe consistently at anything?
Perhaps it is more productive to try to work out how we got so good, back when we were good?
Thinking back, it seemed to me the 10 year period of roughly 1995-2005 was a particularly magic time to follow Aussie athletes at anything they did.
So I started to think about who those sports stars were and what they might have in common.
Across a range of sports, I guessed that athletes hit their peaks between the ages of 25-35 (yes, I know gymnasts are younger, as often are swimmers, etc, but sailors, archers, shooters are usually significantly older, so on balance for a majority of sports, 25-35 seemed right).
So, picking a mid-point of athletes being 30 years of age in 2000, I took a look at the Australian Bureau of Statistics to see whether there was anything special about the year 1970.
Well, it turns out that there was something in the water, but there was even more of it in the following year – 1971. That was the year of the most births recorded in Australian history; 276,400 to be exact.
It turned out to be a sharp peak in the number of births that would not be surpassed again in this country until 2007, by which time the total population had almost doubled. Extraordinary, really.
So, using this year of births as the mid-point and exemplar of what many have already termed the golden generation, let’s examine our sporting results in the decade 1996-2006 – the years this cohort were at their sporting peak.
I have deliberately chosen a snapshot of high profile international sports, to water down cultural bias and highlight sporting performance versus the world. Hence I have excluded AFL and the NRL.
Let’s start with the daddy of them all, the Olympic Games.
1996 Atlanta – seventh place, 41 medals.
2000 Sydney – fourth place, 58 medals.
2004 Athens- fourth place, 50 medals.
This was Australia’s finest period, by any measure. The only other games where we came close to this level of performance were Beijing in 2008, which was at the tail end of this dream run, and 1956, where we had a home Olympics and most of the developed world was still rebuilding after World War II.
Within these medal tallies sat team sports like hockey and basketball, where they produced what are acknowledged as our greatest ever national teams, and others like rowing and cycling, where we pumped out teams, crews and individuals who won gold like never before.
How about the national game, cricket.
In World Cups, we were runners up in 1996, and world champions in 1999 and 2003 (and 2007). Can’t get much better than that.
From 1999 to 2001, the Test team set a world record for consecutive wins of 16 (which they later emulated from 2006-2008). We held the Ashes for that entire period, until the narrow upset series loss in 2005, which was ruthlessly avenged in 06/07 with a 5-0 whitewash.
We won historic away series in Pakistan and India, something that had eluded this group’s forebears.
The team produced players whose statistics and deeds as a combination were historical freaks, with a top seven batting order who all averaged around 50 or more, and the legendary Shane Warne/Glenn McGrath bowling combination.
Rugby union? After spending much of our history being just off the pace with the top tier sides of New Zealand and South Africa, the Wallabies went through an amazing period that included a World Cup win in 1999, and runners up in 2003.
Perhaps even more noteworthy, in terms of difficulty, Australia held the Bledisloe Cup from 1998-2002, a contest in which we have only ever won 20% of series contested. We haven’t won it since.
In addition, the Wallabies defeated the British and Irish Lions in a full series for the first and only time in 2001, and won two of their three Tri-Nations titles in 2001 and 2002.
Sounding a little Anglo-centric with these sports? How about the World Game – football.
The Socceroos qualified for the 2006 World Cup, for only the second time ever, with a veteran team of professionals who were playing in the English Premier League, Italian Serie A, and other European leagues.
Never before, or since, have we had so many Australians playing first-team football in the elite overseas leagues.
The team defied all expectations to make it out of their pool to the round of 16, still our best ever result. This team was populated by the Socceroos’ so-called ‘Golden Generation’, with players such as Mark Viduka, Tim Cahill, Harry Kewell, Lucas Neil, Mark Schwarzer, Mark Bresciano, and John Aloisi.
We had not seen their likes before in Australian football, and unfortunately we have not since.
An individual sport? Let’s try tennis.
It is well documented Australia dominated the game in the 50s and 60s, were still top tier in the 70s, but fell away in the 80s as the world discovered the game.
How did we fare in the far more competitive tennis landscape of the 1990s and 2000’s?
We had a mini-revival of sorts with four mens Grand Slam titles being won by Pat Rafter (1997,1998) and Lleyton Hewitt (2000,2001). We also won the last two of our Davis Cups in 1999 and 2003. We haven’t gone near it since.
We could look at any number of sports that tell a similar tale, like netball, snowsports, swimming, cycling, rowing etc.
The evidence is only circumstantial, but the link between the historic and dramatic spike in home grown Aussies being born in 1971, and the freakish domination of many world sports 25-35 years later is compelling.
Of course, not every sports star of the period was born in 1971. The two to three years either side of 1971 were also high years for births, so we are really talking about a roughly seven year cohort of 1968-1974 forming the backbone of national success.
I think this is significant for two reasons.
Firstly, the general Australian population has grown very healthily year on year, even as the number of births was falling and stagnating from the mid 70s until the early 2000s (except for a brief up-tick around 1992).
This indicates that in the field of sporting performance, it’s the number of children actually born in the country that counts. The overall size of the population, not so much.
Secondly, what does this mean for Australian sport? Do we have to wait until the children of 2007 reach sporting maturity, in roughly 2032-42, to experience our next Golden Age?
Or will the mini surge in population that occurred in 1992 deliver some form of respectability earlier than that, in 2017-2027? God I hope so!
Anyway, being a child of this generation myself, I have my theories as to why a birth surge contributed to sporting heaven for this country either side of the millennium.
Simply, at the micro scale, it bred competition. Bigger families meant more competition at home for everything, and less ‘princesses’.
Bigger class sizes at suddenly bursting schools, crammed into demountables and competing for the teacher’s attention, led to more phlegmatic and practical attitudes in the students.
School teams and age-group representative teams were all tougher to make than ever before, and eventually the job market was dire when this cohort graduated in a flood into the economic recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Put simply, this generation had to fight just a little bit harder to get to the top in anything, compared to their younger and older compatriots, and had a less entitled attitude than later groups.
Over to you Roarers. Do we have to wait until the children of 1992 or 2007 grow up to start kicking bum again? Was it a one-off moment in time?
Or is it just a cycle that will turn back in our favour pretty soon anyway?
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