We need to take the pressure off our Olympians

Mitch, it is a hard one. I used to get stressed about such an issue when young and competing in athletics in my 20s. Sort of switched off AFL for a while, and could not understand why great track and field athletics were largely ignored. Eventually I accepted it was never going to be that popular, besides brief interest in the big games. Australia is indeed a great sporting nation, but only has extensive interest in a few sports on a mass scale. I am not sure what can be done. Hopefully having a few olympic finalists on the track can help. I am hoping Hoare can medal in the 1500m.

To say the public has "no" interest is not true. Lots of Australians will watch the Olympics, because they want to. Keep it real.

pretty much agree with that

Nice article Mitch. . Being involved in athletics, it is always interesting to see how friends of mine talk about athletics events that occurred overnight. More recently, the performances of Stewart McSweyn and Jessica Hull. I think a natural attraction to our sport of athletics is these incredible performances but they are often only ever consumed in short-form content. . Athletics needs to realise that unless a highly-influential public figure gets involved to drive the sport into the public domain, it must do it itself. What is even scarier, is that the Olympic (and Commonwealth) Games are no longer gaining the same type of public recognition and are almost certainly going to continue to decline in the interest of the general public. Athletics (and other Olympic based sports) must come up with an annual 'season' where the top athletes are on display. Think of the old Track Classic meets that used to occur each year. . We have a fantastic opportunity as a sport to promote our athletes using different forms of media. I can log on now to Twitch and watch a 17-year-old kid playing a video game to 1 million concurrent viewers. The days of requiring a consistent place on a television network are long gone. Let's increase our resources in the digital space and show off our athletes. . Let's create a series of meets that occur each year which has a shortened competition that is finished in 90 - 120 minutes. Have two or three programs which cover every event and roll the program out consistently. Have the events run to a hard schedule where people know when and where they are going to see. I'm involved in a sport where we have a schedule that is to the minute. Though in athletics, a Track event can be delayed (or even run early) substantially. . Let's figure out as a sport the best way to cover an event. How does a long jump need to be filmed, do we need to show all six jumps (or are the final three enough?). How can we show some of the less 'entertaining' events. Ensure the program of events are easily able to be broadcast. Ensure proper coverage of the event across multiple platforms. Behind the scenes on social accounts, fast turn around times for footage (or imagery) that may be of interest to larger publications. . Athletics must find a way to display its own sport in a way that is of interest to the general public. Waiting for 'mainstream' media isn't the way to go and almost certainly won't come knocking. . Just my two-cents worth!

You are spot on about the Little A's/ big A's/school disconnect

Sorry about the wall of text, can anyone tell me why my paragraphs didn't come out in the wash?

I’ll chuck in my thoughts, firstly in response to matth’s ideas and then my own. Training to peak every year is generally fine. Track & field athletes do it every year for state championships, national championships, the international season, track season, cross-country season etc. No real worries there, so it you were to discover a publicly attractive competition I think it’d be fine doing it every year. I agree that a teams competition could be more exciting, but no need to limit it to states. You could go with cities, training squads (which is where the real tribalism is, for the athletes at least) or even somewhat contrived teams like they did for the Nitro Athletics event they did a few years ago. If you’re looking for ideas for making athletics attractive to the wider public, there are some ideas. One that I wonder about is professional vs amateur competitions. Most people would be familiar with amateur competitions: these are things like national champs where people qualify to compete, everyone races in a ‘normal’ race and obviously don’t get paid. Hardly anybody watches these outside the athletes and their family/friends. Professional races are invitation-only, usually use handicaps and involve some payment. It’s quite a small practice compared to ‘normal’ races that not many would know about, but there are some well known races. The Stawell Gift is one of these. Once upon a time this was incredibly popular, as you can see on old youtube videos, with the banks of grass tracks in regional towns absolutely packed. They also attracted seriously high quality athletes, such as Cathy Freeman and Craig Mottram. The Stawell Gift isn’t a one-off – there are plenty of other popular professional meets like this, but obviously Stawell is the most famous. With the handicaps they are a lot of fun to watch, it’s usually a local intimate environment and of course there’s betting, always popular with the masses. I often wonder if more events like this couldn’t make athletics more popular. It’s hard to exactly pin down what has made the Stawell Gift famous across the country (either the handicapping, the betting, the local setting, or something else), but I’m sure there are elements which could be transferred into a national league of similar events. Another thing to work on is the blending of Little Athletics with athletics more generally. This means both organisationally and in common practice. The organisation Little Athletics (LA) has a laughably dysfunctional and isolated relationship with Athletics Australia (AA), which is again separate from the other major player School Sports Australia, all of whom are usually quite disconnected with numerous private organisations like parkrun or fun-run organisers. The spat between LA and AA seriously hurts the sport. Little As is an incredibly popular sport for kids – on a Saturday morning go to the local oval which hosts the weekly Little As meet and you’ll be stuck in a quagmire of traffic. It’s heaving. It’s great for naturally gifted youngsters as well as kids wanting to avoid rigorous team sports, and can just dip into the long jump or have a quick race. But as soon as they hit 15, the age when they might just be showing real talent and thinking about committing to a sport more seriously, Little As stops and provides absolutely no continuity to other athletics events, to those organised by AA or anyone else. It’s as abrupt as a cliff. They need to sort it out, so kids can continue to choose it as ‘their’ sport right through high school and into adulthood. The final thing I’d say is about running, which is obviously not all of athletics but is the aspect I can speak to most. The simple act of running is incredibly common to so many Australians, for something as simple as going for a run around the park. This connects us to the elite in a way that no other sport can. We can join a parkrun or 10k fun-run and find ourselves in the same event as an Olympian or international representative – nobody will ever accidentally find themselves lining up against Dustin Martin or bowling to Steve Smith. This should absolutely be taken advantage of, from both perspectives. Community running events should be incorporated into a national points-scoring calendar of events for the elite runners where they simply need to show up, and just treat it as a training session, as well as heavily market these events to the public as opportunities for the average joe to brush shoulders with Olympians. This should help to narrow the gap between the masses of runners out there and the mostly invisible elite, as Mitch the author spoke about.

Well firstly thanks for the shout out with that quote :stoked: . Secondly, I have no solution. The key would be more regular competitions that mean something to regular punters, which is i'd imagine what the Diamond League tries to accomplish. But there is so much competition for eyeballs, that I'm not sure how to get cut through with such a competition. Plus is peaking each year or more often actually detrimental to the once in four years build up? I don't know it's not my sport. I guess if the Australian championships could actually resonate with the general public you would at least have once a year publicity. Maybe make it more of a teams event between the states?

In reality no one cares about these sports and won’t buy into any marketing or promos. The athletes are lucky enough to get public funding because every 4 years the world meets in a digit measuring contest to beat their chests about sports they otherwise have no interest in It’s a sham, they should consider themselves lucky to get paid public funds to do this Each Olympics the public cares less and less