It's not always money; learn from others

As mentioned in last week’s column Australia’s performance in the 2012 London Olympics has triggered a debate in the country’s sports community, especially its program in swimming where the country won only one gold medal – in the women’s 4x100 meter freestyle relay, and none in individual events.

Australia left London with 35 medals (seven gold, 16 silver and 12 bronze), the lowest since the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and far from the “dizzying heights” it attained in the past. Ten of these medals were won in swimming, one of the 23 sports in which Australia participated. Swimming accounted for 47 athletes (23 men and 24 women) of the 410 sent to London. The 35 medals were good for seventh over-all but the seven gold medals were good only for 10th place in terms of gold medals won. 

What magnified the country’s so-so performance (relative to the amount it spent for the London Olympics) was the fact that New Zealand’s performance of six gold medals was just a shade below that of Australia whose population of 21 million is five times that of New Zealand’s four million. Australia’s neighbor got its six gold medals from rowing (3), canoe-sprint (1) and sailing (1).

Writer Matt Wordsworth in his article written in London on Aug. 13, the day after the Olympics, says that Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) President John Coates acknowledges that Australia’s Olympic success is waning especially the swimming team which he called a “disappointment”. Coates stated that the team contributed 20 of the 46 medals won in Beijing in 2008 compared with only 10 in 2012.

Wordsworth states despite Australia’s performance, Coates is not asking for more money. Coates emphasizes that Great Britain spent Great Britain Pounds (GBP) 1.2 billion or P 81.2 billion over four years but so did France and Germany which got remarkably different results. France and Germany pocketed 11 gold medals each, although the latter won 44 medals to the latter’s 34.

New Zealand’s rowing program is funded on less money than Australia’s, according to Coates who has set his sights on the heads of individual sports federations. Coates says that “They’re (sports federations) largely being very very well-funded by the Australian Sports Commission and with that (come) responsibilities of delivering”.

Coates’ statements in Wordsworth’s article, vary with what he said in an interview with Sportsmail Reporter dated August 6 where he blamed the Australian government’s lack of financial support and a lack of compulsory sport in schools for the Australian athletes failure to achieve gold medal success in London.

Sportsmail stated that former Olympian Kevin Gosper, Australian member of the IOC, told the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) the failure to win gold medals resulted directly from cuts in government funding of Olympic sports in 2009. The GBP 35 million (P2.4 billion) earmarked for Olympics-focused high performance sports was only half what the AOC had lobbied for.

Coates, according to the Sportsmail report, also laid blame at the feet of the government saying it needed to change policy and priorities to ensure funding was available for sport in schools: “Perhaps the area that needs a lot of attention… and government intention in terms of policy is getting sport back in the school curricula. The British are making a big thing of that being one of the legacies they’re looking towards and they’ve been achieving that, a greater emphasis on sport in schools. We need that because we’ve got to make sure we have a talent pool”.

Australian Federal Sports Minister Kate Lundy however told ABC that Australian athletes were still up with the best and the world …and there’s no one piece of our sports system that’s broken.”

Policy issues however have also surfaced. According to “Swimming Science” which analyzed Australia’s performance in London, says that the country has a large pool of swimmers and devoted large sums of money to the sport compared to other nations. The analysis states that the culprit could be the centralized system of training which might be initially successful but is not a guarantee for long term success since centralized control has to produce some decentralization to accommodate individual needs.

Swimming Science offers a number of prescriptions for Australian swimming (which should be instructive if we would only have the sense to study and benchmark), among them: 1. Emphasize decentralized coaching, swimmer development and scientific services with periodic centralized camps; 2. No swimmers should be encouraged to go from one coach to another. If the coach produces a champion swimmer, he should be able to work with the swimmer till the swimmer becomes an Olympic champion and 3. State Sport Institutes (like the “murdered” PHILSPORTS or Philippine Institute for Sports) should be sent out to help the best clubs to create conditions for training elite swimmers.

All these sound familiar but they are falling on deaf ears.