Kitty Chiller has done and said many strange things in the last four months, some heavily scrutinised and some not, but she’s left one of her most confusing statements of Australia’s Rio Olympic campaign until last.
Speaking of the accreditation activity that ended with a group of Australian athletes being detained by Rio police, Chiller’s initial reaction was: “I became aware of it a few days earlier and I put a stop to it. I said that’s not the way that our team should behave. And it shouldn’t be facilitated.”
Putting aside the fact that Chiller’s since altered her stance to one of emphatic support for the athletes – who Fairfax Media reports were issued the offending stickers by a team official – you question exactly what she’d put a stop to if nine athletes almost ended up in the clink for trying to sneak into a basketball match.
Far worse is what the initial statement about the athletes’ behaviour says about Chiller’s confused Olympic philosophies and policy-on-the-run management; bearing in mind that the practice of athletes and officials sneaking into Olympic stadiums as the Australians tried to do has been common for generations, how would piling into the arena to support the Boomers not conform precisely to Chiller’s “One Team” ideal? Those athletes were, if anything, behaving exactly how a patriotic Australian would.
The Australian Olympic committee (AOC) and their overpaid, under-scrutinised executive class should actually be thrilled with Chiller’s omnipresence at these Games, because she and the Australian sports commission can wear all the flak they’re unwilling to take. The AOC love a slogan and over the course of these Games they could have settled on the perfect one: Over-promise, under-deliver, shift the blame.
Still, Chiller can’t complain about being the public fall guy. She made a rod for her own back with the relentless carry-on before and during the Olympics. Her ongoing public feuds with Nick Kyrgios, Bernard Tomic, the city of Rio, shonky tradesmen, Brazilian crime rates, the Zika virus and myriad other personal grumbles marked her as the Australian most likely to start a news-making argument in an empty room.
And by the time these Games kicked off Chiller was quantifiably more famous than the Australian swimmers whose failures we’re now supposed to care about; far more frequently Googled than any and all of Cameron McEvoy, Emily Seebohm, Mack Horton, and Kyle Chalmers among Australian medal hopes. Until Saturday, when Chloe Esposito claimed a surprise gold, Chiller was also the most famous modern pentathlete in the country. You could argue she still is.
Yet the level of “blame” Chiller should wear for Australia’s disappointing campaign depends on how much, if anything at all, you think one person in a ceremonial position like hers can can actually control, and also how much responsibility for their personal and competitive failings these grown adult, professional athletes can abdicate. This is without mentioning the arrogance of believing that Australian athletes have some divine right to medals when they’re competing against densely populated and lavishly funded rival nations. If anything she went above and beyond.
Chiller’s greatest skill, in hindsight, is how expertly she gained support from a compliant Australian media; her pre-Games campaign to oust Kyrgios and Tomic (who both stood at least a puncher’s chance of taking medals) was a masterstroke in gaining almost unqualified support from a host of prominent and influential sports columnists and shock jocks, for whom the tennis stars have been frequent and profitable punching bags; bemoaning the act of Australian swimmers removing posters of Herb Elliott and Cathy Freeman in favour of their own also plays to the not-in-my-day leanings of the old guard.
For Chiller’s critics, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how far she’s overreached or underperformed in the course of these Games, because for the best part of 30 years beforehand the chef de mission position was filled by current AOC president John Coates, whose multi-tasking tendencies for so long blurred the lines between his numerous job titles. Now his main duty seems to be forcing himself into the frame as medals are won.
It tells a sidebar story of the Games’ obscurity outside of Olympic years that although appointed to this job in 2013, Chiller had barely made waves until the last four months. “I see myself as the CEO of the team,” she boldly announced in September 2015, and based the willingness of AOC spokesman Mike Tancred to have Chiller handle so many media and diplomatic commitments, it can hardly be argued she’s acted without portfolio.
Chiller’s fast rise to prominence and the potential for an abrupt fall now is actually a media story as much as anything. Once established as a “polarising” figure who wound up readers, she became ripe for the stat-boosting search engine optimisation bonanzas on which news websites thrive, a point made here with no absence of irony (Chiller appeared in at least eight Guardian stories in the months before Rio). In fact, having both achieved infamy so effortlessly, Chiller and Kyrgios were actually a match made in heaven.
In the lead-up to the Games both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian ran lengthy profile pieces on Chiller that bordered on encomiums. Now, the Huffington Post has stood to “salute her”. For a pre-Games story about the Australian athletes’ village being robbed, even the normally sober wires service AAP got in on the act, leading an otherwise predictable story about a few items of stolen Australian team kit as follows: “Australian Olympic boss Kitty Chiller crossed paths with brazen Brazilian thieves who stole Zika-protective shirts during a fire evacuation …” Add in a “KAPOW!” and a “BIFF!” and you’ve got yourself a nice little superhero comic strip.
But this was a case of the media talking amongst itself, and working under the shonky premise that Chiller was misunderstood, under-appreciated and the recipient of a raw deal. In actual fact, the harshest critiques of her leadership lay outside the press box.
Far too little discussion has focused on Chiller’s muddled team ideals. She said athletes should stop whingeing about Rio’s water quality while continuing to do so herself when it came to virtually everything else about the place; she said she’d “fight to the death” for members of the Australian team, just not the ones about whom she wrote 16-page letters of complaint; she claimed Kyrgios didn’t respect what it meant to be an Australian Olympian and a member of a team, but Chiller’s own Olympic experience in 2000 finished when she locked herself in her bedroom at the athletes’ village after her event.
If all of this accurately represents the organisational mantras of the AOC, it’s little wonder that so many of their pronouncements are met with cynicism and snark.
Yet Chiller and the influential boosters who’ve enabled her are now faced with a dilemma as the Games end; Australia’s athletes both underperformed and, by the censorious standards imposed upon them, misbehaved. Both failings expose their brash leader’s pious pre-Games bloviating for precisely what it was. Chiller confronts perhaps the harshest reality of all: even if she had presided over a medal bonanza, Australians don’t hold ticker-tape parades for administrators.
