But for a global pandemic, the heads of Australia’s Olympic sports would have been in Tokyo this week, waiting anxiously for the 2020 Games to begin on Friday. Four years of preparation and hundreds of millions of dollars had gone into an unprecedented Australian Olympic effort, in the hope of redemption following a disappointing Rio 2016 showing.
Instead, these decision-makers and their elite athletes are stuck at home in Australia, with one eye on the unfolding Covid-19 situation and another on the rescheduled Tokyo 2021 Olympics, which are now slated to start exactly a year from today.
Foremost on their mind is funding. High performance sport is expensive. And the coronavirus has already stung. “It has been very painful for most sporting organisations,” says Australian Institute of Sport director Peter Conde. “In many cases, they have had to reduce hours, or staffing, or stand staff down.”
While some major disciplines benefit from commercial dollars and ticket revenue, the overwhelming majority of Australian Olympic sports are funded by the federal government. With billions being spent on the Covid-19 response, some stakeholders are nervous about sport being forgotten.
“It has to be a concern,” says Simon Jones, performance director at Cycling Australia. “But we have to learn to live with this – sticking our heads in the sand is not a solution. We have been given confirmation that our funding will remain ‘in principle’. I am not too sure what that means, but that is our situation. We now live in an uncertain world with no guarantees.”
In April, the Australian Olympic Committee, Paralympics Australia and Commonwealth Games Australia wrote to the federal government on behalf of their 49 member sports, outlining a three-point plan to support sport during the pandemic. In June, sports minister Richard Colbeck answered the first of these pleas, announcing $50.6 million in additional funding for the next two years.
Matt Carroll, chief executive of the AOC, told Guardian Australia that this announcement was “absolutely welcome”. But the funding came with a caveat. The money represented a continuation of support for individual sports to employ additional coaches and sports scientists, after the AIS restructured in recent years, away from a centralised model. While this was much-needed – “otherwise we would have hit a cliff at the end of this year,” says Carroll – the government is yet to make any promises about the “base-line” funding that finances the bulk of high performance operations. That amounts to over $100m per year.
Sports will not know until October, when the federal budget is delivered, whether annual funding will continue at existing levels. But the AOC and AIS are optimistic. “I haven’t been given any indication that it will be bad news,” says Carroll. His counterpart Conde is similarly unconcerned. “We are very confident about the continuation of the baseline funding,” he says.
Covid-19 left the Australian sports with a strategic dilemma. For years, the AOC has noisily advocated for increased high performance funding – government spending on elite sport has not even matched inflation for over a decade. Suddenly, in this period of immense economic turmoil, the continuation of that campaign might have seemed tone-deaf.
“We took a view that at this particular time, with the pandemic, we would just seek to maintain the status quo,” says Carroll. “We know the government has a lot on its agenda; we just want certainty for the next two years. But we maintain that an investment in sport – which, in the scheme of the national budget, is not huge – has a fantastic return for the health and well-being of the community.”
While calls for further investment have temporarily ceased, AIS boss Conde says that – in light of the recently-announced funding, plus $54m over two years provided in the 2019 budget to support athlete engagement, well-being and pathways – sports are well-placed. “High performance sport can always use more money, but we are in a much better position that we have been in for some time,” he says.
Although the pandemic’s economic turbulence battered many sports, some of the smaller Olympic disciplines have found their already-lean business models well-placed to ride out the storm. Table Tennis Australia, which had been on the verge of insolvency in 2017, was in the final stages of a turnaround plan when the virus hit. “TTA completely overhauled its business model and that model has stacked up during the Covid-19 shut down,” says chief executive Scott Houston. “TTA has not had any staff cuts, hours cuts or salary cuts and we have actually hired two new staff.”
Paradoxically, the postponement of Tokyo 2020 and the global lockdown has even seen a financial windfall for some sporting organisations. “Not being able to travel, you save a lot of money,” says Jones, who is a frequent flyer with his cyclists ordinarily competing across the globe. “So short-term there is not much of a financial concern. But the longer-term horizon, we just don’t know. We can’t plan ahead.”
That future, provided a vaccine is found, will be busy. “We go from Tokyo next year, to Beijing for the Winter Olympics in February 2022, and the Commonwealth Games in mid-2022, and before we know it, we will be taking the team to Paris in 2024,” says Carroll.
Despite the action-packed calendar ahead, on Friday many Australian athletes and sporting fans will feel a pang of longing for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics that never arrived. Even amid the financial uncertainty and the ongoing pandemic, leaders of Australian sports are looking forward. The AOC will host a “one year to go” event for the 2021 Games. For Conde, “it will be work as normal. We will pause to think about it, of course, but we are working to a new timetable now.” Jones, meanwhile, has no time for what ifs. “Wondering about where we could have been won’t help much,” he offers. “We are too busy moving forward.”
