Let the games begin.
No, not the Olympics or Paralympics. Rather, the blame games, Australia’s new favourite quadrennial event.
My first day as the CEO of Basketball Australia was day seven of the London Olympics. I started the new job just in time to officially take part in the blame games, and 2016 is already looking reminiscent of 2012.
Here’s the synopsis: Australia falls well short of making its stated aim of being one of the top five medal winning nations at the Olympics. The media blames the government for spending $12 squillion of taxpayer funds (approximately) per medal. The Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) blames the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) for, once again, getting it all wrong. The ASC will, after holding a review, blame the national sporting organisations (NSOs). One NSO in particular – Swimming Australia – will get the bulk of the blame because it’s a national sport to blame the swimmers – even chef-de-mission Kitty Chiller got in on that game.
And the Olympic athletes? Mostly, they just blame themselves, though sometimes they blame a hernia, or other times, the referees.
It’s an unedifying spectacle.
At the heart of the 2016 blame games sits “Australia’s Winning Edge,” the federal government’s new “backing winners” approach to sports funding. Led by businessman John Wylie as chair of the ASC, Winning Edge was designed to take a hard-nosed, evidence-based – really, a venture capitalist approach – to allocating high performance sports funding.
Because “Australia’s Winning Edge” in 2016 won Australia less medals than London in 2012, people like the chairman of the AOC, John Coates, have pronounced it a failure.
John Coates is wrong. Well, mostly wrong.
The ASC’s “Winning Edge” is correct insofar as it demands sports put forward “performance cases”, design detailed high performance plans to achieve set targets, and report annually with the funding decisions able to be adjusted to reflect progress or lack thereof.
In the case of basketball, we had depth charts for each position, in some cases identifying current 14-year-olds. We had player evaluations, player injury and age management plans, detailed plans for developing team culture, and coaching profiles and plans. For the Boomers, we also had a very nifty piece of analysis showing how Olympic men’s basketball medals are won by nations who have the the majority of their players playing the majority of their minutes in the NBA – accompanied by a data showing how our team would compare to those nations by 2016.
The funding panel grilled us, as it did all sports. It handed down decisions that were not based on emotion and nostalgia, but rather, on hard-nosed evidence. Sports like soccer and swimming saw their funding cut. Basketball did pretty well – the Opals earning a slight increase with a medal target of one, the Boomers largely staying even but not targeted to win a medal at Rio.
John Coates and others might say, well – there you go. The Opals didn’t even get to the medal match, and the Boomers were 9.7 seconds away from winning a medal. That proves the Winning Edge strategy got it wrong.
No. It proves that inputs do not equal outputs exactly, and especially in sport. Athletes are human beings, not robots. No matter how good the preparation, there will be good days and bad days, good calls and bad calls, good luck and bad luck. That’s what makes the Olympics so thrilling to watch.
The ASC also made clear that NSOs could not continue to expect money to flow from the government, and that commercialisation and sponsorships would need to become part of sports’ high performance plans. Governance reform was also demanded, especially where it would aid with commercialisation by bringing state sporting affiliates on board and bringing more business expertise to sporting organisations’ boards.
If Coates has a better way to allocate funding for Olympic sports, maybe he should lay it out there. After 25 years in the job, he’s had plenty of time to do so.
I said Coates was mostly wrong about Winning Edge. There are three areas where the strategy could be improved, starting with its too-ambitious target of Australia being in the top five medal nations at the Olympics.
Australia has only achieved this distinction four times in the 28 modern Olympics: 1956, Melbourne; 1960, Rome; 2000, Sydney; 2004, Athens.
You see the pattern: Australia hosts the Olympics, we throw money at it, we have home field advantage, and we get to compete in every event. We do well, and the effect tails into the next Olympics. Then it’s over.
By contrast, Australia has reached the top 10 medal nations on 16 occasions of 28 Olympics.
I’m all for a target that stretches us, but not one that history tells us is out of our grasp unless we are the host nation. Maybe top 10, or even top eight, is a more realistic target for Winning Edge.
The other two challenges for Australia have nothing to do with funding, culture, or governance reform for sporting organisations. These challenges are the two “Ps”: population and participation.
We are a nation of 24 million. There is no ongoing, sustainable funding formula that is going to magically fix the fact that the Americans, British, Chinese, Russians and Germans – the top five medal nations in 2016 – have millions of more bodies to choose from when picking their Olympic teams. (Even Peter Costello’s Baby Bonus didn’t come close.) Our problem is not that we don’t have the right strategy to get to the top five: our problem is we don’t have enough people. We ought to just accept this as a nation, and move on.
Sure, we can do it once in a while, when a particular talent like Lauren Jackson or Ian Thorpe or Cathy Freeman comes along, or when we really throw squillions at it like we did for Sydney 2000. Look the British – they massively outperformed in London, they still have the taper of that happening in Rio. Even with their population advantage, I’m willing to bet the British medal tally falls in 2020 and 2024.
Our other challenge is participation. If we are going to find the next Susie O’Neill or Patty Mills or Sally Pearson we need millions of kids swimming, dribbling and running. That means facilities: pools, courts and tracks. Fund for medals all you like, but absent a facilities funding strategy we will not have enough critical mass to choose from. Look at how Australian tennis has declined on the international stage as community tennis courts have disappeared from our suburbs and parks. The Crawford Report in 2009 argued strongly that participation at a community level is fundamental to our international sporting success. As part of its Rio 2016 review, the ASC should dust off the Crawford Report and read it again.
Or we can all just sit back and wait for the blame games in 2020.
