At the time of writing, Australia is languishing 19th on the official medal tally at the 2012 Olympic Games. When the 2009 Crawford Review came out suggesting that Government sports funding should be redirected to the general populace rather than elite athletes, and that a place in the top 10 is realistic, Coates came out screaming
Now he [Crawford] is telling us eighth is good enough, or maybe 10th is good enough for Mr Crawford. I just don’t think he gets it. It seems un-Australian to me to settle for something second best.
In response to Coates’ hissy-fit, the Rudd Government caved in and increased funding for elite athletes by $325 million. The Australian taxpayer has spent around $700 m over four years for the 2012 London Olympics. Coates naturally welcomed the increased funding, but by November last year, Coates was on the warpath for even more money, suggesting that the $700 million from Australia was insufficient when UK, France and Germany were putting in $1.2 billion each.
Well, if that’s right, each Australian is paying $30.97 for the Australian team, while each German is only paying $14.69 for the German team; each Brit $19.17 for the UK team and each Frenchman $18.35. So much for good value for Australia!
Coates suggested last November that Australia would struggle to be in the top five and could finish as low as eighth. Well, as noted above, we are currently 19th.
New Zealand, with only 184 athletes (compared with Australia’s 410 athletes at London) is currently ranked 12th. Total funding for High Performance Sport New Zealand is NZ$180 million over four years (A$139 million), not all of which is Olympics-related.
I’m waiting for Coates’ explanation – how can New Zealand, with far fewer athletes and far less funding end up higher on the medal table than Australia?
John Coates – resign now. You have cried wolf far too often.
(see also this article.
We’ve done that 10 times so far.
Bloody unusual for Aussie men to come second I must say.
Infidel Tiger
4 Aug 12 at 11:17 pm
Prediction – the AIS budget will rise at least 50% within the next 2 years in response to this.
PSC
4 Aug 12 at 11:38 pm
On that subject I see an ad for the new series of The Farmer Wants a Root. Half a dozen cockies and two dozen buckle bunnies. Now that’s an Olympic sport.
Pickles
4 Aug 12 at 11:39 pm
Our only saving grace is that fellow Anglosphere loafer, Canada, is coming 33rd with zero gold. Although I do hold high hopes for them in the moose wrangling.
Infidel Tiger
4 Aug 12 at 11:42 pm
I’d contribute handsomely to the AIS to see Coates hung, drawn and quartered,
14-Century England wasn’t all bad.
JamesK
4 Aug 12 at 11:43 pm
Gold medal for rent-seeking, but.
Abu Chowdah
4 Aug 12 at 11:47 pm
I think it’s just a casino. It’s luck, in the lap of the gods. The differences between Bronze and Gold can run to thousands of a second or something silly like that.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
4 Aug 12 at 11:51 pm
Forget the medals, he’s a fat pig with his snout in the public trough for the past quarter century.
I’d like to see his gizzards spill out
JamesK
4 Aug 12 at 11:56 pm
Women’s diving can have all the money they want.
Pickles
4 Aug 12 at 11:57 pm
Failed Gold hope Magnussen has been complaining about a lack of sleep. This after the AOC decided to ban Stilnox and other legal sedatives just because the media was creating a beat-up after the Richmond and Hackett ‘incidents’ (for want of a better term, they used it for its prescribed purpose). The athletes have travelled across the world, so jet lag, and plus would be experiencing the nerves of competition – so sleep issues would be expected. Some competitors will be taking banned drugs to gain an unfair advantage; our athletes are barred from taking the legal kind (Australia: must be world’s best, cleanest, set the example for others to follow…). A case of bureaucracy making matters worse?
Athletes banned from using Stilnox
Harold
4 Aug 12 at 11:59 pm
Bring back chariot racing events.
Gab
5 Aug 12 at 12:01 am
Seconded. Like in Gladiator. Bread and Circuses 4 us.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
5 Aug 12 at 12:04 am
Colgate and Coles have exhumed the excreable Mrs Marsh for Olympic ads. There ought be laws.
Pickles
5 Aug 12 at 12:08 am
Call myself not sure cause it seems to me that we have no difficulty giving healthy kids $700,000 yet the same govt seems paralysed by having to hand out $1,000,000 for the sick (NDIS).
Strange country and time we live in.
Not Sure
5 Aug 12 at 12:11 am
If you want a true measure of how important Olympic wins are, ask anyone if they can remember the Medal Tally one week after the games finish. And that’s in a normal year too, let alone one where two weeks of built-up bad economic news is about to be dumped on the world as soon as the closing ceremony is over.
south
5 Aug 12 at 6:48 am
So on a per athlete sent basis, Oz spent $1.7 million, and NZ spent around $1 million over four years. Staggering. And that’s without the corporate sponsorships of some sporting codes.
Keith
5 Aug 12 at 7:28 am
Good!
Maybe now, parents will stop driving their kids to chase personal dreams of personal sporting gold and personal fame and fortune, and start driving them into Nation Building Skills like engineering, hydrology, machining…well the list of actually productive, working heroes, this Great Land is in desperate need of, is almost endless.
And maybe, after this farce of a UNION/Greenie Government, that next crop of working heroes, will actually be allowed to be productive, in a Land FREE of UNION/Greenie Thuggish Dictators.
As a Nation, we’ve paid a great deal for some hard lessons, over the last few generations, and it would be a great sin, to continue refusing to learn from them.
true lilly
5 Aug 12 at 8:05 am
There goes Coates chance as future IOC President
Mike of Marion
5 Aug 12 at 8:40 am
How much of that went to green programs? Solar panels on clubhouses?
ar
5 Aug 12 at 8:44 am
I dunno if that’s quite right true lilly.
All around me I see the kiddies machining like there’s no tomorrow – at the traffic lights when their chin drops to their chest and they start machining until the green one says they can drive on, as they walk along the footpath and across six lanes of traffic they machine … you’ll see mass machiners beavering away at any given bus stop.
Why, even these national Limpik heroes returning from London will be seen gliding triumphally (or sullenly?) through the arrivals lounge machining. Many will have their ears blocked with wire to prevent any distraction to their machining. From the noisy welcome crowd, proud mums, sports reporters and stuff like that.
Mick Gold Coast QLD
5 Aug 12 at 9:05 am
And in other Olympic ‘you are taking the piss’ news the IOC has banned sushi sellers from providing soy sauce as there are no makers sponsoring the event, making the dish practically inedible to Japanese and further drawing attention to the increasingly farcical nature of the event.
Carpe Jugulum
5 Aug 12 at 9:17 am
Oops, sorry Mick. I forgot just how many generations of ‘orstralya’s’ ‘working families‘ have no understanding that ‘machining’ is also a vital Trade Skill.
Maybe it’s time all those seekers of fame and fortune ‘entertainment’, put, “A Tradie Wants a Wife”, into production.
true lilly
5 Aug 12 at 9:33 am
Mick I would have thought the ability to Hoover up taxpayers money for the purposes of self aggrandizement would be an essential prerequisite for the IOC ?
Pickles
5 Aug 12 at 9:37 am
Its not just government funding.
The olympic push has institutionalised sport.
I participate in a sport that is effectively a closed shop – sailing.
In order for our local (shed on the shore, family dinghy) club to operate under the international rules of sailing, it must pay an affiliation fee to the NSW Yachting Federation. It amounts to about 10% of the total club income from membership fees, sausage sandwiches, t-shirt sales etc.
40% of this flows up to the Australian Yachting Federation, and nationally amounts to about 10% of their income.
40% is gobbled up in NSW YF salaries
20% is spent on sundries, including funding back to clubs.
The whole thing is a great merry-go-round of slush funding for administrators.
duncan
5 Aug 12 at 9:58 am
I don think tradies have too much trouble in that area these days. The point of a farmer wants a wife is that these guys can’t get one. For a variety of reasons ranging from isolation to poor table manners.
I don’t think I will wait with bated breath for “the public servant wants a wife”.
Entropy
5 Aug 12 at 10:40 am
The IOC is is our own society writ small. Both are drowning in administrators who ride their own particular gravy train through life. Both have become parasites on the host body, with the original reason for their being, forgotten. The demands for resources continue unabated, and are increasing no matter what the results.
Society desperately needs a good deworming – the unproductive parasites are slowly killing us.
Winston Smith
5 Aug 12 at 10:45 am
true lilly – I’m with you all the way on the desperate need for specialist skills.
On Friday we discovered need for an experienced boilermaker next week to carefully cut some very biggish shoring boxes for transport from one site to another out west. They’re very hard to come by, they’re my age (oldish
) and they are able to charge a handsome fee. Construction apprenticeships were not pursued by Labor from the ’80s onwards – by Bob Hawke or by the building unions – John Dawkins was busy turning tech colleges into fake universities and we are paying the price for that now.
Now, if we’d needed a social worker, an Arts (Environmental Studies) graduate or an interpretive dance choreographer …
Mick Gold Coast QLD
5 Aug 12 at 10:51 am
19th with one gold, eh?
What excellent news!
Rabz
5 Aug 12 at 10:56 am
Close down two major hospitals in each state ,the money saved could be used to increase the wealth of our “eelight sportswankers” we are giving the Useless Untidy Nashuns Billions to support the Bureaucrats in the manner they deserve! Why not make our “eelights ” richer ,they sare so Usefull to Society, like Union crooks and corrupt Politicians!
Borisgodunov
5 Aug 12 at 11:22 am
Being un-Australian is right up there with “for our children and grand-children” and “it’s the right thing to do” as reasons for government taxation and spending.
H B Bear
5 Aug 12 at 12:20 pm
Mick, remember The, “work smarter, not harder“, Campaign…shortly followed by The, “you need to get a ticket – from some Uni brat that’s never worked a day in their lives – to let you keep doing, what you’ve done well, all your working life”, Campaign…shortly followed by The, “we need to import skilled workers“, Campaign…and so on, and oh so Bloody Stealthy, on…
I do remember when having a child qualify for a Trade Apprenticeship, was a source of pride for working family…and when it suddenly became an ‘embarrassment‘ if they weren’t ‘smart‘ enough go to Uni to ‘get a ticket‘ to get ‘rich‘, preaching workers out of work, selling the sort of insanity that made the likes of Peter Singer ‘rich‘, and oh so Bloody Poor as a HumanE being!
Wars are fought with Many Campaigns on Many Fronts. We have been At War In This Country, for a Very Long Time.
true lilly
5 Aug 12 at 12:22 pm
I have great grandparents who were Olympic and other athletes so have done some family research involving early 20th century sport.
Basically from 1900 to ~1960, gold and silver medals in the 200m track for example were only won by English-speaking countries. Sport was amateur; developing countries’ athletes didn’t have weekends free to train due to economic circumstances; or facilities. Plus in the 20s/30s much of Europe was unstable…you can see why a country like Australia would have opportunity to excel in tennis. In a country like China you had widespread poverty (of course), small stature due to chronic malnutrition, difficulty travelling long distances. And just cultural factors, organised sport with rulebooks was basically invented in England and Scotland and disseminated gradually throughout the world.
Now you have increasing health and wealth, more leisure time and funding for sport all over the world. Improved communication and travel. In really affluent countries like ours sport amongst kids is only one option compared to many sedentary hobbies, not to mention they don’t need to dream of using sport as a way of escaping the favela – to take an example.
Frankly I find it unbelievable that anyone is surprised by Australia’s relative decline. The playing field is being made level and the other six billion humans have a fighting chance. And given (can I say this?) the genetic advantages some countries have in the 100m sprint, for example, you won’t see a New Zealander placing very often as they did in 1924.
rob
5 Aug 12 at 12:30 pm
Plus I agree with the guy who posted above, jet lag would explain the whole thing. Especially for the ones who travelled economy. Not that I want to fund anything higher but I have trouble eating dinner for three days after getting to London and doubt it’s the best way to prepare for the heptathlon…….
rob
5 Aug 12 at 12:34 pm
Australia’s approach to the medal tally is all wrong. Why spend lots of money on teams sports when they can only produce 1 medal?
If Australia wants to increase its medal count it needs to concentrate on individual sports where most of the medals are, especially in the fighting sports where there are lots of weight divisions like boxing and judo.
Subsidising 12 basketballers will only produce 1 medal. Subsidising 12 judoists and boxers can produce 12 medals.
Fred
5 Aug 12 at 12:45 pm
Why if it is
Do we have an ALP?
stackja
5 Aug 12 at 12:49 pm
Isn’t Barlcelona on GMT+2? The Science is settled.
Is there an IOC prohibition on leaving your own time zone before the games?
H B Bear
5 Aug 12 at 12:55 pm
Oh, and lets not forget all those EX-’workers‘, who (because they could neither work nor teach), took up all those Government Funded positions of ‘facilitating’ people in ‘picking up tickets’ that lied they now have ‘work skills’.
Ah, if only all those with ‘welders tickets’, could actually produce clean welds that hold…if only all those with ‘health & family social work tickets’ cared to work at building healthy families that produce strong societies…if only wise old folk could still kick the arses of thuggish neighbourhood kids, without being stabbed, then sued for their trouble of daring to care for Our Country!
true lilly
5 Aug 12 at 12:57 pm
Fred you are begging the question.
Who cares what a national medal tally is? Hopefully one result of London will be a change of attitude. Qualifying for a prestigious international event should be the at least interim goal for the athlete, supporters and community. A medal count is basically meaningless when the opposition consists of 180 countries and billions of people. We need to move to a mindset that says competing with the elite is an honour and a pleasure. Actually if we took more pride in peoples’ achievements I think we would have more participation rather than this constant reporting of alleged whinging Twitter-obsessed internet addicts crying all the time and “losing” i.e. coming second in the world’s most elite competition. You don’t get all that crap if you try to become the Nintendo DS champion.
Anyway if we want to just get more medals we should work on things like pentathlon where I suspect rivers of cash to fund showjumping, fencing equipment and nice guns might blow the opposition away. Track and field is probably doomed.
rob
5 Aug 12 at 1:01 pm
“Isn’t Barlcelona on GMT+2? The Science is settled.”
Not exactly a controlled trial!
I was in China, and Hungary, and eastern Germany just before the Olympics (i.e. a time Germany wasn’t exactly at its best). And back very recently. You are talking about levels of economic and societal development in those countries (already Olympic powerhouses then) in the meantime that are huge.
I think you can arrive as early as you like, but finding training venues, ensuring accommodation and suitable diet is ready, security issues, isolation from support presumably would all be challenges.
Most importantly I think condoms are only stocked en masse a week or so in advance.
rob
5 Aug 12 at 1:11 pm
just before the 1992 Olympics that is
rob
5 Aug 12 at 1:11 pm
Yeah – the lack of training venues across Europe and that funny foreign food within one or two hours of London must be to blame.
Rob – you aren’t John Coates are you?
H B Bear
5 Aug 12 at 1:21 pm
Fred, a great deal of the funding is intended to encourage ‘team‘=Group ‘think‘ MENTALity.
From The Same Religious Zealots that gave us, “YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT!”, we get, “it WASN’T YOUR, legs, muscles, lungs, heart, mind and Spirit, that won OUR GOLD!”
Remember the days of Real Team Spirit, when we had things like Working Bees?
The strong men did the heavy lifting, the skilled wood workers did the hammering and sawing and the wives and mothers kept the food and Dettol flowing, as their children learned first hand to take pride in Being A Part Building Their Community, Strong, by also discovering what they were good at, and what they should leave to those who were just plain good at what they do.
You know, those days before they sold the, “you can be whatever you want“, LIE!
true lilly
5 Aug 12 at 1:26 pm
H B Bear:
No.
And there are two points
firstly, does the medal count matter: I say no…
However, if it did matter, as an intellectual exercise how would it be improved?
I realise London has some nice restaurants and there are training facilities around but if you are have your Australian venues accessible to the vast agglomeration of taxpayer funded chefs, sommeliers, doctors, psychologists, podiatrists, wardrobe consultants, milliners and god knows what else, I assume it’s better to continue training locally until you leave. I suppose it would be different if you were heading to Mexico City and it was physically impossible to compete on arrival.
rob
5 Aug 12 at 1:46 pm
[...] Brit $19.17 for the UK team and each Frenchman $18.35. So much for good value for Australia! John Coates: resign now! at Catallaxy Files Gold! Cheers Ray __________________ White 2008 CRD Auto plus a few bits. #29 Nothing but [...]
our first gold - Page 3 - Patrol 4x4 - Nissan Patrol Forum
5 Aug 12 at 2:05 pm
Re: Medals table: The alternative rankings for London 2012
stackja
5 Aug 12 at 3:40 pm
Not sure if anyone has noticed but we are beating Canada. Cop that, Canucks!
ar
5 Aug 12 at 7:11 pm
“Isn’t Barlcelona on GMT+2? The Science is settled.”
Um, but back to the original point. We had access to Stillnox (Ambien) then, as presumably our rivals still do. Sleep is important to athletes. Stupid knee-jerk regulation has unintended consequences.
Big Jim
5 Aug 12 at 10:40 pm
Correction: stilnox was not around in 1992 at Barcelona, so we did not have access to it.
(But no one did and the others do now, so the point about comparative disadvantage stands.)
Big Jim
5 Aug 12 at 10:56 pm
‘The Australian’ has an amusing piece on page 6, comparing medals to populations. NZ does best for gold, sharing each of its’ 3 medals amongst 1,442,628 Kiwis. That’s value for money!
Nuke Gray
6 Aug 12 at 3:38 pm
[...] Australian Government does not spend enough on elite athletes and the Australian Olympics team. But as I noted previously, the Australian taxpayer has paid substantially more for our London Olympics effort than at any [...]
Kevan Gosper: Australians must pay more to win gold medals at Catallaxy Files
6 Aug 12 at 4:35 pm
Swim team attitude on the nose. Their sponsors will deal with that.
WHSO
10 Aug 12 at 3:55 pm