It was the symbol of a brave new world of sporting excellence in Australia after the sporting failures of the 1970s, but has the once-famed Australia Institute of Sport outlived its usefulness?
The Federal Government is questioning the future of the AIS, once-shining symbolic heart of elite sport in this country which critics says has been destroyed by bureaucratic wastefulness and little understanding of its purpose.
But the decline of this once-Olympian institution also raises longer-term questions about the role of Government in sport and our obsessive emphasis as a country on transitory and ultimately meaningless results in elite competitions like the Olympics.
With Australia having some of the highest obesity rates anywhere in the world, (around 30 percent of all adults) despite our high standard of living and amenable sporting climate, is public funding for elite sport a misallocation of taxpayer money?
The AIS was established in 1980 by that great principle-free Prime Minister of the 1970s, Malcolm Fraser, after our disastrous 1976 Olympics in Montreal where we came away with just one silver and four bronze medals.
Some of our famed but abjectly-performing swimming team arrived back in Australia clearly out-of-shape with stories of ice-cream eating competitions in-camp. One of our medal hopes, Jenny Turrell cried to TV crews at the airport at the mostly well-founded criticism the team had received.
This result was a precipitous decline from the golden age of Olympic performances in the 1950s and 1960s where Australia often came in the top three or four countries in the medal tally after the mighty United States and Soviet Union, and Australians were furious.
This had followed another poor performance in Munich in 1972 when a 16-year-old Shane Gould was our only real stand-out, winning almost half our medals with three gold, a silver and a bronze.
Health and exercise experts had been warning Australians for years that increased affluence and lifestyle changes wrought by the alternative culture of the 1960s and 1970s was having a devastating effect on the levels of physical activity, and hence, ultimately, the sporting performance of our elite athletes.
Fraser then announced with much fanfare the establishment of the AIS in 1980 as a centre-of-excellence for elite sports coaching and performance. It would take the best practice around the world and apply it for a range of international sports at this new center of excellence in Canberra.
The plan seemed to work for years with Australia’s Olympic and sporting efforts improving over time. Two gold at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, four at Los Angeles in 1984; to seven at Barcelona in 1992.
But critics now say that the AIS is now simply a funding dispenser with little real training or coaching at its increasingly- unoccupied centre in Canberra’s northern suburb of Bruce.
The AIS in the 1980s boasted 20 coaches who were among the world’s best. Gone are the days of elite training coaches such as people like Charlie Walsh running cycling, hockey with Ric Charlesworth, Wilma Shakespeare training in netball and Rod Marsh running cricket.
The ghost-like rather time-worn facility now appears a lifetime away from the centralised world-class system of the 1990s that was envied and copied around the world.
Government ministers are now said to have been shocked at “explosive’’ findings of former sports minister Rod Kemp’s review of the AIS and its campus in Canberra.
One of his key criticisms believed to be addressed in the Kemp report is the priority for management, rather than sports coaching and development. The report found that the AIS now does little more for sport than controlling the funding that is expected to be about $87 million for Olympic sports after this year’s Tokyo Olympics.
The Kemp report condemns the past decade of funding cuts and poor strategic decisions within the AIS with proposals even to sell off parts of its huge 66-hectare campus.
The story of the AIS is the time-old tale of elite sports administration around the world. Insulated by the shield of “national pride” and “serving the greater good,” a lack of accountability sees plenty of senior sports administrators living the high-life with the sports they supposedly administer money for having to hold chook-raffle era fundraising efforts for the actual athletes.
Meanwhile the AIS has become so expensive for elite sports camps that the Matildas (the Australian women’s soccer team) for instance, find it cheaper to stay at a swish hotel in Sydney than lodge at the AIS residences.
Some sports that remain at the AIS campus must pay for the privilege, and the costs of using the sports rehab and physiotherapists are prohibitively expensive. “It is so distressing what the AIS has become,’’ one former AIS official said. “This is the zoo without any animals.” Another insider noted “it is demoralising’’ while one said the “ghost town’’ of the campus resembles a dystopian movie set.
After 40 years, though, what part should this institution play in our sporting life. In the end it is the taxpayer that foots the bill for such vanities.
But in a broader sense, what role should government funding play in elite sports programs, anyway? The best-performing country internationally in sport, year-in, year-out, is the United States. Yet despite competing against and beating the state-run, drug-fueled behemoth of first, the Soviet Union and now Russia, they offer no Federal Government funding for any of their elite athletic programs; they are all self-funded.
There is also no evidence linking the brief, feel-good euphoria and pride in seeing our best compete and win on the world stage in Olympic and other international sports to general activity and well-being of the wider population. In simple terms, if you’re sitting on the couch watching our seal-like swimming stars win medals in the Olympics and other competition, you’re less likely to go out and exercise yourself.
While politicians like the reflected glory of Olympic Gold every four years; what is this doing, if anything, to combat Australia’s obesity epidemic and its huge impact on our health system and the decline of quality-of-life for so many of our citizens.
Who cares about the Olympics anymore anyway? Remember the hundreds of millions spent on securing the Sydney 2000 Olympics and the euphoria at our surprise win? Well the 2024 and 2028 Olympics had both been awarded to Los Angeles and Paris as the only bidders; no-one else wanted an event which 20–30 years ago was sought and bought like the Soccer World Cup.
Go to a local swimming pool today. In the 1970s, the outdoor municipal pools in summer were filled with hundreds of kids, swimming, laughing, dive-bombing, and splashing about. The modern indoor pool complex is a noisy, disorienting tin shed full of chlorine fumes, tepid water, with two thirds of the lanes invariably set-aside for the ubiquitous swim club team.
With the AIS now looking a rather shabby piece of late 20th century modernist architecture; has Australia, as a country, wasted 40 years of sports blood, sweet, tears, and treasure on meaningless and transitory sporting success while neglecting the sporting and general health of our wider population?
