The long-awaited Crawford Review of Australian Sport has finally been released (read it here) and it’s causing quite a stir in this sports-mad country of ours.
As Bernard Keane reported in yesterday’s Crikey Daily Mail:
[The report] has in effect called the bluff of successive Australian governments and proposed a re-weighting of sports funding away from elite Olympic sports toward grassroots participation.
The Crawford Review has brought that contradiction out into the open, suggesting “the funding imbalance between Olympic and non-Olympic sports should be questioned. More emphasis should be given to sports that are popular with many Australians … The bias toward funding Olympic sports leads to outcomes that make little strategic sense for Australia.”
For many, the criticism of Australia’s gold-medal-hungry sports policies have been a long time coming.
In the SMH, Richard Hinds writes:
David Crawford and his panel should be hailed for one thing: attempting to unshackle the government-funded sports sector from the limited, stifling and self-serving influence of the Olympic movement and its costly, self-aggrandising gold-medal obsession.
The Age’s Greg Baum takes a similar line:
Now the Federal Government must decide if it believes failure to win a medal in the 50-metre backstroke in London in 2012 represents a calamitous failure of national vocation that will put Australia at risk of disappearing off the face of the globe, or merely will spare the world three gratuitous ”oi’’s. I think we will survive.
But in other (decidedly more Rupert-flavoured) corners, the assault on Australia’s Olympic hopes have not been so well-received.
The Australian’s sports editor Willy Mason writes:
To follow the recommendation of the Crawford review of sport and abandon the aspiration to remain in the top five Olympic nations and settle for mere sporting mediocrity is to throw away part of our national identity.
…
Every Australian athlete, no matter what their sport, deserves the chance to strive for Olympic selection and a medal. And every Australian deserves the chance to celebrate when they succeed.
So what do Crikey Sports readers think? A refreshing change in thinking from the relentless and costly pursuit of Olympic gold, or is international sporting success a vital part of our national identity? Leave your thoughts below.
7 Comments
I strongly agree with the recommendations of the review. In dollars per unit making Australians happy, pumping money into suburban sports grounds makes so much more sense than another medal in an obscure sport. God I hate swimming. What an interminably dull sport. The health and happiness outcomes of increased participation would surely outweigh the ‘benefits to the national psyche’ that the Olympic fever model represents.
I also agree with the review’s recommendations. Surely the Australian Government can’t invest millions in social marketing campaigns against obesity, and then funnel funding that would increase the population’s physical activity into a small group of professional sportspeople.
Is there anyone more useless to society than an elite sportsperson? For all the flag waving jingoism, most elite sports do it for nothing more than blowing their own egos to new heights. And for what? Most of them – and their “achievements” will be forgotten in their own lifetime. Sporting success is ephemeral – it leaves no lasting legacy. In 300 years time people will still be listening to Beethoven (or Brian Eno) and marvelling at Picasso but Tiger Woods will be long forgotten.
Think about it – if all the golfers in the world went on strike, the only people who would really care would be their sponsors. What if all the nurses went on strike. Or the garbage collectors. Why should a person whose skills are used purely for their own glorification earn more money than people who work to the greater benefit of the society.
Sure, the government should be putting money into health and fitness and non-professional sport, but with the likes of professional cricket, football, tennis etc there is more money invested in sport than in any other time in history and to what end? The highest rates of childhood obesity in history! put the money back into community programmes and let the elite look after themselves – after all, that’s what they are good at.
The more money the government puts into winning Olympic medals, the more we look like East Germany. Put the money where people will benefit from it — in the sports people in this country actually play. The best thing about sport in Australia has always been our participation rate — as players, not TV watchers. We’d do better at running and jumping and throwing things at the Olympics if lots of ordinary people did it, they way lots of ordinary people play cricket, netball and all the codes of football. It’s much more important for people to have the chance to participate in sport regularly than to watch a hyped festival of nationalism every four years on TV.
While we’re on the subject, shouldn’t elite sports people who benefit from government funding have to pay some of the money back once they start raking it in, the way tertiary students do with HECS debts? Then we could literally talk about funding of elite athletes as an “investment”.
I agree with the report. Spending millions of dollars on “elite sports” that hardly anyone plays is utterly ridiculous.
Focusing funding on elite sportsmen is just plain stupid. Does anyone really think that our global standing is raised by winning a few extra medals?
Lets investing in Australia because they are the best swimmers in the world…..
We better not invade Australia because they are such great wrestlers…..
If our national identity is based on being really ridiculously good at sport that suggests to me we are nation that thinks like teenage boys were thats the basis of status and self-esteem. I suppose it is one step better than our identity being as a nation of ridiculously good looking people.
My point is that it is a strong statement of what we value.
Plus the Olympic committees are some of the worst examples of corrupt slush funded junkettering (probably involving some nepotism and other dodgy dealings).
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