A passion for sport

Melbourne Cricket Ground: host of the first cricket Test match between Australia and England in 1877
Australia has a distinguished reputation as a sporting nation; Australians have always loved sport, and excelled at it. Even before Federation in 1901, ‘Australia’ was competing internationally as a nation. Despite its relatively small population, Australia has produced world champions in most sports.
The most recent example of the nation’s sporting prowess is the success of the Australian team at the 2004 Athens Olympic and Paralympic games. Australians won 17 gold, 16 silver and 16 bronze medals at the Olympics and ranked fourth overall in the medal tally behind the United States, China and Russia. Paralympic athletes ranked fifth in the world, with a total of 100 medals: 26 gold, 38 silver and 36 bronze medals.
It is not just a strong will and an aptitude for sport that makes Australian athletes champions. Science, training and innovation contribute greatly to Australia’s sporting success. Elite athletes benefit from a supportive network of coaches, managers, scientists, doctors, physiotherapists and nutritionists.
The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), funded by the Australian Government, leads the development of Australia’s elite athletes with sports facilities and support services of the highest standards. It provides training in 26 different sports, and programs include biomechanics, physiology, sport psychology, scientific research and talent search. More than 75 coaches train the current enrolment of 700 athletes. At the 2004 Olympic Games, current and former AIS athletes accounted for almost 60 per cent of the team and won 32 of Australia’s 49 medals.
Every four years, the 71 nations and territories of the Commonwealth gather to compete in the Commonwealth Games. The 18th Commonwealth Games will be held in Melbourne from 15 to 26 March 2006. Australia will host more than 6000 athletes, coaches and sports officials. The games are expected to attract over 1 million spectators and a potential television viewing audience of 1 billion people. Athletes will compete in 12 individual sports and four team sports.
Sport and business
Thanks to the nation’s sporting success, Australia leads an important international market in sports-related goods and services. This market is founded on strong research and development and innovative business expertise in a range of fields, including:
- sports consultancies in Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa and Thailand
- junior sports programs in Hong Kong, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and South Africa
- elite athlete training programs in Brunei
- event management services in the United States.
More than 35 Australian companies won goods and services contracts for the 2004 Olympic Games. The contracts were worth over $200 million and quadrupled Australia’s exports to Greece:
- Melbourne-based Concept Sports secured the merchandising rights for Athens 2004. Their contract, worth an estimated $100 million, led them to double the size of their workforce in the lead-up to the games.
- The Cleanevent Group won the cleaning and waste management contract for the games. Worth an estimated $80 million, the deal created more than 100 cleaning, supervisory and project-management jobs across Australia plus thousands more in Athens.
- Sportsworks generated business worth more than $15 million with its accommodation solutions services in Athens.
- Steriline Racing, based in regional South Australia, supplied and installed the starting gates for the racecourse at the Athens Olympic equestrian venue.
- Professional services firm Sinclair Knight Merz assisted in the delivery of the roof for the Olympic stadium and velodrome.
- Sydney’s TAFE Global secured a multi-million dollar contract to help train nearly 80 000 Olympic staff and volunteers.
Held every four years, the Rugby World Cup is the third-largest sporting event in the world. In 2003, 20 international teams travelled to Australia to compete, and the event was broadcast to an estimated global audience of 3.4 billion people. Around 65 000 international visitors travelled to Australia for the tournament.
Rugby Business Club Australia (RBCA) was an Australian Government initiative to leverage business opportunities from Rugby World Cup 2003. The initiative brought together Australian and international business people at 77 networking events around the world. About 40 companies confirmed an export or investment sale, with the total value estimated at over $44.6 million. A further 539 Australian companies indicated that they expect to achieve sales in 2004–05 as a result of the contacts made through the Rugby World Cup.
Australian soccer player Craig Johnson was more than a star player for the United Kingdom’s Liverpool Football Club. He believed that by changing the surface contour of the soccer boot, greater ball control, swerve and power would follow. He experimented for many years until, in 1994, his prototype Predator was picked up for manufacture by sporting goods manufacturer Adidas. Now the Adidas PredatorTM is in its sixth generation and worn by soccer greats David Beckham and Zinedine Zidane.
A sporting life
Almost 13 million Australians aged 15 years and over participate in some form of physical activity for recreation or sport. Close to 11 million Australians exercise at least once per week and about 4.2 million exercise at least five times per week.
The 10 most popular physical activities undertaken by Australians aged 15 and over and the number of people participating are: walking—5.9 million; aerobics/fitness—2.5 million;
swimming—2.3 million; cycling—1.5 million; tennis—1.4 million; golf—1.3 million; running—1.2 million; bushwalking—902 500; soccer—669 300; and netball—614 000.
Australians also enjoy watching sporting events—sport is the most commonly watched genre of television programming after news and current affairs. Going to sports events is also a popular pastime, with about 48 per cent of Australians aged 15 years and over attending at least one sports event during 2002.
The BT is a noteworthy example of the successful application of Australian science and engineering to competitive sport
In 1996 the Australian Institute of Sport and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology produced a remarkable Australian innovation—the Superbike. Constructed from lightweight and high-strength carbon fibre—a material widely used by NASA—the Superbike played a critical role in 23 world championship victories over four years.
The effective banning of the Superbike in 2000 led Australian company Bike Technologies to produce the BT bicycle. The BT was the bike of choice for athletes of all nations at the Sydney Olympic Games, and it helped the Australian team to win 10 medals.
Sport for people with disabilities
The Australian Government, through the Australian Sports Commission, has programs in place to promote sport for people with a disability. In partnership with the Australian Paralympic Committee, Project CONNECT provides national sporting organisations with comprehensive support to include people with a disability, from grass roots to the elite level.
The Disability Education Program is a major part of Project CONNECT, providing training and resources for teachers, coaches and community leaders to help overcome the barriers people with disabilities face in taking part in sport programs. In addition, the Paralympic Preparation Program assists national sports organisations to prepare athletes for elite competition.
The Australian Sports Commission also manages the Sports Ability program. Sports Ability is an inclusive activities program that aims to provide teachers and support staff with more ways of including young people with a disability in physical activity and sport, particularly those with higher support needs. It is funded by the Australian Government’s Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games legacy program.
Sport and regional aid
The Australian Government supports sport development programs in the Pacific, Caribbean and Southern Africa.
Pacific
The Australia–South Pacific (ASP) Sports Program, through a range of innovative governance and delivery practices, increases sporting opportunities for people throughout the Pacific Islands. It employs a comprehensive, inclusive approach to developing communities through sport.
The ASP Sports Program strengthens the sport infrastructure of partner countries at the local (community) level through to the elite level. By focusing on a community-based approach, the program broadens the base from which future champions can emerge.
The ASP Sports Program, a tripartite partnership between the Australian Sports Commission, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Australia’s overseas aid agency, AusAID, delivers sporting initiatives to 14 Pacific Island countries: Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
Caribbean
The Australia–Caribbean Sport Development Program (funded through 2006) offers the 12 Commonwealth countries in the region access to Australian sporting experience and expertise on a partnership basis. Its main areas of focus are physical education; youth leadership; national sporting federation development; community club strengthening; women in sport initiatives; and developing opportunities in sport for people with a disability.
The program operates locally from Trinidad and Tobago and offers programs in Antigua and Barbuda; Barbados; Bahamas; Belize; Dominica; Grenada; Guyana; St Lucia; Jamaica; St Kitts and Nevis; St Vincent’s and the Grenadines.
Southern Africa
The Australia–Africa Sport Development Program (funded through 2006) aims to improve health, community cohesion and social interaction through sport, recreation and physical activity initiatives. Programs are offered in South Africa, Malawi, Swaziland, Mozambique and Botswana.
A major initiative is the Active Community Clubs program, which is designed to improve community cohesion by involving sport, recreation and cultural activities. By having community members become more physically active the community itself becomes more active and empowered.
For 2004–05, the Australian Government has provided or committed approximately $170 million in sports funding.
Online
The nation at play
Adrian McGregor
Half a century ago in southern Australia, as the locomotive steamed between small rural towns it gave three long, joyous blasts of its whistle to announce to a town that its team had won the local football that afternoon. Thus was the news brought to the countryside.
Sport linked Australians then—and still does. It informs the national character, is paramount in the culture, and is one of the many ways Australians measure their international status. Other nations may treat soccer as a religion, but Australia worships nearly all sport. It is one of only two countries that has competed in every Olympics since 1896 and one of only five that has hosted more than one Olympics. This near-obsession with sport has its roots in the nation’s colonial foundations, a comparatively small population, and geographical isolation in the Southern Hemisphere. Initially unable to make much impact on the world stage through trade, art or politics, people turned to sport, driven by a national egalitarianism—a belief our athletes were as good as those from larger nations.
Geographical isolation meant that idiosyncratic sports blossomed—Australian Rules and Rugby League or football instead of soccer. Women’s netball, with over a million players, is far more popular than basketball. Blessed with year-round temperate or subtropical sunshine, and thousands of kilometres of coastline, it was natural that Australians would excel at such open-air pursuits as swimming, tennis and surfing. Olympic swim champion Ian Thorpe, tennis’s Lleyton Hewitt, and Layne Beachley—world women’s surfing champion for a record six successive years—are continuing testimony to this.
But that doesn’t explain the achievements of Alisa Camplin, who in 2002 became an Olympic skiing champion; of cyclist Robbie McEwen, regular wearer of the Tour de France maillot vert for sprinting; or English Premier League soccer stars Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka. Australians love to win and the reason is motivation—a young nation’s desire to match strides with the world’s athletes.
In the 1930s Australia usually measured itself against England—thus legendary cricketer Don Bradman became a national hero. The 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne was a watershed. Unravaged by war compared with Europe, Australia managed third in the medal count behind the giants, the United States and the Soviet Union. When, in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Australia won no gold medals, the nation’s self-esteem went into steep decline. The Australian Government responded in 1981 by establishing the Australian Institute of Sport for elite athlete development. Today the institute is a world leader in sport coaching, science and medicine. By 2000 Australia had reasserted itself, finishing fourth in the medal count at the Sydney Olympics and fourth again in Athens in 2004. As a priority, the Australian Olympic Committee has allocated $17 million to prepare athletes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
As successful as Australia has become, the national psyche still identifies with its battling past. Our loudest cheers are often reserved for other nations’ sportspeople who, without a hope of victory, perform beyond all expectations. Australians are almost as happy barracking for the underdog as winning.
Adrian McGregor is an award-winning journalist and author of best-selling biographies of footballer Wally Lewis, cricketer Greg Chappell and athlete Cathy Freeman.
Last update May 2005