Let's get physical
The problem with the spluttering from the Australian Olympics Committee over yesterday’s report from David Crawford’s Independent Sport Panel is that Australians are getting fatter while cheering on our Olympic athletes.
And it is clear from the panel’s terms of reference that this is what the government wants to talk about. John Coates and the AOC are in the national morale business; their terms of reference required Crawford and his colleagues to "better place sport and physical activity as a key component of the government’s preventative health approach".
Coates and Crawford are on different mountaintops, shouting past each other – one talking about an excellent TV show called The Olympics that plays for two weeks every four years; the other talking about efficiency and grass roots participation in sport for health reasons.
Bloody bean counters. It’s “disrespectful and ignorant”, shouted John Coates from his mountaintop. “I’m pissed off.”
That might be due to the fact that he knows the AOC has a problem: its basic philosophy is that sport is for watching, not doing. The government was clear in the terms of reference that it wants the spending on sport to contribute to better health.
It might be different if Australians were heading off to the gym after watching Steve Hooker pole vault over 5.96 metres, but we just feel terrific and reach for another cake to celebrate.
During the two weeks of the Olympics the medal tally is presented as a measure of national success and a boost to national morale and year after year the cost per medal rises steeply because of the competition.
In fact, it turns out that the Olympic medal tally is the only way in which sporting success is defined in Australia, according to the Crawford Panel’s report: “No parallel ambition has been expressed for community sporting participation where outcomes are not even measured.”
The panel asked a few questions about how much money is being spent by Australian governments on sport and whether it’s having any impact. No one knew. “The only data found was derived from 2000–01 Australian Bureau of Statistics material. It confirmed that approximately $2 billion was spent on sport at that time across the three tiers of government.”
In 2007-08 the Australian Sports Commission gave $90 million to national sporting organisations, of which 80 per cent went to Olympic sports. Of that, 90 per cent went to high performance programs.
What’s more, there is no definition of value for money. In Beijing, Australia came sixth with 46 medals overall, including 14 gold. They cost $4 million each. The AOC wants another $109 million a year, to get into the top five, and also because the unit cost of Olympic medals is being driven up by competition from other wannabes.
David Crawford says top ten is fine – we don’t really need to be top five. And he wonders why archery gets more money than cricket, why water polo gets as much as golf, tennis and lawn bowls combined.
But that’s a cheap shot. As the head of Archery Australia, Jim Larven, wailed yesterday: “So what? Cricket is a professional sport that makes millions out of sponsorship and TV rights.”
It comes down to how many people watch a particular sport on TV, and how often, and there is a Law of Inverse Returns at work.
Cricket and footy don’t need government funding because a lot of people like watching and playing them. Archery and water polo need money because they can’t pull big crowds and we only watch them every four years, and even then only when the synchronised swimming and weight-lifting aren’t on.
The nub of the argument, it seems to me, comes down to this paragraph in yesterday’s report: “The Panel can find no evidence that high profile sporting events like the Olympics (or Wimbledon or the AFL Grand Final) have a material influence on sports participation. So if sports are to be funded in part to encourage wide participation, some priority should be given to those sports played throughout the country and even more so to those that engage their participants through their lifetimes.”
Except the sports that are played (and therefore watched) throughout the country don’t need government funding. The challenge is to get more people off their backsides and doing something, and the Olympic medal tally is a “dubious” measure of where to spend it.
Bloody bean counters.
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