Burning [medal] ambition - 2009 Crawford report

Burning ambition
2009 Crawford report 

Burning ambition

ByDan Silkstone
November 18, 2009 — 11.00am
===
BY HIS report's own admission David Crawford is no big fan of archery, but yesterday the Sydney-based lawyer and company director took aim and let fly at one of the nation's biggest targets. Shooting for the sacred cow that is Olympic sport - Crawford and his panel hit a perfect bullseye. It hurt.

Their independent report - more than a year in the making - offers nothing less than to revolutionise Australian sport. ''It is really asking the question of what Australians want to value,'' Crawford told The Age.

The problem is, that is not a simple question.



Often it is said, and often by the Prime Minister, that Australians love sport. The report makes a rather different case: we love to watch it on television and, most of all, we love to win. At most other levels, Australian sport, the Crawford report says, is falling apart.

Crawford and his panel - including somewhat controversially both a current and former AFL commissioner - began with a blank slate and asked how taxpayers' money should be doled out.


What they found was a system in which the vast majority of government funding is funnelled into elite Olympic sports while other activities - on the face of it far more popular - receive little or nothing.

To the panel this was curious and understandably so. Why does archery receive more funding than cricket, the reports wonders, when cricket has more than 100 times as many participants? Why does water polo get as much as golf, tennis and lawn bowls combined?

Mostly such sports rely on government funding because nobody else would fund them, while sports such as cricket and football have far greater commercial appeal and can afford to pay their own way.



Olympic glory is expensive - as much as $15 million of taxpayers' money lies behind each gold medal.

Since Sydney, Australia has set itself the target of a top-five medal tally finish. In Athens the green and gold came home fourth, in Beijing the nation finished sixth.



Olympic sports have said all year that they need a massive injection of funding to maintain that position as nations such as Germany, Britain and France up their spending. The message from Crawford was simple: don't even try.

''Why do we set ourselves up to be the fifth best country in the medal tally when you have other countries with far greater populations spending far greater sums than we will ever be capable of spending,'' he said yesterday.

''Is it realistic? Should we be aiming for top-five in sports like taekwando, or ice skating or the luge? Or should we focus on those sports that mean something for Australia?''



Almost all of the Government's current funding - more than 90 per cent of the $90 million shelled out by the sports commission last year - goes to elite level sport. Around 80 per cent of the total funding goes to Olympic sports.

All the while, the report notes, community sport is struggling. Poor facilities, drought stricken playing surfaces, a shrinking pool of volunteer coaches, umpires and officials, all hamper the development of future sporting stars and a healthy Australia.



The report urges that current funding levels be maintained yet lists a host of new priorities for allocating that money.

In tackling obesity and diabetes, as in all other things, one cannot have one's cake and eat it too. Crawford suggests the Australian people need to be ''re-educated'' about what constitutes sporting success. Medals ain't it.

If sport is to be used to improve public health and community facilities, it argues, why not use the sports that Australians already watch and play in the greatest numbers? According to the report these are sports that are central to the national ''ethos'', a list that comprises cricket and football, golf, tennis, netball, surfing and surf lifesaving.



For the Olympic movement this was, literally, sacrilege.

''Un-Australian'' AOC Chief John Coates called it, before accusing the panel of not being qualified to pass judgment on issues it obviously did not understand.



''This funding is vitally important to the entire nation,'' he said. ''It is not just for the sportsmen and sportswomen.''

He has a point. If government does not fund Olympic sports such as badminton, weightlifting and kayaking, who will?

The report calls for such sports to create better commercial properties, to start paying their own way. It isn't that easy.



Take Athletics Australia - local custodian of one of the world's most popular sports and yet very much strapped for cash. Every four years athletes such as Steve Hooker and Sally McLellan capture Australian hearts and minds and yet they do so as part of an Australian Olympic Committee team with intellectual property owned by the AOC. The revenue they earn from that exposure does not flow back to their sport.

Athletics - desperate to create something of its own - this year staged a Battle for the Ashes meet, held on the streets of Newcastle, England, in September. Heard of it? Probably not. The initial Ashes meet landed harder than Steve Hooker without a mat. No star athletes made themselves available. Nobody wrote about it. Nobody watched.



Come London, 2012, Australians will suddenly be expected to cheer as men and women they have hardly heard of win medals in sports they generally avoid watching. This, as Crawford points out, is strange. But it is also true. The last time Australia bottomed out at the Olympics - in 1976 - the public outcry was so loud that the Australian Institute of Sport was created.

Crawford presents a view of an Australian sports machine that is broken. At the top tens of millions of dollars are channelled into the awkward alchemy of turning sweat into gold. At the bottom, sporting grounds wither, the population fattens and the volunteers, funding and facilities needed to sustain widespread sport are in disarray.

The old adage holds that a government should never commission a report unless it has a fair idea of the answer it will get. Sports Minister Kate Ellis now faces an unenviable task. How much of this does the government implement? What, as Crawford himself asks, do Australians really want?



Archery is used to prove a point in the Crawford Report, it could just as easily prove the opposite. It does not have cricket's massive numbers. But the ''niche sport'' of archery has 6000 registered members in Australia. The governing body, Archery Australia, says the sport's casual practitioners number 100,000. They matter.

Anticipated and feared all year, the report is in. Now the bunfight starts in earnest.



The Olympic sports have formed a group to respond and lobby - on it are all manner of top administrators and famous athletes.

Their talk is apocalyptic and their voices loud. Accustomed to setting targets they have a bullseye of their own. Crawford and his report are in the cross-hairs.