Speaker 1: Australia is known for its bad ass Why as a
Speaker 1: sporting nation, we've blown the world socks off at games
Speaker 1: like women's soccer, test cricket one day it's national cricket,
Speaker 1: women's soccer, T twenty cricket, backyard cricket, and of course
Speaker 1: women's soccer. But in nineteen seventy six we went to
Speaker 1: the Montreal Olympics and it nearly destroyed our reputation for good. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to the poolroom. Well, we celebrate the winners, losers
Speaker 1: and the weird stuff between. I'm Tony Armstrong. For the
Speaker 1: first eight decades of the Olympics, Australia had a pretty
Speaker 1: good record. Obviously we'd always killed it in the pool
Speaker 1: and we'd had success on the track too, but we
Speaker 1: were also gold medalists in equestrian canoe, sailing, cycling, diving
Speaker 1: and pentathlon. Heck, at our home games in Melbourne nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty six we came third out of everyone. And we've
Speaker 1: sent athletes to every modern Olympics. The only other country
Speaker 1: that's done that is Greece, and they invented it. We're
Speaker 1: a country full of people who kickballs, hit them with sticks,
Speaker 1: throw them in the air, and put them in nets.
Speaker 1: We've got wide open spaces for running and jumping and
Speaker 1: we're surrounded by water. Sport is in our blood. What
Speaker 1: I'm saying is by nineteen seventy six we weren't Olympic novices,
Speaker 1: but the competition had changed. When Australia won eight gold
Speaker 1: medals in Munich, people thought that was pretty good. It
Speaker 1: was three more than mid one in nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: at least, but six of them were won in the pool,
Speaker 1: and half of those were thanks to future survival when
Speaker 1: a Shane Gould who was only fifty and look, there's
Speaker 1: plenty to be said for being great at freestyle, but
Speaker 1: other countries were investing in their future champions and Australia
Speaker 1: simply wasn't. Even Our swimmers, the life raft of our
Speaker 1: Olympic dreams for decades, were training in substandard pools. They
Speaker 1: weren't even full length. We'd pinned our hopes on a
Speaker 1: squad that were struggling to find fifty meters of water
Speaker 1: in one place. Our athletes were still amateurs, working their
Speaker 1: regular jobs alongside training, while our overseas counterparts were paid
Speaker 1: to get good. By the time we got to Montreal,
Speaker 1: the corners we've been cutting caught up to US one
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty Australians went to the nineteen seventy six Olympics.
Speaker 1: We had representatives in all kinds of sports, cycling, archery, fencing. Look,
Speaker 1: there was twenty altogether that should have been a wide
Speaker 1: enough net to cast, but we flubbed it. No one
Speaker 1: in our athletics team placed higher than twelveth We lost
Speaker 1: all but two of our basketball games, and half of
Speaker 1: our marathons didn't even finish, and Railing Boil was disqualified
Speaker 1: from her two hundred meters sprint after two false starts.
Speaker 1: The Australian team crawled home with only five medals in hand,
Speaker 1: and four of them were bronze. It was a real
Speaker 1: shock for a nation that considered itself, if not the
Speaker 1: literal best at sport, at least the figurative best. How
Speaker 1: could Australia, a country with four whole football codes, do
Speaker 1: so badly? And what was the government going to do
Speaker 1: about it? A few years earlier, the Whitland government had
Speaker 1: commissioned a sports academic by the name of John Bloomfield
Speaker 1: to write a white paper. It had the super catchy
Speaker 1: title of Role and Scope and development of record creation
Speaker 1: in Australia. He basically recommended Australia get up to speed
Speaker 1: with the rest of the world, investing coaching, invest in
Speaker 1: talent identification, and be serious about sports science and medicine.
Speaker 1: Bloomfield had looked at the elite athletes coming out of
Speaker 1: European sports institutes and compared them to our zero sports
Speaker 1: institutes and nil gold medals. It was time, he'd suggested
Speaker 1: that Australia follow suit. After a feasibility study to check
Speaker 1: that yes, elite athletes are good for the economy, I
Speaker 1: assume a report was released that recommended the creation of
Speaker 1: the Australian Institute of Sport. The Minister for Sport, a
Speaker 1: guy called Frank Stewart, presented it to Parliament. He was
Speaker 1: keen sport offers the most fundamentally democratic social order one
Speaker 1: could imagine. I feel it is time Australia joined the
Speaker 1: ranks of those numerous countries which realized some time ago
Speaker 1: that a two way relationship can operate between sport and
Speaker 1: the state. He even set up a study group to
Speaker 1: get it up, but when the Whitlam government was defeated
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five, the recommendation dropped dead, hid it
Speaker 1: in the back of the filing cabinet so more money
Speaker 1: could be spent on roads or tax concessions, I guess.
Speaker 1: And it stayed like that until yep, Montreal, when even
Speaker 1: New Zealand won two gold medals while we came home
Speaker 1: with none. Our sports performance was back under the microscope.
Speaker 1: How could we a nation that had got pretty comfy
Speaker 1: with punching above its weight do more? Winning the institute
Speaker 1: getting people fired up about it wasn't as easy as
Speaker 1: it had been. The nineteen seventy six Games really had
Speaker 1: an impact on public support for Australian sport, and the
Speaker 1: government had also fallen out with the Australian Olympic Federation.
Speaker 1: After five years of pushing, in nineteen eighty, Bloomfield was
Speaker 1: appointed Deputy chair of the very organization he'd recommended, and
Speaker 1: Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser officially opened the Australian Institute of
Speaker 1: Sport on January twenty sixth, nineteen eighty one, a day
Speaker 1: we now celebrate with Lamb Shops Australian Institute of Sport Day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds better. Finally our athletes had proper support, eight
Speaker 1: hundred of them applied to train under scholarships in Canberra,
Speaker 1: where special focus will be on sports like basketball, swimming
Speaker 1: and track and field. It was a great success and
Speaker 1: extra sixty two athletes headed to the next Olympics in
Speaker 1: la and we took home twenty four medals, including four golds,
Speaker 1: only one of which was for swimming. Since our dismal
Speaker 1: performance in nineteen seventy six, Australia has never had another
Speaker 1: year without a gold. We've trained athletes at the highest
Speaker 1: level for more than forty years and the AIS now
Speaker 1: includes everything from psychology to biomechanics. In the covid Era
Speaker 1: Tokyo Games, we came away with the whopping seventeen goals,
Speaker 1: equaling our highest number ever. It didn't feel like it
Speaker 1: at the time, but Montreal nineteen seventy six might have
Speaker 1: actually been our best games. Not in medals or records
Speaker 1: or overall happiness, but hitting rock bottom paved the way
Speaker 1: for something better, something greener and golder, something unstoppable. You've
Speaker 1: been listening to an iHeart production with the Poolroom with me,
Speaker 1: Tony Armstrong, Catch you next time. No