A two team corporate beer league. I played both sides, for Van Oord Werkendam of Rotterdam and Ham Dredging of the UK.
Please sign me up for the Bass Pale Ale squad.
Easier just to move the whole country down south.
I know! Let’s do a hospitality exchange with Australia! They can have snow for a couple of decades, and we can have beaches!
Personally I dont have a problem with Canada getting no medals. The olympics were supposed to be about the atheletes competing against the best, winning a medal was a bonus.
Declan
You miss the real point of your own quote. The AIS was set up because Australia’s failure to get a medal in Montreal was regarded as a national embarrassment because *even pre-AIS it was regarded as the norm *that Australia would win a disproportionate number of medals.
The AIS helps, but it isn’t the root of Australia’s success. The root is sport obsession. That was enough to put us ahead of what you might expect in medal count for the summer games before the AIS existed.
On straight medal count, it goes like this:
1952 - Australia 11, Canada 3
1956 - Australia 35, Canada, 6 (Aust. hosted)
1960 - Australia 22, Canada 1
1964 - Australia 18, Canada 4
1968 - Australia 17, Canada 5
1972 - Australia 17, Canada 5 again
1976 - Australia 5, Canada 11 (Canada hosted, but did worse than Aust. did most other years)
1980 Canada and many others boycotted.
AIS founded - 1981
Look it all up on wiki, I can’t be bothered doing all the links. There’s a wiki page for each year of the summer olympics.
Still think it’s due to the AIS, mhendo?
Furthermore for those who think that Canada is the same but seasonally reversed, I say no it isn’t. Canada has a summer. You play summer sports. Australia, for all intents and purposes, virtually has no winter to an extent sufficient to experience the snow and ice that winter sports are based around. We have a handful of tiny areas with sufficient altitude to get snow and ice. The vast majority of Australians have no regular contact with snow and ice outside their household freezer, at all. The vast majority of Australians have simply never seen snow, or experience it only on expensive and highly occasional holidays to particular Australian regions, or overseas. Can Canadians say the same in reverse about the conditions under which sports played at the Summer games are played?
I should add that the point of my post was not to put shit on Canada. Canada probably just has a balanced and healthy and non-obsessed outlook, contrasting with Australia’s single minded anti-intellectual obsession.
The root is two things:
-
Choice of gov’t and private sponsorship; and,
-
More importantly, as you put it “sport obsession” on the part of the population at large.
In the case of Canada, both of these factors point strongly towards winter sports. Canadians love hockey, skiing and the like; they do not by and large love the summer athletics as much.
While it is true that Canada has summer sports, and so more opportunity than Australians to compete in such sports, the national focus is not on them. Given that the two countries have as many athletes and as much money, you would naturally expect Australia to do better at summer sports, as its national attention is not divided - all of its athletes and all of its cash is focussed on summer sports (or at least, a goodly percentage). Roughly speaking, if the two countries had the same number of talented athletes and the same amount of money, one would expect Australia to do twice as well - as the Canadian contingent would be spilt between summer and winter and the Australian one would not.
But the imbalance is in fact worse than that (for Canada in the summer games), because in the case of Canada, winter sports are by and large much more popular. Kids growing up tend to play hockey, ski and skate for fun. Every street corner has its street hockey games even in summer; ice hockey is a popular pastime for children, with many joining junior hockey leagues …
Given these factors, the medal count makes total sense; it is exactly as one would expect - Australia does considerably better than Canada in the summer games; Canada wins most of its Olympic medals in the winter games.
Malthaus- good post. Explains it all very well. I am surprised Australia ever wins anything (or even competes) at the Winter Olympics.
In other words, you’re full of shit in your assertion that you have competed internationally. My original position remains: get your ass off the couch and go compete internationally before you complain about our athletes.
I recall last Olympics – or about the same time period, anyway – there was some flap about marijuana as a “performance-enhancing drug.”
Yeah, maybe. If you put a big bowl of ice cream at the finish line.
If you go up to an athlete and ask him or her: “What can I do to help you succeed? What can my company do to help you succeed? What can our government do to help you succeed?” or “What can I do to help encourage sport in Canada? What can my company do to encourage sport in Canada? What can our government do to help encourage sport in Canada?” then your comments and efforts will be appreciated.
If, however, you go up to an athlete who is one of the very best in the world, but who has not made it to the podium at the highest level, and you confront him or her with: “What The Fuck Is Your Problem ???” or collectively “What The Fuck Is Canada’s Problem ???” then don’t expect to be taken as anything other than the embarassment that you are.
From your position on the couch, you denigrate our high performance athletes for what you perceive as poor performance, but you have not been a high performance athlete, or coach, or official, or sport organizing body administrator, or fundraiser of any significance. From your position on the couch, you make a ridiculous statement about “sapping the competitive drive in our young people” but you do not lift a finger to develop athletes in Canada, let alone high performance athletes.
In short, you are a very ignorant, very rude, and very hypocritical whinger. The Flying Dutchman, What The Fuck Is Your Problem ???
Wow. Is “Our Athletes” the Canadian equivalent to “Our Troops”?
I always thought the principal reason for athletics was for complaining about your own side.
That’s bullshit. I’m not a politician. Am I not allowed to complain about politics? I’m not a police officer. Am I not allowed to complain about crime problems? I’m not a doctor. Am I not allowed to complain about problems in our healthcare system?
It’s a free country – you are allowed to be a total ass if you like.
I’ll add that my memory of organized summer sports we played as kids presented few that would be found in the Olympics: softball, football (Canadian rules), and soccer are the only ones I recall as being organized. Most of us were exposed to track and field events in gym class (and in my gym class, most of us hated it), and some of us did recreational or even competitive swimming, sailing, archery, and shooting, but very few ever expected or even wanted to compete internationally in these sports. But hockey (not the field kind)–even road hockey–was popular with pretty much everybody year-round, most of us learned how to ice skate and ski at young ages, we all went careening down snow-covered hills in and on a variety of sleds and such, and we basically had fun with winter. Spending the winter in warm gyms and humid indoor pools was drudgery; playing outdoors on snow-covered hills and ice rinks was preferable to anything else. Heck, why run when you can skate?
To a considerable extent, yes.
I never argued that Australia would win nothing without the AIS, and i was well aware of Australia’s medal tallies before Montreal.
But the fact remains that Olympic-style sports have become much more professionalized, and it is essentially impossible to win anything if you compete and train part time or as a hobby. The technological training curve has angled sharply upwards over the past few decades, and the AIS has enabled Australia to stay at the top of that curve.
I realize that asking a counterfactual question (how many medals would Australia have won without the AIS?) is a largely fruitless exercise, because we’ll never know. But it seems to me that the Montreal experience, and the founding of the AIS, supports my argument just as well as it supports yours. You argue that Australians had already become used to disproportionate Olympic success, and that’s true. But the fact that the powers-that-be felt the need to take the drastic step of pumping millions of dollars into a new sporting institute also suggests that they felt that Montreal was not simply an unfortunate aberration, but possibly the writing on the wall for future Australian Olympic success levels.
My argument here is further supported by the fact that, in the pre-Montreal Olympics that you list (Helsinki, Melbourne, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City, Munich), Australia finished in the top 10 in every one of those Olympics. Yet, after the so-called debacle of Montreal, Australia did not appear on the top-10 list again until Barcelona in 1992. The Aussies couldn’t even manage a top-10 finish in the boycott-depleted Moscow Games of 1980.
Then, in 1992 in Barcelona, Australia was 10th in Gold medal count, 9th in overall count. In 1996 in Atlanta, Australia was 7th in Gold, 5th overall; in 2000 in Sydney, 4th in Gold and 4th overall; and in 2004 in Athens, 4th in Gold and 4th overall. Currently in Beijing, the Aussies are 6th in Gold, and 4th overall.
So, basically, Australia were pretty bad at the Olympics from 1976 through 1988, showing steady improvement from then on. Now, Australia habitually hovers around 4th in the world at the Olympics, which seems to me to be pretty much the country’s glass ceiling. It seems rather unlikely that a country of 20 million people, no matter how much money it spends, is ever going to beat the United States, China, or Russia, so the Australians have pretty much done as well as could ever be expected, in terms of their place in the hierarchy.
And their marked improvement, and their return to the top 10 medal winning nations, came at pretty much the exact time you might expect for an institution like the AIS to start showing results. The AIS was formed in 1981, and gained increased funding and commitment from the government over subsequent years.
Sure, Australia’s (sometimes unsavory) obsession with sport is crucial to the country’s success in international sporting competition, but i think there’s a very good case to be made that Australia’s disproportionate success in the past 5 summer Olympiads has also been made possible by the AIS.
Almost?! 
Yeah, well… maybe… I really don’t have any experience of Aussie sports obsession, but just let me say as a very sports-uninterested kid growing up in NZ the country seems pretty well thoroughly obsessed with sporting achievement. In my last year at High School the prefects were: the 1st XV rugby team, the 1st XI cricket team, the rowing eight, a couple of soccer players… and the head off the debating team to provide some academic balance… and this was at a school with a strong academic focus.
Oh go fuck yourself. I answered your stupid moral criterion for the right to complain truthfully. But hey, if you want to make it your mission in life to stalk my bbq threads and register your angst with me repeatedly then I suggest you seek professional help.
I’m done with you.
I see you’re fully exercising your rights…
Seriously, I thought the thread was kind of funny. Chill out. (Or, alternatively, smoke some of that good Canadian weed.)
Awww c’mon Muffin, you’re getting snitty about a post with a 
at the end? Lighten up, already. I figured from TFD’s post about “competing internationally” complete with smiley that he was basically joking, no clarification required.
Yeahbut. You miss the point. What you are saying is like saying that the reason a serial axe murderer does such extensive axe murdering is that they spend all their money on axes. The more pertinent reason is that they are a homicidal maniac who is obsessed with killing people with axes. You or I could buy an axe, but the key point is: we choose not to, as we are not obsessed with axe murdering. Any democratic first world country could buy an AIS-equivalent…