A sporting life
Australians have always loved sport and have generally excelled at it. Even before Federation in 1901, ‘Australia’ was competing internationally as a nation.
Australia has more than 120 national sporting organisations and thousands of local, regional and state sports bodies. Around 6.5 million Australians are registered as sports participants.
The Australian Sports Commission provides high-quality training opportunities for high-performance athletes, funding for national sporting organisations and sport programs ranging from talent identification and development to specific initiatives for women in sport, Indigenous sport and sport for people with a disability. In addition to program delivery, the commission has important leadership, coordination and funding functions and a general advocacy role on issues relating to sport.
The number one team sport for Australian girls is netball. For boys it is soccer.
A champion nation
Despite its relatively small population, Australia has produced world champions in many sports, including cricket, rugby union, women’s basketball, rowing, boxing, netball, field hockey, swimming and skiing.
The most recent examples of the nation’s sporting prowess are the successes of the Australian teams at the 2004 Athens Olympic and Paralympic Games and the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. At the Athens Olympics, Australia won 17 gold, 16 silver and 16 bronze medals 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.
In Melbourne, where athletes from 71 Commonwealth countries
and territories competed, Australia won 221 medals (84
gold,
69 silver and 68 bronze)—the highest number of any
nation. England came second with 110 medals and Canada third
with 86.
In 2006, Australia also reached the final 16 in the football World Cup.
The science of sport
It is not just a strong will and an aptitude for sport that make Australian athletes champions. Science, training and innovation contribute greatly to Australia’s sporting success. Elite and professional athletes benefit from a supportive network of coaches, managers, scientists, doctors, sports psychologists, physiotherapists and nutritionists.
The Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, funded by the Australian Government, leads the development of Australia’s top athletes with sports facilities and support services of the highest calibre. It provides training in 26 different sports; programs include biomechanics, physiology, sports psychology, scientific research and talent search. More than 75 coaches train the current enrolment of 700 athletes.
Australia hosted the 18th Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in March 2006. This was a significant international sporting event involving 4500 athletes from the 53 countries and 18 territories of the Commonwealth. The Games were widely hailed as a success, with more than 1.7 million tickets sold and a global television audience of 1.5 billion. Around two million people also attended the cultural program Festival Melbourne 2006, held in conjunction with the Games. Melbourne also hosted the 2007 FINA World Swimming Championships.
Australia hosted the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956 and Sydney in 2000. In 2003, Australia hosted the Rugby World Cup—the third largest sporting event in the world. Brisbane is bidding to host the 2011 World Championships in Athletics.
Australia's gold medallist Jessica Schipper in action during the women's 100m butterfly final at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, 19 March 2006.
Sport and business
Thanks to its sporting success, Australia is an important international trader in sports-related goods and services. Recent international activities have included:
- 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 Athens Olympic Games. The contracts were worth more than $200 million and quadrupled Australia’s exports to Greece.
Melbourne-based Concept Sports secured the merchandising rights for Athens 2004. This contract, worth an estimated $100 million, led Concept Sports to double the size of its 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.
Sydney’s TAFE Global secured a multi-million dollar contract to help train nearly 80 000 Olympic staff and volunteers.
Australian companies are now closely involved in preparations for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008—designing stadiums, providing IT and telecommunications and working in event and sport management.
Australian soccer player Craig Johnston 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 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.
Sports participation
A national survey in 2005 indicated that just over 11 million Australians aged 15 years and over participated at least once a week in physical activity for exercise, recreation and sport—a participation rate of 69.2 per cent. An estimated 7.1 million people aged 15 and over exercised three or more times per week (44.2 per cent).
The 10 most popular physical activities undertaken by Australians aged 15 and over are walking, aerobics/fitness, swimming, cycling, tennis, golf, running, bushwalking, soccer and netball.
Sport for people with disabilities
The Disability Sport Unit of the Australian Sports Commission aims to ensure that all Australians with disabilities have an opportunity to participate in sporting activities at the level of their choice.
The Commission uses four innovative programs to help meet this objective:
- Disability Education Program, which provides training and resource material for teachers, coaches and community leaders to help them include people with disabilities in sporting activities
- CONNECT (Creating Opportunities Nationally through Networks in Education, Classification and Training), designed specifically to prepare sport for the inclusion of people with disabilities at all levels from grassroots to the elite
- Sports Ability, an inclusive activities program designed to provide teachers and support staff with more ways of including young people with disabilities in physical activity and sport, particularly those with high support needs
- National Classification Program, in partnership with the Australian Paralympic Committee, which addresses the need for experienced classifiers—a crucial element in providing pathways for athletes with a disability.
Sport and international aid
The Australian Sports Commission has an international relations program, dating back more than a decade, to promote cooperation in sport between Australia and other countries through the provision of resources, services and facilities.
The program does this mainly by managing Australian government-funded community sports development programs in the Pacific region, southern Africa and the Caribbean, and by coordinating the Commision’s relations with foreign agencies.
The launch of the Football Anytime program at Federation Square, Melbourne.
Our Pool of Talent
by Adrian McGregor
A nation’s pastimes are usually defined by its climate yet despite Australia being the world’s driest inhabited continent - or perhaps because of it - Australians are drawn to water. We swim, surf, sail, ski and snorkel, raft and row, and fish – every imaginable watery pursuit. Northern hemisphere visitors fly south across thousands of kilometres of coastlines and descend into our capital cities over suburbs dotted with the blue reflections of backyard swimming pools. Since about 85 per cent of our population lives within 50kms of the coast - much of it sandy beaches with ocean surf - it is inevitable that the nation has developed a tradition of excelling in swimming. It is our most popular sport and social activity.
At the Olympic Games, our swimmers regularly provide the majority of our medals. Australia’s first female gold medallist was Fanny Durack who won the swimming100m in Stockholm in 1912. The honour board since lists names familiar to most Australians, Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose, to Susie O’Neill and Ian Thorpe. Our fondness for water is most manifest on the beach. The volunteer Australian surf lifesaving movement, unique in its scope, also dominates international competitions in surfing skills. As well, the 2007 men’s and women’s world professional surfboard titles were won by Mick Fanning and Stephanie Gilmour who live within coo-ee of each other on Queensland’s Gold Coast.
As it is in the water so it is on land. In November, 2007 Australia was listed with world champions in sports as diverse as cricket, women’s basketball and netball, motorcycle GP, athletics, cycling, sailing, rowing, boxing, skiing and squash. Our romance with sport dates back to early days when the nation, conscious of its convict history, sought ways to establish an international identity. The obvious choice arrived in 1896 with the first modern Olympic Games, to which nations were invited rather than having to qualify. It is no surprise that Australia is one of only two nations that has competed in every Olympics since, and is one of only six countries that has hosted more than one Olympics. Sport proved a tangible way to gauge our international status and even, in certain fields, to achieve a remarkable dominance.
The most recent sport to capture the nation’s imagination is soccer, mainly due to the success of the national team, the Socceroos, who made the finals of the 2006 World Cup. Soccer has long struggled in a country whose football traditions are indelibly linked with English rugby and Irish gaelic football. In 2008 rugby league celebrated the centenary of the founding of the Sydney club competition, while Australian rules marked the sesquicentenary of formalising that game’s rules. Yet both those codes are decidedly parochial and face a challenge in popularity from soccer, the football justifiably entitled the world game.
Adrian McGregor is an award-winning journalist and author of best-selling biographies of prominent Australian sports figures.