Rise of the Green & Gold

Australia has always been a sporting nation, but the green and gold wasn't always synonymous with winning. This is the story of how our greatest failure on the world stage gave rise to new a generation of athletes and put Australia on the path to Games glory.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Australia is known for its bad ass Why as a
sporting nation, we've blown the world socks off at games
like women's soccer, test cricket one day it's national cricket,
women's soccer, T twenty cricket, backyard cricket, and of course
women's soccer. But in nineteen seventy six we went to
the Montreal Olympics and it nearly destroyed our reputation for good. Hey,

(00:35):
welcome to the poolroom. Well, we celebrate the winners, losers
and the weird stuff between. I'm Tony Armstrong. For the

(01:03):
first eight decades of the Olympics, Australia had a pretty
good record. Obviously we'd always killed it in the pool
and we'd had success on the track too, but we
were also gold medalists in equestrian canoe, sailing, cycling, diving
and pentathlon. Heck, at our home games in Melbourne nineteen
fifty six we came third out of everyone. And we've

(01:27):
sent athletes to every modern Olympics. The only other country
that's done that is Greece, and they invented it. We're
a country full of people who kickballs, hit them with sticks,
throw them in the air, and put them in nets.
We've got wide open spaces for running and jumping and

(01:48):
we're surrounded by water. Sport is in our blood. What
I'm saying is by nineteen seventy six we weren't Olympic novices,
but the competition had changed. When Australia won eight gold
medals in Munich, people thought that was pretty good. It
was three more than mid one in nineteen sixty eight

(02:09):
at least, but six of them were won in the pool,
and half of those were thanks to future survival when
a Shane Gould who was only fifty and look, there's
plenty to be said for being great at freestyle, but
other countries were investing in their future champions and Australia
simply wasn't. Even Our swimmers, the life raft of our
Olympic dreams for decades, were training in substandard pools. They

(02:33):
weren't even full length. We'd pinned our hopes on a
squad that were struggling to find fifty meters of water
in one place. Our athletes were still amateurs, working their
regular jobs alongside training, while our overseas counterparts were paid
to get good. By the time we got to Montreal,
the corners we've been cutting caught up to US one

(02:54):
hundred and eighty Australians went to the nineteen seventy six Olympics.
We had representatives in all kinds of sports, cycling, archery, fencing. Look,
there was twenty altogether that should have been a wide
enough net to cast, but we flubbed it. No one
in our athletics team placed higher than twelveth We lost

(03:15):
all but two of our basketball games, and half of
our marathons didn't even finish, and Railing Boil was disqualified
from her two hundred meters sprint after two false starts.
The Australian team crawled home with only five medals in hand,
and four of them were bronze. It was a real
shock for a nation that considered itself, if not the

(03:35):
literal best at sport, at least the figurative best. How
could Australia, a country with four whole football codes, do
so badly? And what was the government going to do
about it? A few years earlier, the Whitland government had
commissioned a sports academic by the name of John Bloomfield
to write a white paper. It had the super catchy

(03:57):
title of Role and Scope and development of record creation
in Australia. He basically recommended Australia get up to speed
with the rest of the world, investing coaching, invest in
talent identification, and be serious about sports science and medicine.
Bloomfield had looked at the elite athletes coming out of

(04:18):
European sports institutes and compared them to our zero sports
institutes and nil gold medals. It was time, he'd suggested
that Australia follow suit. After a feasibility study to check
that yes, elite athletes are good for the economy, I
assume a report was released that recommended the creation of

(04:39):
the Australian Institute of Sport. The Minister for Sport, a
guy called Frank Stewart, presented it to Parliament. He was
keen sport offers the most fundamentally democratic social order one
could imagine. I feel it is time Australia joined the
ranks of those numerous countries which realized some time ago

(05:00):
that a two way relationship can operate between sport and
the state. He even set up a study group to
get it up, but when the Whitlam government was defeated
in nineteen seventy five, the recommendation dropped dead, hid it
in the back of the filing cabinet so more money
could be spent on roads or tax concessions, I guess.

(05:21):
And it stayed like that until yep, Montreal, when even
New Zealand won two gold medals while we came home
with none. Our sports performance was back under the microscope.
How could we a nation that had got pretty comfy
with punching above its weight do more? Winning the institute

(05:43):
getting people fired up about it wasn't as easy as
it had been. The nineteen seventy six Games really had
an impact on public support for Australian sport, and the
government had also fallen out with the Australian Olympic Federation.
After five years of pushing, in nineteen eighty, Bloomfield was
appointed Deputy chair of the very organization he'd recommended, and

(06:05):
Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser officially opened the Australian Institute of
Sport on January twenty sixth, nineteen eighty one, a day
we now celebrate with Lamb Shops Australian Institute of Sport Day. Yeah,
that sounds better. Finally our athletes had proper support, eight

(06:31):
hundred of them applied to train under scholarships in Canberra,
where special focus will be on sports like basketball, swimming
and track and field. It was a great success and
extra sixty two athletes headed to the next Olympics in
la and we took home twenty four medals, including four golds,
only one of which was for swimming. Since our dismal

(06:56):
performance in nineteen seventy six, Australia has never had another
year without a gold. We've trained athletes at the highest
level for more than forty years and the AIS now
includes everything from psychology to biomechanics. In the covid Era
Tokyo Games, we came away with the whopping seventeen goals,
equaling our highest number ever. It didn't feel like it

(07:19):
at the time, but Montreal nineteen seventy six might have
actually been our best games. Not in medals or records
or overall happiness, but hitting rock bottom paved the way
for something better, something greener and golder, something unstoppable. You've

(07:47):
been listening to an iHeart production with the Poolroom with me,
Tony Armstrong, Catch you next time. No