Australia's Olympic Successes

Recently, in one of my MBA classes a student from Nepal asked;?

“For such a small country, how come Australia was so successful at the Olympics?”

As has been well reported, there has been considerable Australian interest in 42 of the 45 sports on the Paris 2024 program. The only sports without any Aussie presence ?were fencing, handball and volleyball.

Australia won 53 medals, 18 gold, 19 silver and 16 bronze. .

Happy to craft an answer for the student, a range of reasons came to mind.

Obviously Australia is a sport loving nation, with most of the population living in close proximity to the coast, and in well structured cities was my first response.

Then I recalled Australia’s poor performance at the 1972 Olympics in Montreal, with a team of 180 athletes returning home with just one silver and four bronze medals and ??being ranked thirty-second on the overall medals table.

I informed the students that this national embarrassment initiated the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport? to be based in Canberra, and eventually with subsidiary institutes in each state. A wide range of elite sports training programs are hosted in these venues.

This project was funded by the Federal and State ?Governments, and also supported by ?the generosity of philanthropists like Gina Rinehart, the chairman of Hancock Prospecting, and Katie Page, the CEO of the Harvey Norman retail group. As probably Australia’s richest citizen, she has donated over $60 million to three or four elite sports in the past ten years. Katie Page, the CEO of the Harvey Norman retail group is another high profile supporter.

Ever since the days of Olympic medalists, Dawn Fraser and the Konrad siblings, swimming at the Olympics has always stood out as probably Australia’s most successful Olympic sport. The root cause I suggested to the now very interested class was because of the beach culture that so many Australians enjoy? in the mild, all year round climatic conditions. We’re not really snow bound like so many of the nations and regions that we compete against in the pool.

?I then drew the students’ attention to applying a PESTEL analysis to their attention. After all, applying this analysis tool to macro environments was taught in the course.

Apart from the governments (political) contributing in various ways to the development of elite sports, such as the construction of world standard facilities, our political stability must also be a factor. As a nation, our people are not involved in, or distracted by conflicts with neighboring countries. We are surrounded by seas. I related this scenario to other nations that were not sharing borders with other countries such as New Zealand and Japan who also did exceptionally well on a per capita basis in the medal count. Our elite sports men and women are able to concentrate wholeheartedly on their chosen disciplines.

Economic factors were then addressed. The students began to suggest that the most successful nations in the sporting arenas were those who had well established, and stable economies. And of course, access to well-crafted technologies also became a relevant factor. I contributed the fact that I have a connection with an engineering design business that has the Australian Olympic cycling team as a client. They have developed refinements to bicycles used by members of the teams for competitions.

At this point, another student, a woman from northern India enquired;

“Most of the gold medals were won by women?”

This had me searching for an answer. Maybe, I suggested that male sports in Australia are dominated by high budget, mass-market platforms such as Australian rules football, and rugby league, and also professional cricket and soccer. Fewer men therefore are attracted into elite amateur sports, the province of the Olympic Games movement. Women, on the other hand have fewer opportunities to participate professionally in non-Olympic sports, and so have a greater presence in the Olympics.

A final contribution to the discussion was about the staging of the Olympics in Australia. Melbourne hosted the games in 1956, Sydney in 2000, and Brisbane is down for 2032. There is a culture of participation in Olympic sports well ingrained in the Australian psyche. Successful Olympians are treated as national heroes. Our young people have achievable targets to aspire and train towards.

At this, we returned to the lecture that I had prepared.

For me, the seed of a LinkedIn article had been planted, and I’d appreciate seeing your opinions on this topic.

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Click here for more details about Australia’s Olympic successes. https://olympics.com/en/news/paris-2024-olympics-australia-medals-tally-winners-table