The_Brown_Hornet
John Eales (66)
One hopes that a real review will be held after these olympics in relation to how significant sums of taxpayer funds are spent. The bulk of our successes seem to have been athletes not involved in the Winning Edge programme.
I loved the women's rugby win, but my favourite Aussie gold was Esposito in the Women's Modern Pentathlon. A real achievement by any measure and from a sport which received $25,000 in government funds.
Mine too. Your classic Aussie battler story, with plenty of sacrifice to go with it.
I've become increasingly skeptical of tax payer money being lavished on the Olympic team and actually sport in general. Every four years we hear the same people sticking their hand out for more public funding (especially guys like John Coates). At a time when our Federal budget is in a large deficit and plenty of worthy things to be funded, why should our Olympic athletes get any more than they currently do, or more controversially anything at all? I know you can't build a new highway, port, school or hospital with the money spent on our team (it's not nearly enough) but it's the principle, surely? A lot of our big time athletes are pro or at least semi-pro, have corporate sponsorship (say what you like about Gina Rinehart, but Hancock Prospecting support the Hockeyroos) and/or endorsements, so I question the need to kick in extra money. All of this in light of a significant fall off in medal performance since Sydney. That said, the haul we got in Rio and London are probably about where we sit as a nation I think. I'll fire up PowerBI and crunch the numbers when I get bored at work this week and test that hypothesis