We’ve made it- it’s the final day of the Tokyo Games, and we have emerged intact, covid-free, and laden with sweet, sweet gold. The final days saw more success for Australia; God brought home Tom Green and Jean van der Westhuyzen for gold on a kayak, but could only afford Nicola McDermott a silver in the high jump. Nevertheless, does Liberal preselection await? Elsewhere, Keegan Palmer settled the debate on what constitutes an essential service, before we marvelled at the quick-thinking of Cedri...
Aug 07, 2021•35 min•Season 2Ep. 17
In this episode, which was recorded just before the start of Tokyo 2020, we're fondly reflecting on the true Bad Boys (and Girls) of Australian Olympic History. Sung to the theme of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, our subjects include: "Nick D'arcy, Kendrick Monk, posing in a gun shop. Stilnox, John Coates, Cultural Review." "Steph Rice Homophobic Tweet, Michael Diamond DUI, Sally Robbins laying down, nation's on the fritz." Audio production by Tim 'T-Dog' Eldridge; graphic design thanks ...
Aug 06, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 16
Have a Go's fan favourite Luke Heggie is back on as part of our special 'Olympic Reflections' mini-series. We hear about one of the strangest units of all time, British decathlon gold medallist Daley Thompson, before learning about Irish sporting royalty, Michelle Smith de Bruin and her doting husband, Erik. Check out lukeheggie.com for gig dates. If you're not already on his podcast with Nick Cody (Midnight Brawl) then do yourself a favour. Elite audio production from Tim 'T-Dog' Eldridge; grap...
Aug 05, 2021•34 min•Season 2Ep. 15
We’re deep in to the post-swimming medal frenzy. The rivers of gold have slowed, and Australia is diligently scouring the beach with a metal detector for anything that resembles a precious metal. Thankfully, sailing is keeping us afloat, with Matthew Belcher and Will Ryan picking up another ‘just show up’ gold medal. Does this mean we are on the cusp of a sailing boom? And what’s in an seafaring AusKick pack anyway? Elsewhere, boxing sensation Harry Garside is taking the world by storm, sinking ...
Aug 04, 2021•33 min•Season 2Ep. 14
Melbourne comic Tim "Big Hewy" Hewitt joins us today on our special 'Olympic Reflections' mini-series! We start with a very recent memory (Anastacia's parochial reaction to the Brisbane 2032 bid win), before deep-diving Australia's brief and weird obsession with the pole vault, triggered by gold medallist/psycho redhead Steve Hooker and the glamorous Tatiana Grigorieva. That naturally leads to a discussion around swimming dads and illegal body suits. After the break we talk Stilnox and gun laws ...
Aug 03, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 13
Cam Duggan and Gerard McGowan, two-thirds of the excellent Mugg Off Podcast, join the show as part of our special 'Olympic Reflections' mini-series. We discuss Eric 'The Eel' Moussambani, who stole our hearts at Sydney 2000 despite coming from a country which didn't have an Olympic pool. How did he get into the Olympics? Why didn't someone jump in to help a bloke who was clearly drowning in front of our eyes? Where is he now? We then go on to reflect on cult hero Jai Taurima, the larrikin athlet...
Aug 02, 2021•30 min•Season 2Ep. 12
Scintillating Sunday has moved in to Magic Monday, and we’re blissfully counting our ever-growing mountain of gold. Where do we start? Logan Martin picked up an unlikely gold in BMX, leaving the nation in a bunny-hop lather and sending his real estate agent scrambling for an effective way to market a BMX track. Matt Wearn won our first ‘welfare’ gold by simply ‘turning up’, while chronic over-achiever Rohan Browning momentarily reignited our passion for the 100m dash. Will he be immediately be i...
Aug 01, 2021•38 min•Season 2Ep. 11
We examine one of the most iconic moments in Australian sporting history: the time Kieren Perkins won Gold in the 1500m from lane 8 at Atlanta 1996. He'd barely qualified for the team, he was ill before the race, and he was plagued by self-doubts and panic attacks. But he romped it home from the "graveyard" Lane 8 position to secure his place in our hearts, and a lifetime's worth of board directorships and corporate sponsorships. Will the nation "stop" for an event like this again? Have social m...
Jul 31, 2021•22 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Super Saturday is here and the gold on the water at Tokyo 2020 continues to flow apace. From Wednesday's "67 minutes of glorious gold" to the extreme dominance in the Rowing, Australia's been unashamedly stockpiling medals for the looming athletics drought. But is the gold getting old? Is a breaststroke gold really worth the column inches? And are the TV-polished fathers of our winners right to be obdurate and scripted in their reactions? But for every story of triumph, there’s one of utter nati...
Jul 30, 2021•38 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Kurt Fearnley is Australia's pre-eminent Good Strong Bloke (GSB). Over a 25-year career, he's amassed three Paralympic Gold medals, two Olympic silver medals and seven world titles. He's also crawled the Kokoda Trail, crewed the winning yacht in the Sydney to Hobart, and jagged an OAM. We hear what it's like to be an 18-year-old competing in front of 118,000 people at Sydney 2000, to winning Gold in Athens 2004 (despite busting a tyre 5km from the finish line). We discuss the pressure of perfect...
Jul 29, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Today we are going back to a defining moment in Australia’s sporting history: The Olympic swimming selection trials of 2004. The nation held its breath when Ian Thorpe slipped on the blocks in the 400m qualifying heats for Athens 2004, earning an automatic disqualification from the stickler official. Thorpe claimed a noise caused him to jump. the blocks. What was that noise? Was it the sound of sponsorship dollars going down the drain? Or perhaps the NRL's Phantom Siren diversifying into new spo...
Jul 28, 2021•24 min•Season 2Ep. 7
We’ve got Gina Rinehart-levels of gold flowing in the pool thanks to Ariane Titmus and Kaylee McKeown, and a swimming team that is pleasing its AOC masters by rag-dolling socials with regular viral content. But while this may be keeping John Coates happy, what about the locals in Japan? Is there anything in the COVID marshall handbook for negotiating a gyrating white man? And why does the IOC bristle about podium trivialities, but couldn’t care less about a profanity voiced by Rebecca Gibney? On...
Jul 27, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Tom Birmingham from the Hello Sport Podcast is on as part of our special 'Olympic Reflections' mini-series. We earnestly discuss the lingering cultural impact of Matt Shirvington's junk (upon close review, it's still as big as we remembered it to be) while reflecting on Jane Savile's sad (but technically correct) last minute disqualification from the Sydney 2000 Olympics. The Hello Sport Podcast is a celebration of the great Australian past time that is talking about sport with unqualified opini...
Jul 26, 2021•28 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Day 4 is here, and we’re already in the bad books with the IOC. But who cares, because how good’s a relay gold with no subsequent commercial impact? Even though they’ll never see a corpie, our 4x100m relay golden girls crushed the Americans on the way to gold. But was it enough to satiate our collective appetite for medals? And how much of this undue pressure can we shift on to the shoulders of Ariarne Titmus? For those unaware, she’s the girl from the Harvey Norman ads. Not only do we badly nee...
Jul 25, 2021•28 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Much like a 40-year-old man trying to impress the friends of his new 22-year-old girlfriend, the IOC is rolling out a bunch of ‘rad’ new sports at Tokyo 2020. But why does everything have to be new? Broadcast dollars, mainly. But it's not the IOC's most desperate cash grab: that was Paris 1900, which included highly marketable sports such as live pigeon shooting and poodle clipping. Karate's in at Tokyo, and that makes sense, but what the actual fuck is 'Sport Climbing'? We're assume it's like t...
Jul 24, 2021•25 min•Season 2Ep. 3
After a typically precise and covid-devalued Opening Ceremony, Day 1 is underway at Tokyo. Join the boys as they run the rule over the fanfare of the first night at the Tokyo National Stadium and face the burning questions that arose. How good was the lights and graphics and shit? Will the weight of a state-of-the-art graphite flagpole cost Cate Campbell? And if the Olympics are supposed to help us forget about COVID, then why was the whole thing packed with references to this feral virus? Once ...
Jul 24, 2021•42 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Welcome to Have a Go's special daily coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Games. Many thought it wouldn't happen, but through sheer determination (and water-tight contracts) the IOC have fought off a global pandemic to muscle this thing in to existence. Sport is a microcosm of society - it gives us hope and dares us to dream... or some shit - but do the Japanese even want this? Meanwhile, the athletes are under strict orders not to engage in any coital activities in the Village. What's the point of winnin...
Jul 23, 2021•28 min•Season 2Ep. 1
We've covering the biggest international sporting event of the year in a special daily podcast. Try and guess which one? (It'll save us from having to type the words and risk being sued by a certain Swiss-based sporting organisation.) We'll be bringing you event previews, race reviews, gold medal updates, feature stories, special guests and wild tangents... all dripping with Sydney 2000 nostalgia. Forget COVID, let's pour all our energy into supporting largely unknown amateur athletes in various...
Jul 14, 2021•3 min
Please enjoy this special hour-long "best bits" episode to mark the end of Series One! Episode includes some new exclusive content and a hint as to what's next for the Have a Go team. After 20 episodes of deep painful introspection, are we any closer to understanding what makes Australia tick? No, but at least we've contributed 600+ mins of audio content to the internet. If you've been enjoying this Podcast, feel free to leave a review. It'll take 13 seconds of your time and give us the shot of ...
Jun 29, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 21
It's the quadrennial event that unites the world in a kaleidoscope of excitement, triumph, and premium advertising opportunities. Here in Australia, we love a gold medal more than anything else (especially one we haven't budgeted for). And we'll never forget that the Sydney 2000 Games were universally declared the "best ever". It was a simpler time: the economy was booming, political leadership was stable, there were fewer Royal Commissions, Roy and HG were on Free-to-Air TV, and there were cert...
Jun 22, 2021•31 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Religion. It's literally divided nations and incited pretty much every single war throughout history. But while Australia remains a majority Christian society, more than 30% of Australians said they have "no religion" in the 2016 Census. Is Twitter taking over from the Good Book? Is "Wokeism" the newest religion - and if so, who would be its spiritual leader? But is the separation between Church and State starting to fade? Our Prime Minister Scott Morrison is a devout Pentecostalist who blesses ...
Jun 15, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 19
When the NSW Blues and Queensland Maroons collide at 8:17pm on a school night, it’s more than just a game of rugby league. It’s decades of pent-up tension, a raging inferiority complex, and cultural warfare on a molecular level. It’s also CTE and pokie money. However, Origin is wobbling on the precipice as it faces scrutiny from all-comers. Is the concept’s treasured tapestry under threat from loose immigration laws and rigged refs? Can it survive the cultural axemen of contemporary times (that ...
Jun 08, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 18
From the deadly serious issues dogging the nation all the way down to the triviality of butter, we will conduct a Royal Commission in to anything. It’s an obsession that has even beset our sporting teams, with culture reviews into cricket, hockey (and a number of other sports you’d forgotten about) now the process de jour for getting to the bottom of a stink. But why do we hold these laborious and monstrously-expensive reviews if we’re just going to ignore the recommendations? And what’s the poi...
Jun 01, 2021•31 min•Season 1Ep. 17
From our earliest history, this country has adored a frothie like nothing else. Whether a work function, a catch-up with family or a three year old’s birthday party, there is no event that can be undertaken in Australia without it being densely imbued by booze. But why do we crave the sweet elixir with such concerning fanaticism? Has anyone seen the end of Friday Night Footy without being half-cut? Would it kill us to enjoy a gourmet seafood lunch without being paired with a range of premium whi...
May 25, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Today we’re talking about Canberra – it’s the home of our federal parliament, the centre of national politics and the beating heart of our public service. But our politicians have been taking the piss down there for decades. A deep-seated cultural rot has set in. There's a culture review into the parliamentary workplace, and for good reason. These blokes are deadset out of control. Walter Burley-Griffin would be turning in his grave. So, how do we fix Canberra and pull these blokes back in line?...
May 18, 2021•34 min•Season 1Ep. 15
"The economy" is the number one issue for Australians at the ballot box, even if no-one knows what that means. When COVID struck, there was a bit of a line outside Centrelink for a couple of days, but we rolled out a few stimulus packages and a government program or two and we’re roaring back. Or so we're told. But what happens if we lose our AAA credit rating? Probably nothing hey. If the AUD is smashing the USD is that a good thing or a bad thing? And who is the best source for investment tips...
May 11, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Home to the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, Roxy Jacenko, Alan Jones, and a host of recently deceased white collar criminals, Sydney is truly Australia's glittering crown jewel. But is Sydney really that "good", or does Melbourne's cafe culture give it the edge when it comes to the all-important "liveability" stakes? While the Harbour is indeed sparkling, and its people are undeniably more attractive than anywhere else in Australia, Sydney does have an affordability issue. So how do we ensure a...
May 05, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 13
If there’s one thing Australians don’t like, it’s change. Climate change, especially. Australia has the third highest proportion of "climate deniers" in the world. But what's wrong with being a bit iffy when only 97% of peer-reviewed experts say humans are to blame for climate change? Sure, global warming has killed more Prime Ministers than people, but why can't Scott Morrison just sort it out immediately? What does "net zero" emissions mean anyway? (sounds bloody good whatever it is). And what...
Apr 27, 2021•34 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Rightly or wrongly, the events of Gallipoli have shaped our national identity for over 100 years. In 1915, Australia was a newly federated nation still on its P plates, searching desperately for a sense of self. But what does the ANZAC Spirit mean to us in 2021? Why are we ripping Victoria Cross medals off our most decorated soldiers when we could just chalk it up to the mysterious "Fog of War"? How do we properly install the Spirit into the next generation of milky-handed recruits (presumably v...
Apr 20, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Australia's a pretty safe place to live, but that doesn't mean we take our national security lightly. The current terror threat level is listed as "probable," so COVID hasn't completely wiped the bastards out yet. But do we really know who our enemies are? Maybe they're closer than we think. Perhaps they're even being canvassed for pre-selection as we speak. As such, we must all remain both alert and alarmed at all times. Even when drinking out of a prosthetic leg for a laugh. And stop the boats...
Apr 13, 2021•38 min•Season 1Ep. 10
