Rise of the Green & Gold

and the weird stuff between. I'm Tony Armstrong. For the 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 been listening to an iHeart production with the Poolroom with me, Tony Armstrong, Catch you next time. No