Thirty years ago, if you flew over an Australian city what would surprise you was not the swimming pools, but the tennis courts. Australian suburban backyards of every demographic stripe had one, or had one within reach: grass, sand, clay, sometimes concrete. Particularly in affluent suburbs, but elsewhere, too, most Australian kids were in walking distance of a tennis court.
These days, they are gone. There are no fixed statistics on the number of backyard tennis courts in Australia, but authorities ranging from the national tennis body to former Davis Cup captain John Alexander confirm that it has been a catastrophic wipe out, a virtual extinction. The home tennis court has fallen victim to the 10-metre swimming pool, to the subdivided block, to the granny flat, to the stack of apartments. A culture of leisure has transformed itself into a culture of property development.
Community tennis courts still exist as a legacy of the mid-20th century boom in the sport, but few new ones are being built and the extant ones are seldom booked up. The Australian home tennis court – which doubled as a cricket pitch, a football ground, a basketball court – is a seriously endangered species.
At the same time, we Australians see a reason behind the decline in our national tennis prestige, where grand-slam tournaments pass without an Australian player, male or female, reaching the second week and with a mere scattering in the first. Once, we owned tennis: 15 Davis Cups between 1950 and 1967; a further six since then; seven Federation Cups; 18 male grand-slam winners with 77 singles titles between them; four female grand-slam winners with 42 titles; arguably the best male player (Rod Laver) and best female (Margaret Smith Court) the game has known. But, since the 1970s, tennis has been a drying riverbed, momentarily replenished by Pat Cash (one grand slam), Pat Rafter (two) and Lleyton Hewitt (two). Five grand-slam singles titles since 1980, and few second-week appearances outside of those three players. Looking at that change and at the decline of the family tennis court, you have to conclude the two phenomena are connected.
Deep social change has upended Australian tennis – just as, in a completely converse way, a different species of social change has raised the sport in eastern Europe. So what can be said about the rest of Australian sport, which appears to be going through one of its periodic ebb-tides? This year our Olympians brought home their lightest bag of metal since before we started spending up big for our home Olympics, Sydney 2000. Our cricketers lost to India and limped past New Zealand, and many believe England could beat them in next summer’s Ashes. Our once-unchallenged net ballers and hockey players are among the ruck. Our surfers and squash players, who once brought home world titles like duty-free gifts from foreign airports, are among the hunters, not the hunted. Even the trustiest standby, when all else goes wrong – our rugby league team – has just lost the World Cup for the first time since any of the current players were born.
Not only can Australians scratch their heads over failure in the present or immediate past, but failure of a kind is already factored into the future. On 4 December, when the British government announced it would commit £304m (A$571m) to its Olympic athletes for 2012, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was ‘Half-price heroes: we can’t compete’. Australia, spending A$213m on its Olympic program, had effectively given up the fight before it had started.
We may pretend it didn’t, but losing all those cycling races to the British in Beijing – and falling behind Britain in the medal table – stung the national hide. To see that Britain will, for 2012, spend four times as much as us on rowing and cycling, and three times as much on swimming and athletics, sticks in the antipodean craw, because money spent is generally thought to be directly proportional to medals won, and if we are already surrendering to Britain, what hope is there?
It has to be added here, without fear of generalisation, that Australians can tolerate losing to many different nations: in cricket to West Indies, in swimming to the United States, in tennis to Spain, in rugby to New Zealand. But there is something about losing to Britain, and England, in any sport, that just cannot be borne. Even those Australian cricket pundits and fans who were most ambivalent about the team’s image and manner of winning during the past 15 years were able to set their moral objections aside and rally behind the flag when it came to an Ashes series. Witness the size of the crowds, and the sheer glee, when Australia won the last series 5-0. To the boors and the sledgers and the poor sports in our team, all was forgiven.
When Britain’s Olympic spending figures were released in December, enough was enough. Heads of Australian sporting bodies lined up in an orchestrated protest. ‘We have to decide upfront whether as a nation we want to be successful,’ said Andrew Dee, chief executive of Rowing Australia. ‘You can’t join the space race with a hang-glider.’
The president of Cycling Australia, Mike Victor, commented: ‘We’d love to have some of the things [the British] have and be able to run things like a professional road team. But we just can’t at the moment.’
Danny Corcoran, the chief executive of Athletics Australia, said the difference between Britain’s funding and Australia’s was ‘a monster, a huge gap. The UK team were amazed by what Australia was able to do in Beijing with our resources, and it is now getting worse… For us to try and compete against not only the UK but many other countries spending more than us, we can’t continue to compete with our hands tied behind our back.’
When discussing Australians and sport, distinction must be made between tips and icebergs. At community level Australians are an increasingly sporting people, living up to our international image. We are devoted to fitness – walking for exercise and going to the gym are far and away the most popular fitness pursuits, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and two in three Australians participate in some sporting activity, including about one in three in an organized sport. Among men, the most popular organized sports are golf and cycling (both 8.8 per cent of the male population), swimming (8 per cent), running (5.4), tennis (4.9), soccer and cricket (both 3.9). Among women, the top organized sports are swimming (10), netball (4.8), tennis (4.7) and cycling (3.9).
Nor is there any sign of complacency or slackening off in the country’s investment in sport. The total value of construction works – public swimming pools, football grounds, stadiums and so on – has increased from A$869m to A$2.23bn in the past decade. Four-fifths of that spending comes from the private sector. Households spend a total of A$6.3bn a year on sports equipment and activities, including tickets to events. There are 9,256 sporting organisations in Australia, which give paid employment to 111,000 people and make the use of 181,000 volunteers.
These numbers are all on the rise. According to a report by the researchers Sweeney Sports, the most popular sports in Australia for ‘interest’ and participation are tennis, swimming and cricket – interestingly, three sports where our national performance is notably in decline.
So much for the iceberg, which is massive and growing. In any society, though, there is an intriguing connection between the mood of public participation in sports and the performance of the elites. How much impact do the symbols of national prestige have? When Dawn Fraser won swimming gold in three successive Olympics from 1956 to 1964, there was a boom in pools to turn us into a nation of Dawns. No doubt everybody who swam felt they glided along the water with the gold medallist’s amphibious grace.
If that is true, the converse is also: when our Olympians don’t win, we all feel a bit more sluggish. When our cricketers are beaten by England or India, there is a little less strut on every Saturday-afternoon pitch across the nation. Great champions inspire a nation; failure at the top has a slight depressive effect on the masses.
Australia suffered a national sporting depression once before, and it galvanized a response that produced the most profound change in the history of our sport. The 1976 Olympics in Montreal are seen as the nadir of Australian sports: one silver medal, four bronze, and 32nd place in an overall medal tally depleted by the African boycott. The construction of the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, which was already under way, was finished by 1981. The AIS, designed along ’scientific lines’ to prepare elite athletes, initially covered eight sports, six of them Olympic.
Outside the communist bloc and some private academies in America, the AIS had no parallel. It harnessed the best knowledge on training, nutrition, medicine and psychology, and enticed coaches from every corner of the globe, to hothouse a tiny elite of athletes in a full-time professional environment. It led the non-communist world for total commitment and was given credit for Australia’s recovery in subsequent Olympics, right up to 1996 and 2000, when we were among the top five nations in terms of medals won.
In time the AIS’s activities were decentralized from Canberra among the states, where replica institutes were set up, some of them specializing in individual sports. One of these satellite institutes was the Australian Cricket Academy in Adelaide. Its formation was announced in 1986 – the year Australia lost to New Zealand at home, drew with India at home, and lost a second successive Ashes series. That year was our cricketing Montreal. The academy model became the envy of the cricket world when in the 1990s it became recognised as a production line that turned out a generation that dominated the sport.
Adam Gilchrist, who attended the cricket academy in the early 1990s and emerged with contemporaries such as Damien Martyn, Justin Langer, Michael Bevan and Stuart MacGill, says the academy is still doing its job but the benchmarks of success might have shifted. ‘The first thing you’ve got to say is that the rest of the world hasn’t stood still, and the more other countries have copied our cricket academy, the less advantage it gives us.’ Countries such as England and India have imitated the Australian model, even, in England’s case, to the point of poaching the Australian academy’s most influential early coach, former Test wicketkeeper Rodney Marsh. But it is not only in the levelling of the international playing field that Gilchrist sees warning signs.
‘I think the academy will keep on producing cricketers with high technical skills,’ he says. ‘Where you might be a little bit more concerned is how these guys are schooled in life outside cricket. Because they’re being identified so young and taken into this environment, they’re not getting the exposure to life that pre-academy cricketers had.’ Gilchrist himself, although part of an early academy intake, played with seasoned adults from his early teens. It was always part of the education of an Australian cricketer, this exposure to hard men 10, 20, 30 years their senior.
‘I certainly learned a lot of new words from playing with grown men,’ Gilchrist recalls. The grade cricket competitions across Australia, city and country, earned a reputation for hardening young players in an intense environment, not only technically but competitively. ‘When you were representing your suburb or area against another, with all the men against each other, you knew you were in a game,’ Gilchrist says. But also, it gave an education broader than just cricket. Gilchrist partly attributes his ethical approach to cricket – walking when he knew he was out, for instance – to the fact that he used to play grade cricket alongside his tough but deeply moral father, Stan, a schoolteacher. ‘Men like that wouldn’t let you get away with any nonsense.’
Now, however, the best young talents tend to skip over their years of grade cricket, being recruited to the academy or elite State squads from their mid-teens and pushed forward into Sheffield Shield cricket before they have played much grade cricket at all. Gilchrist says he does not know how this cultural change – a kind of hothousing, or early-life specialization – will ultimately affect Australian sporting standards.
This transition would play itself out later in Gilchrist’s career. The Australia team were a mix of academy babies (such as Ricky Ponting, who went to the academy at 16) and a few who had come up outside the system (Matthew Hayden, for instance, had been shunned by the academy because Marsh said he only wanted to take cricketers who had a future as first-class players).
Once these players became adults, together in the one team, they would realize how different their life experiences were. When John Buchanan became Australia coach in 1999, his credo was: ‘I want to help you become not just better cricketers but better people.’ It was as if, at the highest levels, there was a recognition that the precocious hothousing of professionals was leaving their education incomplete, a gap that had to be filled in later.
Competitors will say that that single-mindedness, even narrowness, was precisely what made our teams so rugged. In the British caricature of Australians, we are beady-eyed and granite-hard and our humanity has been winnowed down to a thin, adamant stratum of competitiveness. That is said to be our strength. But it’s a long way from the truth about how Australians see ourselves. Generalising again, the beer-drinking, pizza-eating, womanising persona projected by Shane Warne was admired in Britain for what it was thought to say about Australian sporting masculinity. We are simple, we are upfront, we are laid back, we are pretty stupid actually, but with a ball in our hand we express our national genius.
Meanwhile, Warne was never as popular in Australia as in Britain. To many here – including the decision-makers at the national board who denied Warne the captaincy – Warne reminded us all too painfully of what we had left behind. He was the unreconstructed 1970s man, not particularly funny, and when he did not have the ball in his hand he was a national embarrassment. His off-field ‘bogannness’ was the price we had to pay for laying claim to his genius at cricket. But he personified the national character in the 2000s no better than Edna Everage or Dennis Lillee.
Caricaturing Australians in this way, of course, licensed the British to congratulate themselves on their sporting failures. Mike Atherton and Derek Pringle did not do much on the field against Australia, but at least they were cultured human beings, university-educated and articulate and almost above it all. Would you be proud to have a losing Mike Atherton or a winning Glenn McGrath? The English might well have been happy with what they had and, if they saw Australians as too obsessed with winning at all costs, then winning itself could become another sign of Australian inferiority.
Yet this was a battle of caricatures, not truths. In England, a tough new cricket academy and a streamlined, more competitive county system were under way. In Australia, Buchanan was trying to round out the education of our Test cricketers by taking them to historic battlegrounds and asking them to write poetry. Hayden wrote a cookbook and McGrath worked on developing a new barbecue sauce. Was all this a new sign of Australia’s degeneration?
Others believe that elite international sport has changed so vastly, in the era of wholesale professionalism, that there is no longer a meaningful relationship between the sporting prowess and fitness of a culture and the performances of its national representatives. Do the exploits of Rafael Nadal and the Davis Cup winners, not to mention the European football champions, mean the Spanish have suddenly become a faster, fitter people? Are Novak Djokovic and Jelena Jankovic the standard bearers for a nation of superhuman Serbs? And conversely, does decline among the professional elites throw any light at all on national sportiness?
The Australian Institute of Sport has 700 scholarship-holders this year, a historic high. Yet the competitive nature of sport means that a country may be going backwards even when it is going forwards: that is, it may be raising its standards against fixed measuring sticks, but other countries may be raising their standards faster. The anxiety in Australia is that while our AIS has become a model for the western world, we are suffering early-adopter’s syndrome: we are standing still while the others are, comparatively, moving forwards with newer facilities and fresher approaches.
One person who has observed the fine detail of change in several fields is sports analyst Mark Morgan. A Commonwealth Games gold medallist in the 100m freestyle in 1978, a lawyer and a long-time accredited swimming coach, Morgan has compiled figures to test different theories about Australia’s reputation for ‘punching above its weight’ internationally. ‘For a start, this is a bit of a myth that we pat ourselves on the back for,’ he says, ‘this idea that for our small population [20 million] we do so well. The fact is, Australia is an affluent country with a favourable climate and education systems that expose children to many different sports and sporting opportunities, we spend a lot of money on sport and we value sports very highly, so in sporting terms we’re not quite the small country that our population suggests.’
Morgan believes Australia does punch above its weight in most sports, but not perhaps as impressively as we like to think. In swimming, the sport Morgan knows most intimately, he says that Olympic results never reflect the health of the sport generally: ‘Olympic results are generally assessed by medals won, and medals are won by freakish performers. Without Ian Thorpe in Sydney and Athens, and without Stephanie Rice in Beijing, Australia’s swimming results would have been comparatively moderate, in terms of medals won. But then again, if America hadn’t had Michael Phelps, Australia’s results would be much better without Australia having done a single thing differently.’
Rather than look at Olympic results, Morgan’s analysis goes to age-group times in national and regional championships. ‘Age-group records are being broken in Australia at a ridiculous rate,’ Morgan says. ‘The times are getting significantly faster every year. They are on par with American results and better than any other country. This may never be reflected in Olympic medals, but it’s a fact that swimming in Australia is getting stronger and stronger.’
The sophistication of swimming training and coaching has increased appreciably in the three decades since Morgan was the fastest swimmer in the country. ‘From the 1970s there was a move towards huge volumes of swimming. Heated indoor pools had just been built, so swimmers were training in winter as well as summer for the first time, and the thinking went, “Five kilometers a week is better than two, so 10 must be better than five, so why not 40, 50, 90 kilometers a week?”‘
The attitude of coaches, Morgan recalls, was: ‘You throw all the eggs at the wall and the couple that don’t break, they’re the good ones and you’ll persist with them.’ Weights training was similarly crude. ‘Nautilus machines and the like had only just come around, and coaches would put you on dumbbells and bench-pressing and essentially the same weights program as a shot-putter would do. Not only did it burn sprint swimmers out, but it was counter-productive, building muscle bulk that wasn’t good for swimmers.’
The transformation to more targeted training – core-strength exercises, a focus on recovery, and splitting swimming groups into distance and sprint swimmers, as well as separating their training by stroke – was pioneered in countries such as Australia and America with the strongest swimming traditions, but during the 1990s there was also a greater sharing of knowledge internationally that leveled the pool, so to speak. Also, the freer traffic of coaches between countries – Australia kindly donating the best of its coaching talent to Britain – and the influence of the internet meant that while one country might be improving its coaching techniques, its ability to keep those techniques secret as a competitive advantage was diminished. Globalisation was a rising tide that raised all the boats.
‘With those influences,’ Morgan says, ‘I think you shouldn’t be saying how Australian swimming has lost its dominant position, you should be saying how remarkable it is that Australia, and America, have stayed ahead of the field.’
Older coaches spy something deeper at work: in Australia, there is such a saturation of sporting opportunities that sports are constantly in competition with each other. ‘Scouts from all sports are going around schools and spotting talent,’ Morgan says. ‘There’s nothing a parent and a kid like more than someone coming up and saying, “You’ve got the perfect physique and speed and skills for basketball, or Australian rules, or netball, so here’s a scholarship for you and you’re on your way.”‘
The identification of talent, he says, is happening at such a young age and spreading among so many sports that Australians’ natural tendency to fitness and the outdoors are going to be diluted.
‘It’s not like China, where someone will come to a village and pick out the gymnasts and that will be their only pathway out of poverty,’ Morgan says. ‘In a relatively affluent country like Australia, the most talented young sports people have lots of sports to choose from, and it’s inevitable that your national teams in the traditional sports might be weakened, because nowadays the kids aren’t all playing cricket, or all going swimming, or all playing the same code of football. And it’s not a pathway to affluence. A good number of the most talented kids in any sport are going to become doctors and bankers. They don’t need sport to get them out of where they’ve come from.’
Hence one solution to the apparent paradox: while Australians are growing demonstrably fitter and more involved in physical exercise, the achievement of our national teams in traditional sports may slide. Couple this with the boom in popularity of non-competitive physical pastimes and ‘extreme sports’ – skateboarding, surfing, mountaineering, off-road cycling – and you have a fair portrait of today’s Australians: fitter than ever, sportier than ever, as rugged and sunburnt as we always were, but just not so focused on beating England at cricket. And not so worried at having no locals competing in the tennis grand slams. As Tennis Australia points out, for all the decline in Australian participants in the grand slams, attendances and television ratings for the Australian Open have never been higher. Perhaps we’re just not as parochial as we used to be.
It’s a rosy, laid back picture and there’s only one thing that might conceivably change it: getting smashed in this year’s Ashes series and getting left behind by Britain in cycling and rowing and swimming and track and field in London in 2012. Then we might get serious again.
, players will continue to enjoy a high income.
