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The Olympic Games

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Scotty

Scotty

David Codey (61)
TBH,

My understanding is that the federal government ignored the recommendations in the Crawford review. This was partly due to Coates having friends in the ALP, but also I assume no government of this country wants to be blamed for reducing our sporting success!

We have a third of the population of Britain and France and a quarter of Germany. It would be hard to justify us spending the same figures as they do on olympic sports.

My preference would be to concentrate spending on high participation sports and lifting overall participation rates of our children. That will be both good for the health of our nation and good for our sporting success.

The Olympic sports that would be included in the above include - athletics, swimming, hockey, cycling, rowing. Sports that have relatively low barriers for entry and offer good health benefits. No spending to the likes of archery, shooting, judo etc.

Of course Rugby should also receive a boost with Rio looming!
 
Scotty

Scotty

David Codey (61)
AngrySeahorse said:
This point in the article is interesting "Race morning contained an early plot twist when strong cross breezes forced a reallocation of lanes in which Great Britain were given the most sheltered lane - six - and Australia to four. An an hour before the race the heavens opened with London's biggest storm of the week." Is there a reason the Poms got the most favourable lane? isnt it supposed to be based on who was fastest? Bit like the swimming, fastest end up in the middle lanes?
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The British were the fastest qualifiers. They beat us in the semi and therefore deserved that lane.
 
The_Brown_Hornet

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
Scotty said:
TBH,

My understanding is that the federal government ignored the recommendations in the Crawford review. This was partly due to Coates having friends in the ALP, but also I assume no government of this country wants to be blamed for reducing our sporting success!

We have a third of the population of Britain and France and a quarter of Germany. It would be hard to justify us spending the same figures as they do on olympic sports.

My preference would be to concentrate spending on high participation sports and lifting overall participation rates of our children. That will be both good for the health of our nation and good for our sporting success.

The Olympic sports that would be included in the above include - athletics, swimming, hockey, cycling, rowing. Sports that have relatively low barriers for entry and offer good health benefits. No spending to the likes of archery, shooting, judo etc.

Of course Rugby should also receive a boost with Rio looming!
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Scotty, I actually agree with that. I was just posting a bit of the debate that is going on around funding and administration of sport in OZ. I've got lots more to say about it, but that can wait for later.
 
Scotty

Scotty

David Codey (61)
It is pretty self serving for Coates isn't it? Maybe he should be concentrating on ways for those Olympic sports to become more commercially viable. Swimming and cycling would be good places to start.
 
AngrySeahorse

AngrySeahorse

Peter Sullivan (51)
Soccer is another one that a lot of kiddies play.

I'd say money going toward sports like Archery, Shooting, Judo, & the like should be more toward promoting & encouraging participation rather than anything else so that the numbers of participants would grow enough to justify more funding. It is ridiculous that archery gets more funding than something like Cricket - especially when we have mens & womens national teams.
 
barbarian

barbarian

Phil Kearns (64)
Staff member
Re the Crawford report, from memory it wasn't just Coates who kicked up a stink when it was released. Apparently Crawford had ties to AFL and it shone through in the report.
.
 
AngrySeahorse

AngrySeahorse

Peter Sullivan (51)
barbarian said:
Re the Crawford report, from memory it wasn't just Coates who kicked up a stink when it was released. Apparently Crawford had ties to AFL and it shone through in the report.
.
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The AFL. I understand there are plenty of kiddies that play it but in terms of international sports I could not think of a bigger pointless black hole to put funds into.

IMO the AFL raise enough on their own not to need an extra funds.
 
The_Brown_Hornet

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
There shouldn't be any taxpayer money going into fully professional sport IMHO. Their sponsorship and media rights deals should pay for all of that. I'd be surprised if it was much, but the cynic in me says that the AFL, NRL et al have their hands out as much as anyone.
 
Hugh Jarse

Hugh Jarse

Rocky Elsom (76)
Staff member
Interesting comments coming today from Coates and Feral Sports Minister regarding sports in Schools, and the role of sports in the National Curriculum.

In the Public High School system, the (Mon - Fri) week is already rather full. Where would the find the additional time needed for sports? More importantly the demands on teachers time is chockers. They are going to either follow the Private Schools example and run sports on Saturdays (overtime costs for teachers), or employ more "teachers" in the sports departments who just coach sports or both.

Both solutions do not come cheap.

It could also have a big impact on the weekend sporting clubs, or the Weekend sports clubs need to move from a village club framework to include School teams in with the village clubs.
 
The_Brown_Hornet

The_Brown_Hornet

John Eales (66)
I read that with interest too. I'm actually sick of hearing from John Coates to be honest. Time to retire old boy.

I don't know about other state schools, but the primary school my kids go to still has PE and sports carnivals and they host the district inter-schools several times a year. When they hit high school, I fully expect sport to be compulsory as they'll be going private in all likelihood.

I think there will need to be a bit of a discussion on what our priorities are, because you can't fit everything in during the school week.
 
Kangaroo Sausage

Kangaroo Sausage

Peter Burge (5)
Not sure what the problem is gents, according to this you guys are doing quite well:

medaltally_460x230.jpg


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10825019
 
AngrySeahorse

AngrySeahorse

Peter Sullivan (51)
My experience in primary school was one designated sports day/week. In the warmer months swimming was mandatory x1/week - this was a weekday, not on the weekend. We had sports carnivals for athletics & swimming, divided into 3 groups - red, blue, & gold which was designed to make it more competitive, points at the end indicated which group was better & thus the students in that group had bragging rights. I remember the lame taunting chants "Gold-gold very old", "Red-red already dead", & "Blue-Blue stuck in Glue". I was always in Gold our chant was "Gold & Bold". The colour flags were very old, you had a sense there was a fair bit of tradition associated with them. Gold was not excellent in swimming but we kicked arse in athletics. One year we combined with the local public school (my school was Catholic) & we actually ran a mini-olympics (with only track & field events), groups of kids were designated a country - I remember being in team Hungary. On top of this we had zone events through the Maitland Diocese which also had a pathway up to State. We also had local sports persons come in to do clinics for their sport, I remember the former Newcastle Falcons coming to my school.

High school also had a designated sports day & you needed permission from parents to avoid it. But kids who tried to avoid it, even with parents permission were, IMO, rightfully harassed into doing something - even if it was just walking. Naturally we had athletics & swimming carnivals as well. I remember with soccer & softball we actually had designated training times & were allowed to catch up on our studies for the classes we missed in our own time.

My yr11 & 12 school had two sports subjects, one was "PE" & the other was "Sport & Recreation". I chose Sport & Recreation. While the PE students were sitting in a class room learning about anatomy the S&R students were actually out playing sport & learning about tactics & coaching basics for a number of sports from baseball to Rugby. I really loved that class as much as I loved visual art. I'd recommend anyone big on sport but not on academics to choose S&R over PE.

This is only an example from a Catholic school perspective & I graduated from year 12 in the early 2000s so maybe things have changed. I look back now & I think the schools I went to had a good balance of encouraging participation & having organised school sports but made sure the academic/learning side was not neglected. If schools now days do not have the same/similar set up as above, as in they have less than what I've described above then it just isn't good enough. Even if the kids don't go on to compete at the highest level it still does wonders for self esteem & healthy living.
 
Hugh Jarse

Hugh Jarse

Rocky Elsom (76)
Staff member
The way to the top of the medal table is obviously select a sport that gives out lots of medals for not too much effort, and then throw the nations resources at that.

Hockey and other Field sports only give out 1 medal after a week or so of competition. In terms of KPI for calculating return on investment, that one team medal represents an investment in 15 players. For a Single Scull Rower Gold Medal, you only need to invest in one athlete, not 9 of them for the Blue Riband Rowing event.

When doing the usual "per capita" Gold medal calculations, as some pundits like to quote, the number of participants and length of time taken to earn the Gold Medal should also be taken into consideration.

The maths may be a little out but for running about 3 kilometres (100 metres, 200 metres, 4 x 100 metres, 4 x 200 metres in qualifiers, QF, SF and Final) it is technically possible for one person (country) to win 4 gold medals.

What sports have lots of "easy" medals?

Do weight lifting still give out 3 Golds for Snatch, Clean and Jerk and overall lift within an weight group as they once used to do?

Why do they have weight groups for weight lifting? This is just a medal table rort perpetrated by the "good" weightlifting countries. Same for boxing.

In Athletics, there is no Gold Medal awarded in the 100m sprint for fat bastards, or 100 metres running backwards sprint category. No other styles or concessions to anyone, just One Gold to the person who is fastest over 100 metres, any non-motorised running style allowed.

In basketball, there is no competition for teams with players who are less than 6 foot tall.

Rant over. Bottom Line, the overall Medal table doesn't really mean much because there is no direct comparisons between what each medal is worth, and while NZ is ahead of us on the table this will remain the case.
 
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