He said athletes should have been in Europe before Sydney. "If they don't win races in Europe, they don't go, irrespective of whether they meet the standard or not."
The Olympics were the pinnacle. "Even if you don't think you can win a medal, you go there for your best performance or to try to actually improve on your best.
"You don't go there to take part, you don't go there to have fun, you don't go there for the experience."
But New Zealand athletics coach Steve Hollings denied that his athletes were in Sydney to have fun.
"If that's John's views, that's John's views. I don't think people come to the Olympics not to try, but it's very easy to make those comments from afar."
Walker said New Zealand sport was in crisis but no one wanted to address it. If more was spent on sport, particularly at a lower level, it would lead to a healthier nation with lower health costs.
Walker said he had a different attitude from today's Olympians when he won his 1500m gold medal at Montreal in 1976.
"The people who went to the Olympic Games with me went to win ... They tried to achieve their best."
Before the 1976 Montreal 5000m, Dick Quax was stricken with diarrhoea, was on a saline drip for two days and lost 4.5kg.
"He got off his sickbed and came back and got second. That is guts."
Walker said many modern athletes did not have the killer instinct and may have had it too easy.
"There is no secret to running - run hard, have a beer, have a pizza. But today we've got podiatrists, doctors, physios, physiologists, psychologists, all these support networks around you.
"If an athlete has a bad day, they go off to a psychologist. We are trying to make it too complicated."
Too many times in the past few days he had heard losers say what a great experience the Olympics were.
The attitude that everyone was a winner by competing was wrong, but it had crept in to the Kiwi psyche.
The psychologists would say they were there to help athletes deal with the pressure, but in his day there was no psychological support.
"The psychology of sport comes from doing the hard work in training, doing the competition and being confident in yourself, but you have to have the ability as well. You have got to really want it."
John Davies, who won a 1500m bronze at the 1964 Olympics and coaches runner Toni Hodgkinson, said no athlete went to the Olympics to fail. "They really put their hearts and souls into it." It was no use going to Europe to race, as Walker suggested, as it was impossible to get into races.
"My own view is that we don't invest enough in coaching - if we don't teach people well, they don't pass exams."
- NZPA
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