The gold factory - Australia's Institute of Sport

Herald Canberra bureau chief GREG ANSLEY looks into the secrets of the Lucky Country's sporting success.


John Boultbee is Australia's sporting alchemist.

As director of the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), he has overseen the processing of raw talent into the rush of gold that has marked the nation's route to the Sydney Olympics.

Much more is expected next month.

The Australian Olympic Committee has set a target of 60 medals, 20 of them gold.

The record over the past few years of how Australia's Olympic athletes have done in world-class competition suggests that this is not an unrealistic target, Boultbee says. But he is uncomfortable with his institute's growing reputation as a champion-maker.

"People see us as a medal factory," he says. "Well, they might - we don't."

Nonetheless, with graduates such as runner Cathy Freeman and swimmer Michael Klim, who has set four short-course world records in the AIS pool, the tag sticks.

At the last Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, 136 of the 324 members of the Australian team were present or former holders of AIS scholarships.

They won 33 of Australia's record haul of 80 golds, plus 22 silver and 15 bronze medals.

The institute's performance was dazzling: both the men's and women's hockey teams - all present or former AIS athletes - won gold; AIS gymnast Andrei Kravtsov won gold and the men's team, silver; medal-winning netball and cricket teams were dominated by AIS players; squash star Michelle Martin won double golds.

At the preceding Atlanta Olympics, 76 per cent of Australia's 127 medals were won by former or present AIS athletes.

And driven by a hometown advantage and the wave of success that has skipped from one Australian sport to the next over the past 18 months, AIS-trained athletes will again lead the charge at Sydney.

Even with eight major sports still to announce their teams and other lists still to be completed , 168 of the 320 Olympic athletes so far named have passed through the institute or are still training there.

The AIS influence extends to the Paralympics.

Although less pervasive, one in five of the almost 250 paralympians named at the time of writing has trained at the AIS.

This is as it should be.

The institute was a direct product of Australia's shame, called into being by an alarmed federal Government after the woeful 1976 Montreal Games.

Australia had been used to shining - a staggering 35 medals, including 13 golds, at Melbourne, and, with a record 122 nations competing at Munich in 1972, eight golds, seven silvers and two bronzes.

At Montreal the nation expected to win at least 30 medals. But it won just five, and for the first time in 40 years, no golds: and, pain on pain, its sole gold prospect was lost to New Zealand, in men's hockey.

The AIS was Australia's response, starting as a public company in 1981 with just eight scholarship sports and enduring barbed criticism as it edged towards a new professionalism that took sport beyond individual striving to a sophisticated system of star production.

Since 1986, the AIS has been a statutory authority funded by the Government at a cost of about $A26 million ($34.5 million) a year. It now runs scholarships in 26 sports from a $A100 million Canberra complex, with regional units or individual sports programmes around the continent.

This is the cutting edge of a national obsession with success.

According to studies at the University of South Australia, the cost is simply too high - $A918 million between 1976 and 1996 to foster elite sports, with each Olympic gold medal costing Australia $A36.7 million.

Boultbee snaps back: "That's the view of one academic."

"The Australian public, like the New Zealand public, is sports-mad and it is a priority for them for our national teams to do well."

The rationale goes that the amount of money spent on sport from the federal budget is infinitesimal compared with education, health, defence ...

The benefit, both at the top level and at community level, is that if you keep success in front of the eyes of people it does lead to greater participation in sport and this resounds in a healthier population and a saving in the health budget.

Government economists agree.

In submissions presented to a parliamentary inquiry on sports funding, they estimated that if an extra 10 per cent of Australians could be encouraged into greater physical activity, the nation would gain a net benefit of $A590 million a year.

And, stiffened by AIS athletes, Australia's Olympic performance has bounced back.

eipSince Montreal, the nation has collected 115 Olympic medals, 23 of them gold.

Boultbee, with most of his athletes training and competing hard around the world in the final runup to the Olympics, despairs a little at the focus on medal counts.

"At the institute we are not obsessed with targets, because once you have a medal count each medal tends to become a statistic instead of a recognition of what was a fantastic performance," he says.

But in a near-empty gym, national men's gymnastics head coach Warwick Forbes takes a break from training with Brendan Dowrich, trying for his third Olympics, and reflects on the success that has come through the AIS.

"When I was a gymnast, Australia and New Zealand were pretty much on a similar level," he says. "We were both bloody pathetic in world eyes.

"Since then, with an AIS programme in place, Australia has soared to 13th place in the world in women's gymnastics last year, and 19th place in men's competition."

In an office nearby, Canadian transplant Stelio DeRocco, head coach of the national men's volleyball team, feeds off similar enthusiasm: "The support that one gets here through the sports science and medicine departments and the passion that the people who run the institute have for sport is tremendous."

In the past four years the AIS-dominated volleyball team has rocketed from nowhere to the outer orbits of the great - beating Korea to qualify for the world championships in 1997, beating France to third place in the 1998 US championships, battling world titans Italy and Russia in last year's World League.

This, says Boultbee, is the product of a holistic system, linking athletic skills to vocational, educational and personal development under the slogan "a balanced approach to excellence."

Athletes train hard: archers shoot 300 to 400 arrows a day, gymnasts work out before and after school in a 10-11 hour day, distance swimmers clock up to 20km a day in the pool.

But they must also work or study at least 15 hours a week.

The benefits come in a closed system that links world-class coaching with training regimes and leading-edge facilities in sports science, medicine and psychology, with ideas and enthusiasm bouncing not only off athletes, but between coaches from different sports.

Gymnasts' lives, for example, are ruled by the Smolevski pentagram, named for its Russian inventor, which places their residence, dining, training, schooling and medico-science facilities within short range of each other.

And, like other AIS sports, programming is long-term, developing depth at the top level.

"We can see the 2004 women's team at the AIS now, the 2008 team is under preparation and we have selected 12 girls already for the 2008 squad," Forbes says.

And in a display of Anzac sporting cooperation, New Zealand will join forces with the AIS, in its new initiative to breed sporting champions.

Even though New Zealand's sporting institutes, the High Performance Centres, have yet to open their doors, the AIS has already approached its Kiwi equivalent to work together on marketing and sponsorship.

The Australians say they have transtasman sponsors who want to invest in the sporting futures of both countries.

New Zealand has set up three High Performance Centres, to be launched next week, with core financial backing from the Government to the tune of $16 million over the next four years.

The Northern centre, run by Olympic hockey gold medallist Ramesh Patel, will operate out of Auckland's Unitec, the Millennium Centre in Albany and the Waikato Polytechnic.

Lieutenant-Colonel John Dyer, awarded the New Zealand Gallantry decoration in the latest Queen's Birthday Honours list for coordinating the evacuation of Sierra Leone, was yesterday announced as the chief executive of the Central centre in Wellington.

The South Island centre will run from Dunedin, led by the head of Netball New Zealand, Keryn Smith.

The centres will cater for 1500 athletes, nominated by their sports codes.

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