Australia's last golden days in sport arena

Valerie Vili cheers on Craig Barrett and Tony Sargisson in the 50km walk. Picture / Brett Phibbs

MELBOURNE - Depressed at Australia's torrent of gold again? Take heart: the gilded run that began at Atlanta, soared at Sydney, overwhelmed the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and is poised for Beijing, may be nearing its peak.

Professor John Bloomfield, the former Olympian whose recommendations in the wake of the nation's no-gold disaster at the 1976 Montreal Olympics led to the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport, can see a nosedive ahead.

The institute and the broader sports policy it supports is a world leader and considered to be a key factor in the astonishing success of Australian athletes across a full range of sports.

But Bloomfield warns that the rest of the world is fast catching up, posing real threats to Australia as a major sporting power.

He also warns of trouble within - from changes in society, a falling birth rate, fat kids and comparatively niggardly federal funding.

Bloomfield's concerns are spelled out in Australia's Sporting Success: The Inside Story, considered to be a landmark book in sports policy.

He believes that the success of the nation's sports system may now work against itself, with other countries adapting it to their own needs and headhunting Australian talent.

Soon after the Sydney Olympics ended, British, French, Canadian and South African sports bosses headed south with bulging chequebooks, luring some of Australia's high-profile specialists with salaries much higher than their own country could afford.

Britain is a key and emerging sports power, fuelled by traditional antipodean rivalry that has seen the Aussies win at least 60 per cent of the sporting contests between the two.

Bloomfield said that after decades under one of the most bureaucratic and antiquated sporting systems in the world, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Government began pumping money into sports - £1 billion ($2.78 billion) in the first year alone - and set up an Aussie-style sports institute with associated centres of excellence.

In Melbourne, Scottish journalists credited their institute with a performance that garnered 11 golds - five more than in Manchester in 2002.

Bloomfield says Britain will become an even greater threat in future, by boosting its own ranks of coaches and sports scientists with headhunted Australians, and by the sheer amounts of money being poured into sports.

Talent scouts are also targeting second-generation Brits from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, whose genetic inheritances provide performance advantages in several sports.

Other major threats are emerging from a reunited Germany, France and Italy, Bloomfield says.

Within Australia he warns that the pool of potential stars may be shallower because of a growing number of single-parents families that do not have the time, resources or energy to support their kids in sports, tied to a falling birth rate that will see fewer kids on the field or in the pool.

The number of volunteers to coach and support sport is already declining. And the broad span of migration - which initially helped Australia to spread its medal count across a wide range of sports outside those inherited from Britain - may now rebound.

Bloomfield says in his book that the balance of migrants is swinging away from the British and Europeans, who support sporting clubs, to Asia and the Middle East, which do not have the same sporting interest.