Olympics: Planning a case of running around in circles?

By ARTHUR WHELAN

Last month New Zealand was looking back on a century of proud sporting achievement.

Last week we were told to get used to losing unless we spent far more money on elite sport.

That message, in briefing papers to the Governement, was not what we wanted to hear 241 days before the Olympic flame is lit at Stadium Australia.

But despite the suggestion that we can buy success, the reality is that in the past few years we have spent what for sport in this country are dizzying sums solely on gold-medal prospects.

And although we have known since September 1993 that the Games would be held in our part of the world, the evidence is that we are still searching for a way to imitate a proven formula we have known about for 10 years.

The writing was on the wall in 1990. As the hugely-successful Auckland Commonwealth Games wound down, a Herald article described how the Australian Institute of Sport was finally achieving tangible results, nine years after being set up after complaints about Australia's failures at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

Nine years to get results. Ten years since New Zealand saw those results, right here at the Games we hosted.

What have we done in that decade?

Here's one perspective.

A year after the 1990 Games, Government minister John Banks said he was worried that sport in this country was falling behind the rest of the world.

He toured the Tamaki site suggested for a small centre, perhaps the first of a network throughout the country, aimed at lifting our standards.

But last November the Sports Foundation announced plans to keep us up with the fast-evolving world of modern sport via - you guessed it - a network of three centres throughout New Zealand, modelled on the Australian institute.

In any case, our Government signed a deal in 1994 giving our gold-medal prospects access to the Australian facilities.

And last month former Auckland mayor Colin Kay, who is promoting a separate Auckland regional institute of sport based on Australia's - one which would run in tandem with the foundation's plans - commented that we already have the resources here and that they are under-utilised.

The transtasman scenario now is especially ironic considering that when the Australian institute was set up, we were already three years ahead, having established the Sports Foundation in 1978 for the same reason - concern that we were falling behind.

Time and again throughout the 1990s commentators including Herald columnists bemoaned our lack of a similar, effective model.

But in its annual report to June 1999 the foundation notes that we now have 17 sports academies of varying quality around the country.

The foundation has emphasised again and again how Sydney is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and reaffirmed that New Zealanders value winning over taking part.

In its build-up to Sydney, it drew up a seven-year plan towards 2000, with the aim of raising $106 million. There was the $6 million Sports Foundation Challenge, a cash bonus incentive scheme for medallists and world champions, but only three people ever got money - $25,000 each.

In June 1998 it revived the concept with a $500,000 fund to recognise front-runners such as rower Rob Waddell.

It produced opinion poll results that showed New Zealanders rated the Olympics as more important than the Rugby World Cup.

And it has handed out lots of money.

When the foundation was set up in 1978 it got a maximum $100,000 from the Government to subsidise whatever it could raise from the private sector. In July last year the foundation handed out $15 million just to medal prospects, in some cases at the expense of non-Olympic sports. The previous year it was $12 million.

By comparison it cost New Zealand $3.7 million to send a team to the Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games.

During the build-up to Sydney, the foundation has taken some hits - there was the 1992 fraud disgrace of founding chief executive Keith Hancox, criticism of the amounts it still hands out to rugby ($485,000 in the year to June) despite that sport's professional revolution, and it has a public relations job of explaining what it does that the Hillary Commission does not.

A major supporter, Brierley Investments, is cutting back the multi-million-dollar funding it has provided since 1986.

In 1998 the foundation suffered a public relations disaster in trying to set up its own "People's Choice" awards system, rivalling the Halberg Awards.

And nationally, there have been major sporting letdowns - it took Darren Liddell's weightlifting golds and the rugby sevens team to salvage New Zealand pride at Kuala Lumpur. Our track and field team disappointed at those Games, and at the world championships in Seville; and as for the Rugby World Cup and the netball ...

These images were in stark contrast to the grainy footage of so many triumphs we saw so many times at the end of last century.

We have had 10 years of warnings about what it now takes to keep up.

But while the Australians set a target of 20 golds at Sydney only 48 days after the news that they would host the Games, the sports institute example shows we have been running round in circles.