(Above: the Olympics, bringing you all the finest in rampant nationalism, and ersatz Greco-Roman triumphalism, along with the heady whiff of snouts in taxpayer-funded troughs).
Here on loon pond, where sport is confined to nut cracking, head butting, kneeing in the groin, stiff arms, and swift upper cuts, we're wildly excited by the Crawford report into sport.
The sight of Olympics chief John Coates whingeing and whining and moaning and quivering and quaking with indignation was worth every dollar spent - and yes I don't care how much they spent.
Come to think of it, Crawford and his colleagues should be offered a bonus on the spot. For having to put up with a high dive display of theatrical emotionalism, with double back flip and twist.
Oh the wailing and the gnashing of teeth as the gravy train develops a jelly-like wobble and the desperate dole bludgers can feel a hundred million buckeroos of taxpayers' money slipping out of their grasp.
You've probably already seen the Coates' whinge already, but there's a summary here at Olympic chief slams sports review as 'insulting':
"Now he [the report's author, businessman David Crawford] is telling us eighth is good enough, or maybe 10th is good enough for Mr Crawford," Coates said.
"I just don't think he gets it.
"It seems un-Australian to me to settle for something second best."
Lordy, lordy can the attempt to turn Australia into a south seas East Germany be finally biting the dust? Can the notion that we have to fling taxpayer dollars at athletes so they can wander off to the drug-infested professional sports carnival known as the Olympics be under sustained attack?
Will the commentariat columnists, always ready to attack subsidized arts activities, be ready to join in the feeding frenzy, as we feast on the corpse of Coates, the Olympics. and rampant, snout-in-the-trough, socialized sports funding? Will someone dare raise the shibboleth that the Olympics is just a gigantic rort? And then prove it's not a shibboleth? It's just a boondoggle ...
Poor hapless Tory Maguire, known around these parts affectionately as the bubble headed booby, had one of the first cracks at it, in Every Olympian gets a medal?, but seemed to be in a state of shock and befuddlement, as the heresy of Olympic sports bashing threatened to spread beyond the report.
In the end, so startled and shocked was she to be in the company of infidels and philistines that she had to settle for a couple of lame questions:
For now, two questions:
A - do we need to lower our sights and put up with less Olympic medals?
B - which sports are most important to our ongoing national self-esteem?
Sports are important to our ongoing national self-esteem? But we love losers. Just look at Gallipoli and South Sydney and Collingwood. Losing is an essential part of our ongoing national self-esteem. Why fork out a bucket load of taxpayer bucks to support a bunch of losers?
Still I guess we could end up like East Germany. Whatever did happen to all those drug-inflated pecs and female swimmers? Talk about a decline in esteem, to the point of extinction of the state, and the wall.
Of course you'll always find all the pundits, without exception, rabbiting on at length about the evils of taxpayer funding and taxpayer support and ghettoes where people on the public teat lose all sense of proportion and reality.
Why should the taxpayer fork out for these wretched amusements? they thunder.
Until you come to sport. Then they choke like the socialists they are, worried that they might lose their followers. Blessed are the cheese makers, and the fartlekkers.
Meantime, the hopelessly romantic and idealistic report chokes on the hundred mill a year required to keep Australia as a top five Olympic nation, and muses poignantly about the sports which carry the 'national ethos', whatever that Gallipoli-laden nirvana might be, and concludes that many of the sports which attract strong followings and can deliver high rates of health participation, as opposed to bum squatting in front of the television, could benefit from better access to taxpayer dollars.
The bias towards funding Olympic sports leads to outcomes that make little strategic sense for Australia. For example, more government funds are provided for archery than cricket which has more than 100 times the number of participants, according to unpublished ASC data. Water polo receives as much high performance and Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) funding as golf, tennis and lawn bowls combined - even though these sports can right claim to be ‘whole of lifetime’ sports and significant contributors to the Australian Government’s preventative health agenda.
Sound sensible? Well to anyone living this side of Mars or Venus, yes, especially in the matter of government funds, and what sport might mean to individuals, as opposed to an obese nation knocking off beers and cheering on an elite professional squad of gladiators.
But not to Coates who could only manage this kind of gold medal worshipping rhetoric:
"The report is disrespectful of all the work that has been done, particularly since the 1980s, in getting us to where we are," the AOC president said.
"This is an insult to some of our great Olympic champions.
"Is Mr Crawford suggesting the gold medals won in Beijing by Matthew Mitcham, Steve Hooker and Ken Wallace meant nothing to the Australian people?
"Is he telling us the gold medals won by our rowers and sailors count for nothing?
"I will leave it to you to tell [archer] Simon Fairweather and [weightlifter] Dean Lukin he's no longer a hero.
"They are the ones who are entitled to feel that what they have done for their country doesn't count."
Coates said Australia's slide down the Olympic table was "already happening".
"We think we are headed at best for eight in London," he said, after a sixth place in Beijing.
Good. With a bit of luck London can turn into a Gallipoli campaign worthy of the mother of all Olympics. With a home ground advantage the English can piss millions against the wall in search of glittering gold, not realizing this is no compensation for living in England, while Australians can take to the surf in droves.
"This is an insult to some of our great Olympic champions.
"Is Mr Crawford suggesting the gold medals won in Beijing by Matthew Mitcham, Steve Hooker and Ken Wallace meant nothing to the Australian people?
"Is he telling us the gold medals won by our rowers and sailors count for nothing?
"I will leave it to you to tell [archer] Simon Fairweather and [weightlifter] Dean Lukin he's no longer a hero.
"They are the ones who are entitled to feel that what they have done for their country doesn't count."
Coates said Australia's slide down the Olympic table was "already happening".
"We think we are headed at best for eight in London," he said, after a sixth place in Beijing.
Good. With a bit of luck London can turn into a Gallipoli campaign worthy of the mother of all Olympics. With a home ground advantage the English can piss millions against the wall in search of glittering gold, not realizing this is no compensation for living in England, while Australians can take to the surf in droves.
The trend towards East Germany in the funding of the film industry has regularly induced anxiety attacks in the likes of Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair (here), and now they can have anxiety attacks about the rampant attempts to shove the rorting of taxpayer dollars down the throats of athletes intent on the high life - getting the medals courtesy of socialized cash handouts from the taxpayer, and then cashing in by marketing the medals in television commercials and such like, as they become commercial commodities of the most banal kind (selling shit like Nutrigrain, full of sugar and salt, to the unsuspecting suckers that this is the way to become iron men).
It's the usual routine beloved of free marketeers and banks. Nationalize the losses and privatize the profits.
Naturally Dr. Andrew Southcott, opposition sports spokesman, had to reveal himself as an East German cadre and socialized sports lover right out of the blocks, bemoaning the loss of prestige and medals. Top 10 at Olympics 'not good enough', muttered this Erich Honecker of Aussie sport:
“This report is preparing us for a decline in our overall standing,” Dr Southcott said. “This will make Kate Ellis the first Australian Minister for Sport to preside over a decline in our performance at the Olympics.”
Why the nation will be set back twenty years, to the dark gloomy days of Montreal. Men's penises will droop, women will worry about the size of their breasts, scalps will go bald, when we - god's bronzed chosen sporting deities - should prevail over all.
I can hear Piers Akerman now ranting at the failure of the government to deliver appropriate government funding to elite athletes - yes here's one time it's really handy to have an elite, not like you pansy pussy latte sipping inner west elites - in our quest to show that government funding is wrong, and that the Chinese buy their Olympic medals with their outrageous government funding.
But not Jacquelin Magnay. There she is in the Herald rushing to the battlements. Report misreads the nation's love of the Olympics, she shrieks, warning of a new Montreal - gasp not one gold medal - and calling it bizarre, and pointing the finger at the panel as a bunch of AFL surf lifesaving and rugby league gangsters, and worrying that the elite has been abandoned, and calling for a fair go, and looking after your mates, egalitarianism and the need to take the piss of the British as an excuse for pissing money down pockets of the elite.
All this preposterous talk of participation, and disingenuously inflating participation numbers. Australians don't participate. No, we and Kate Ellis must laugh at the elite part of the report, like everyone else. Fling another three million at Tiger Woods so the black kids of Alice Springs can have a role model, having been bussed down in their thousands to Melbourne just to glimpse their hero in action!
So it goes, and so it will go on and on, as vested interests leap to protect their pockets, and their dream of taxpayer funding to indulge their personal passion.
Oh there's going to be a fine old weeping and wailing and tear-sodden time on loon pond these next few weeks - the government has given itself until the new year to toss the hot potato around - and apart from the pleasure of watching these immolations and gyrations, won't it be fun to discover all those valiant commentariat columnists creeping out of the woodwork like cockroaches to denounce the taxpayer subsidizing of sport as a socialist rort worse even than the money pissed against the wall on the y'artz.
Here's hoping that the self admittedly pissed John Coates stays right royally pissed for years to come ...
Meanwhile, getting worried about sports deprivation, and genuinely interested in athletes?
Instead of watching the five ring circus known as the Olympics, why not settle for the various world championships involving all kinds of sports - the athletics' world championship, for example, is run by the IAAF and the next outing is in Daegu, South Korea in August 2011 (here).
What have you got to lose, apart from the Olympic Games, perhaps the most hideous carbuncle on sport for the last half century - and yes I'm counting professional boxing and wrestling in the tally. At least wrestling had Mickey Rourke ...
(Below: the Olympics, cauldron of individuality and national pride).
(Below: oh alright, there was one good Olympic moment).
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