![]() Luminaries including Ian Thorpe, Anna Meares and Lauren Jackson criticised a “broken” funding model, bemoaning that Australia sports “slip further behind the rest of the world and we wonder why”. In October 2018, 41 past and present elite athletes signed an open letter pleading for greater investment. Others believe government funding for elite sport in Australia is woefully insufficient. A 2014 headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was explicit: “ Stop wasting taxpayers’ money on sport funding”. If the Australian Olympians repeat their performance of Rio in Tokyo – eight gold medals, 11 silver and 10 bronze – that would equate to around $16 million per medal. To critics, the dollars distributed by the AIS to individual sports in the past four years is funding enough. The country has slipped down the medal tally at the three subsequent Olympics, finishing 10th at Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Although it is difficult to put a precise total on how much goes to high performance (as there are various shared costs between the AIS and Sport Australia, both subsidiaries of the Australian Sports Commission), a fair estimate puts federal government spending in the search for national pride at about a quarter of a billion dollars each year.Īfter unprecedented medal success at Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004, Australia’s performance at summer Olympics has been in structural decline. More money is then spent by the AIS itself, including on staffing and site costs. Each year the AIS hands out about A$150m directly to sports and athletes for high performance purposes, across summer and winter Olympic and Paralympic disciplines. While that figure is split between high-performance and grass-roots participation, across the AIS and Sport Australia respectively, the majority is spent in the pursuit of medals. This year, the Australian federal government will spend about $350m on sport. The ambition is plainly stated in the document, standing out for its emotive language among the dense accounting tables: “The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) will strive to deliver national pride and inspiration through international sporting success.” ![]() Buried deep in the health portfolio budget statements is the funding that Australia’s sport administrators hope will propel our athletes to gold in Tokyo and beyond. While it may take a leap of imagination to go from the voluminous budget papers released on Tuesday to the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, they are intimately linked. This is the cold financial truth at the heart of sporting success: glory is not cheap.
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