Oly, Oly, Oly, oi, oi, oi

By ROD WISE
Acting Editor

A LATE surge in gold medals from left field appears to have quieted the anxious antipodean breast.

Yet the signs of decline from the highpoint of Sydney 2000 were there to see, with our men swimmers and cyclists no longer the powerhouses we have come to expect, and success in the centrepiece of any Olympic Games, track and field at the main stadium, still continuing to elude us.

While most of us will soon move on by escaping into long, hot summer weekends, those whose job it is to get us up to the barrier for the next Olympics, in 2012, will not find escape quite so easy.

We rested on our laurels once before, when after coming third in the medals tally at Melbourne with 33 gold, silver and bronze, we steadily slipped down the ladder to score a solitary bronze at Montreal in 1976.

The response of the Australian community then was, by and large, that this was unacceptable. That given our size, sport defined us and gave us one sphere where we could hold our head up with an objective measure of our self worth. And woe betide any government which failed to recognise that deep need in the Australian psyche.

Beijing has given us another wake-up call, so you can imagine the howls if we are humiliated at London. So be prepared for calls to dig deep.

While many in our arts community object to the disproportionate funding that goes into sport, the wider Australian population does not see it that way. To them, our Olympic athletes have much more than an easel riding on their shoulders. They have us. Just about all of us.