Australian sports decline is evident as they enter the Ashes as underdogs
Australia,with its sunny beaches and well-to-do surfers,was unthinkable as the setting for a maudlin tale of decline. But the London Olympics proved to be the beginning of just such a story for one of Australias mightiest institutions sport.
Yet the Olympics came as the bigger shocker. The frayed edges of Australian sport were suddenly magnified for all the world to see. News trickled in that funding had been cut mercilessly in the last Olympic cycle. At London,gold medals dropped by half,from 14 to 7,and the total tally slipped from 46 to 35 the lowest since Barcelona in 1992.
The straight-talking Aussies wouldnt mind calling their biggest swim hope,James Magnussen,a flop after the much-hyped swimmer returned with a lone silver from his four events. There were more tears as Australia failed to set Eton on fire and came back without a single gold medal in rowing for the first time since 2000.
Hurdler Sally Pearson ran the race of her life to bring some cheer on the tracks,but the erstwhile south-side strutters were left stammering excuses for what was a self-confessed poor show. Australians even rued how their coaching expertise,from rowing to swimming,cycling to triathlon,was being used by other nations to tactically beat some of their own.
Yet,nothing could have prepared the country for the string of revelations that were to follow. The Australian Crime Commission declared one gloomy morning this February that no sport in Australia was untouched by the scandal of systematic drug use and match fixing. Alerts were sounded to the bosses of cricket,soccer,the AFL and the rugby league about deep links between sports administrators and organised crime.
The commission even declared that players were being administered drugs not yet approved for human use. This included peptides and hormones. Richard Ings,former head of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA),said,This is not a black day in Australian sport,this is the blackest day in Australian sport.
While Australian dope control bodies took a cue from USADA,which had gone after Lance Armstrong,their state and federal sports ministers drafted detailed laws to prevent sporting clubs from throwing matches,as organised crime was said to have infiltrated deep into the sporting core. For a country with a perfectly regulated and legalised betting system,widespread result manipulation by the jockeys came as another blow. This was perhaps the gloomy backdrop to Ian Chappells recently voiced concerns about rampant corruption in cricket.
An edgy Australia dumped its cricket coach South African Mickey Arthur for excessive disciplining when he handed out homework. Within a fortnight,its rugby bosses had dropped Kiwi Robbie Deans,who had six months left on his contract,for not enforcing enough discipline as Wallabies players James OConnor and Kurtley Beale were snapped at four in the morning at a fast food outlet in Melbourne,ahead of their must-win second test match against the Lions. The pair also missed the bus to training,and coach Deanss list of losses against Scotland and France grew to include the British and Irish Lions,bitter rivals both. After Arthur,another foreign coach paid the price for a team in turmoil. Suddenly,Australians found their trust in the foreign expert flagging,and demanded that one of their own take over.
The embattled Australian cricketers thus started as underdogs unthinkable some years ago at the Ashes. Sports fans across the world may be heartbroken by faltering of the mighty Aussies in playing arenas across the world. No wonder then that when Ashton Agar neared the 100-mark in Australias first riposte to England at Trent Bridge,the whole cricketing world got up to cheer. Never mind that Glenn McGrath and Scott Muller would consider a 98 on debut by a number 11 a horrible breach of bunny bat tradition. Life seems back to normal when Australians fight back against the breach of their sporting bastions.
shivani.naik.@expressindia.com
