Olympic Bureaucrats Overshadow the Athletes
by Brian McRea, Director of the Australia First Party (WA)
21 August, 2016
As the 2016 Rio Olympics near their end, we hear the media and the Australian Olympic Committee wailing about the poor result (in their opinion) and the low number of gold medals won by Australian competitors.
This is the unfortunate result of the common assumption by “elites” and those slurping from the public trough who believe that money can buy anything — even if they are buying with “somebody else’s money”.
It should be recognized that those competitors have given their best, against the rest of the world’s best, and whatever the eventual results they should be recognized and acknowledged for that commitment.
We see the same whinging by media and sports commentators over the loss by the Australian Cricket Team to Sri Lanka. This should be no disgrace to our team. It only implies the skill of the Sri Lankans is seen as less than that of the Australians. Sri Lanka proved to be better cricketers on a smaller budget and should be recognized as such.
Throwing money at issues and projects brings glory primarily to the organizers, who in most cases are not capable of achieving results in their own right. This undeserved focus is beginning to bear its inevitable fruit, as traditional supporters of many sporting fields abandon them for other activities.
The whole Olympic machine has been degraded by the banning of the entire Russian team, because some individual Russians may have been guilty at some time of doping. However the Olympics have allowed participation by athletes from other countries, who have also been guilty of the same banned practice on prior occasions.
This win-at-all-cost attitude only takes from those who have given their best, and in the end is bound to compromise the actual effort many are prepared to apply.
The complaints about facilities by some team organizers prior to competition is another clear example of the craving for attention by organizers, where the star attractions should be the participants.
The breaking of curfew rules by some athletes shows that they were not bothered by the “dangers” outside the complex. I wonder if they were also concerned by small problems with a hurriedly built complex, which organizers blamed on an already stretched host country and economy.
The money spent on those games would have been far better spent on improving the lives of those poor and disenfranchised in Brazil, some of whom used the occasion to steal from those that they saw as rich and greedy — feeding of their own failing economy.
