91Èȱ¬

Having marked already the 99.94 anniversary, Australia will celebrate the centenary of the birth of Donald Bradman on Wednesday. I've done a piece on that for our programme. I'd love to get your comments.

Staying with "the Don", the number of comments for that Brits' Olympics success piece reached a Bradmanesque score - 350 and counting. It almost became the blog equivalent of Bodyline, with some of the ugly nationalism, nastiness and peevishness that went with it. Time to call close of play on that one.

A couple of final thoughts on the Olympics. The response of Australia to what, let's face it, was still a pretty impressive medal haul, is fantastically Ruddwellian - another review. Where should the money be spent? How much money should be spent? Apparently, each of Australia's gold medals already cost A$50 million.

There have been a few calls to go down the British national lottery route, while others will no doubt think that encouraging even more gambling is madness.

Anyway, as we leave the Olympics behind, I'm going to pick up an argument that I made in Australia and the Rise of the Rest:
that the Beijing Olympics provided more evidence that this country is becoming an increasingly muscular middle power.

A few quick points:

• Australia provided a lot of the organisational expertise in Beijing. Leading lights in SOCOG, the Sydney Organising Committee, acted as consultants. Ric Birch, the creative genius who produced the opening ceremony in Sydney, also helped out in Beijing.
• Australia provided a lot of the coaching talent at the games for other successful countries. They talk about wind-assisted sprints, I'm surprised nobody here has yet produced a medal ranking for Aussie-assisted medals?
• Australian architects designed seven of the main Olympic venues, foremost among them the fabulous Water Cube. It was designed by the Sydney firm PTW.
• The Bird's Nest was built with Australian iron ore.
• Kevin Rudd's fluency in Mandarin has unquestionably boosted his diplomatic clout, both regionally and internationally. Whatever you think of the bloke, his linguistic skill has definitely won him the respect of his peers on the world stage.
• The Beijing Games has marked the ceremonial beginning of the Asia-Pacific Century, and Australia is a significant regional player. Bob Hawke and his foreign minister Gareth Evans were the founder fathers of Apec, after all; Paul Keating increased its diplomatic cache by helping to make it a leaders' forum. For the statistically-minded, six out of top eight countries in the medal table are members of Apec.
• Err, that's it.

A good games, with much to enjoy on both sides of the Oz/Pom divide.

London 2012. Can't wait. And guess what, Westfield, the Australian shopping centre giant, is already busy constructing the Olympic village...

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My heart sank when I heard that the open-top bus was starting to rev up its engine, and that Team GB's victorious athletes were to be paraded through the streets of London.

Can't we stick to pedal and wind power? Seems to work just fine, and is much more carbon neutral. For all the jibes about the Brits sitting and lying down for their medals, you have to admit the golds have been very green.

I thought the news was certain to bring a quick reversal of British fortunes. And then, as I ploughed through all your comments, the GB wunder cyclist Chris Hoy , (beating an Aussie to boot).

So, too, - whom the Aussies have already tagged as the Cathy Freeman of the London games (Freeman, an aboriginal athlete, lifted Australian hearts at Sydney in 2000, also by winning the 400m).

"Just brilliant," shouted the Channel 7 commentator Raelene Boyle, a former Olympic sprinter herself. "Just brilliant."

That, I think it's safe to say, is something the Brits and the Aussies share. We both recognise sporting brilliance when we see it, and can sense its broader meaning as well. More than that, we both like to imbue our sporting achievement with broader, national meaning - hence some of the heated comments.

But are we also suffering from another bout of 'Oz/Pom Syndrome', a condition that triggers a stream of nationalist invective? Is it encoded in our DNA? Are we genetically predisposed to needle each other?

On occasions, I have succumbed to this condition myself, as my Aussie wife and my Australian mother-in-law would attest. I just can't help myself.

An example. I've just been trying to track down a sports reporter for help with a piece I'm planning for the lunchtime news, but he wasn't in. "He's probably resigned in protest at having to report on so many British gold medals," I suggested to his colleague who answered the phone. She came straight back with the "per capita" argument

The Oz/Pom Syndrome. There we were parroting the same old lines, ventriloquising the same old barbs. We could not help ourselves.

Then a moment of honesty.

"I just couldn't give a s****," she said. And, in that, I dare say she speaks for much of the Australian nation. The truth is that not that many Aussies are going to lose much sleep over this. And if anybody out there is, we'd love to come round and film you, ideally before lunchtime in Britain, so please get in touch.

That said, I suspect the British performance has unnerved a few people, like grumpy old John Coates, the AOC chief, who spends many of his waking hours thinking how Australia can accumulate more gold medals.

The reason? The British success has had a very Australian edge. Long-term planning, gutsy determination, supreme self-assurance and ruthless execution.

The British cycling team reminds me of the Aussie cricket team that white-washed England. Hayden comes in and hammers the bowling. Then Ponting does it. Then, when he's out, Hussey comes in and continues the punishment. They did it for five test matches running. Victory was not enough. They wanted, and achieved, complete domination. The British cyclists have emulated their success. They are scary.

A few other quick points:

• the per capita argument may sound a little desperate, but that does not mean it is not valid. Australia does do disproportionately well and has done, pretty much, ever since the national disgrace of 1976, when its team returned from Montreal without a single Gold
• lpankhurst pointed out that "medal" is a noun not a verb. It is on Channel 7, along with "to podium"... although I have to hear "to flagpole".

So how about a few others? To Hoy. To Pendleton. To Oz/Pom.

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Britain Tops Australia in gold medals.

Not my headline, but the words of the Sydney Morning Herald.

It's an Olympic story that is getting quite a bit of play here - it got second billing on the SMH website, nudged off the top of the online podium by the resignation of the leader of a nuclear-armed country in one of the most troubled corners of the world.

So, yep, it must have been a close call.

And there was me thinking we'd have to wait for the Ashes next year for a good, old-fashioned Anglo-Australian stoush.

The last time Britain out-medalled Australia, Bob Hawke and Margaret Thatcher occupied The Lodge and Number Ten, and and had not even entered the world let alone leapt into an Olympics-sized swimming pool.

Seoul 1988 - the Brits got 5, while the Aussies got 3. Thereafter, the Aussies have always ended up on top.

• 17/9 in Athens
• 16/11 in Sydney
• 9/1 in Atlanta
• 7/5 in Barcelona

That may happen at Beijing, too - although the failure of Australian men's swimming team to win a single gold (it's the first time that's happened since the Aussie annus horribilis of 1976 in Montreal) and the British domination in cycling makes it tough.

Even John Coates, the head of Australian Olympic Committee, has conceded publicly that the Poms might edge out the Aussies. "Not bad for a country that has no swimming pools and very little soap," as he himself would doubtless put it.

Meanwhile, the Australian sports minister, Kate Ellis, has been reminded that a week is a long time in sporting politics. Before the Olympics started, when she entered into her now famous wager with the British sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, she called the Poms a bunch of "serial chokers". This morning she was quoted in The Australian saying that the Aussies had become complacent. To rub salt into her self-inflicted wounds, she quoted from Tony Blair, who had told her that long-term investment produced long-distance pedal power.

To tread the dark path of sporting cliché - or to retread it - Australia has been a victim of its own success. The Australian Institute of Sport, established in the wake of the disastrous Montreal Games, set the gold standard - and has since been copied all over the world.

Then there's what might be called the "Troy Cooley syndrome". Troy Cooley is the Australian bowling coach nabbed by England who helped mastermind the Ashes victory in 2005 (when he returned to the Australian fold, he helped coach Ricky Ponting's men to the 5-0 whitewash).

The British cycling coach Shane Sutton won gold at the 1978 Commonwealth Games for - wait for it, Australia. Top quality coaches can reportedly earn five times as much in Britain than in Australia.

An Australian coached the Brazilian winner of the 50 metres freestyle, who edged out the pre-games favourite, Eamon Sullivan. The legendary Aussie swim coach, Ken Wood, openly sold his training techniques to the Chinese, which might have cost his protégé, Jessica Schipper, a gold (she was beaten by a Chinese swimmer).

Anyway, here are a few other quick thoughts, which will hopefully undermine a few dog-eared stereotypes rather than reinforce them:

• Are the Aussies win-at-all-costs competitors? Among others, the swimmers Libby Trickett, Grant Hackett and Leisel Jones showed themselves to be champions both in victory and defeat.
• Are the Aussies nerveless performers, athletic robots who can turn it on every time, as the Brits often appear to think and fear? The world record-holding swimmer Eamon Sullivan produced an under-par performance.
• The notion that Australian sports stars regard success as a platform rather than a peak, as the Brits are sometimes accused of doing ("open-top bus syndrome"), also fell apart a bit at this games. Libby Trickett and Leisel Jones both fell off a little after early golds (although they did make a great comeback in the relay), and Sullivan had set a couple of world records in the heats.

Who knows whether the Brits will ultimately beat the Aussies. But goodness me, the next few days are going to be close and fun.

Thanks, as ever, for your comments on the divisive nature, or otherwise, of Aussie sport. Summer unites and winter divides. Dare I say it, but I think BryantObsessed got it pretty much spot on, even if he did get sent to the comment "sin bin" for a later remark (I don't get to the see the ones that are blocked or held up, by the way).

And, as a few of you wrote, I should have spent a lot more time talking about that great summertime national sport: cricket (good to see the "Sheffield Shield" make a comeback?). And soccer, if you go by attendances, is definitely starting to challenge it, as MoMcCackie pointed out.

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As much of Australia continues to enjoy that quadrennial "feel good factor" delivered by the Olympics (or will Beijing produce only a "feel pretty good factor"?), I'm going to be a bit of a killjoy and focus on what is making many people here feel bad. The uncertain state of the economy.

It is not even 18 months since the then Prime Minister John Howard made the optimistic pronouncement: "Working families in Australia have never been better off." But if Kevin Rudd made such a statement today, howls of laughter would quickly be followed by the foot-steps of men in white coats.

Back in March, 2007, Mr Howard no doubt believed his upbeat assessment to be true, and not entirely without justification. The economy had just enjoyed its 16th year of uninterrupted growth, and performed more strongly than other OECD countries (the annual Aussie rate of growth was 3.6%, compared to the OECD average of 2.5%).

With 75% of growth in the world economy coming from Asian and other developing economies, Australia's resources boom appeared permanent and immutable. The country's terms of trade were at their highest in 50 years.

Perhaps John Howard made the mistake of looking too far west, to the Pilbara and other mining centres in booming Western Australian. Instead, he should have been keeping a closer eye on the western suburbs of Sydney, the home of the famed "Howard battlers", the hard-working, aspirational working class voters whose desertion from Labor underpinned a decade of conservative rule.

But even as Mr Howard delivered his Macmillanesque statement, the "battlers" were already grappling with rising prices and more costly borrowing. On the eve of the federal election in November, interest rates rose for the 10th time since 2002.

Since then things have got worse. Petrol costs have increased by 18% since this time last year, and household costs, such as mortgages and rental payments, rose by 62% between 2001 and 2006. Overall, the cost of living has risen by 4.5% in the past financial year, according to the Bureau of Statistics. The stock market, meanwhile, is down 26% since November, when it reached its peak.

"So many Australians feel overwhelmed by their housing costs and are unsure whether they really are much better off today than at the beginning of the decade," a study from the National Centre for Social and Modelling reported last month.

Arguably, Australia is still better placed than most other western economies to ride out the global economic storm. Corporate profits are in good shape, and Western Australia continues to enjoy the China-fuelled boom (although a slowing global demand for Chinese goods could have a knock-on effect).

Moreover, Australia has not yet recorded one quarter of negative growth - let alone the two consecutive quarters of negative growth required for economists to start deploying the "r" word, recession. The Reserve Bank predicts growth will slow to 2%, the economy's most listless performance since the early 1990s.

Still, parts of the country - like much of the drought-hit bush and outback, along with much of the east - may already have entered a "mental recession".

So two questions: does all this gloomy economic talk ring true? And, if so, how badly is Australia hurting?

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I wonder what the great, track-suited one, former Prime Minister John Howard, would have made of the Australian athletes' uniforms at Friday night's Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Green and gold, those tricky sartorial staples, were replaced by blue and silver. Was that:
a) UnAustralian.
b) Moving with the times (according to the designer, 'the new colour combination better represented modern Australia and represented the youthful spirit of our Australian team.')
Or c) Categorical proof that fashion and sport do not mix.

But I digress. At this high holy time, when so many Australians happily become members of a nationwide, sofa-based cheer squad, I'm going to set out what may seem, to outsiders at least, like a perversely counter-intuitive argument.

Here it is: that sport divides this country as much, if not more, than it unites it. It demarcates this vast and sports-loving land along geographical, social and even ethnic lines.

Let's start with rugby union. I often find myself re-telling the story of the businessman arriving in Melbourne who turned on his hotel television hoping to catch the Bledisloe Cup, the showdown between the Wallabies and the All Blacks. Instead of marvelling at the haka, he found himself watching 'Doe, ray, me,' with Julie Andrews as the pack leader, and a front row made up entirely of smiling young Austrians resplendent in leather lederhosen.

Earlier this month, thrillingly, I had a similar experience. Instead of showing the rugby from Auckland, Channel Seven in Melbourne broadcast Cool Runnings. We were treated to the hapless Jamaican bobsleigh team rather than the much-improved Wallabies, because rugby union is not seen as a ratings winner in Victoria.

Generally, rugby union is an elite sport, for which private schools provide the main nurseries of talent and where most of the top clubs are to found in the more well-heeled parts of town, like Manly, the Eastern Suburbs and Randwick. Topping the local table in Sydney right now is Sydney University, the country's oldest and arguably poshest university.

Rugby league, by contrast, is the sport of the New South Wales and Queensland proletariat - a largely blue-collar game whose fan-base is mainly blue-collar. Again, it can hardly be considered a national sport. Over 80% of its participants come from New South Wales and Queensland.

Or take Australian Rules Football, which last week celebrated its 150th anniversary. Tellingly, it was first known as Melbourne Rules, then became Victorian Rules and finally Australian Rules when it spread to the other colonies. Now, it has become the country's most-watched sport, and is busily planning to set up new teams in Sydney and Queensland. But for all its rampant expansionism, ten of its 16 professional teams are still to be found in Victoria.

Soccer is another case in point. Australia did not even have a national team until 1922, and even now it is widely viewed as a sport populated mainly by the country's European immigrants. Reflecting its multi-cultural base and make-up, the Socceroos continue to field a polyglot mix of players, with surnames like Petrovic, Sprianovic, Zadhovich, Troisi, Djite, Vargas, Sarkies and Valeria.

Admittedly, the lines are being blurred. Melbourne Storm is currently the holder of the rugby league premiership - although its average attendance remains at 11,711, which is pitiful in sports-mad Melbourne. Similarly, in both 2005 and 2005 the Aussie Rules grand final was contested between two expansion clubs, the Sydney Swans and the Perth-based West Coast Eagles. And if you illustrate graphically how the fan-bases of various winter sports intersected and overlapped, it would look a Venn diagram.

There is also, of course, a paradox - a rich one at that - because sport has long been viewed a springboard for Australian nationalism, whether it be the country's nation-binding joy at Donald Bradman sticking it to the Poms, or Australians doing disproportionately well at the Olympics.

It's also interesting that the country's swim team is a source of such fierce national pride - which perhaps augments John Pilger's oft-quoted remark about the beach being Australia's 'true democracy'. Perhaps the pool - or at least water - is, as well.
Cricket, the great summer game, is another exception.

Australian success at the Olympics will no doubt produce the usual bout of face-paint nationalism, and why not? One of the many things I love about this country is the affection reserved for the national sports teams representing it at the Olympics - whether it's the Olyroos, the Hockeyroos or the Greco-Roman-roos.

But don't be fooled by the make-up, for its camouflages a quite different reality: that Australia is also divided by its infectious love and appreciation of sport.

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One of my favourite yarns from the Sydney Olympics concerns the thin blue line painted onto the roads as a guide for runners in the marathon. In the middle of the night, as most of Sydney slept, someone armed with a brush and a can of blue paint decided the route was in need of a detour - and redirected it into a nearby pub.

I have just been compiling a report about the matchless success of the Sydney Olympics, which were famously described by the then President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, as the most successful in the history of the modern Games.

That diverted blue line helps lead you to the answer. Neither Sydney nor Australia took the Games too seriously. John Morse, then head of the Australian Tourism Commission, put it rather neatly. The organisers realized that the games were not only a 16-day sporting competition but an excuse for a 16-day party.

From the very outset, the organisers wanted to imprint their country's personality onto the games: its laid back approach to life; its sense of larrikin irreverence and fun.

They were helped by the army of volunteers, who cracked jokes and launched into song to entertain spectators waiting in lines and queues. They were aided by the "live sites" dotted around the city, which were originally intended as a way of dispersing spectators and thus preventing the transportation system from being overloaded, but which took on a life all of their own.

Sydney provided the most fabulous of backdrops, and the simple fact that the Games took place a year before 9/11 meant they were not swamped with overbearing security.

A sense of fun combined with a sense of inclusiveness. There was a strong belief that the Olympics could have a unifying impact on a country where 24% of its resident population was born beyond Australian shores. The organizers did so by creating - and then liaising closely - with a Multicultural Advisory Committee, drawn from Australia's ethnic communities. It worked a treat.

The organising committee also spent years drumming up support in the bush and the Outback. Cleverly, they targeted kids, knowing their infectious enthusiasm would transmit to their parents - as, indeed, it did.

In the Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman, the Games also had the perfect poster girl. On the first night, she lit the Olympic flame; on the 11th in the 400m, and it vested the Sydney Games with an even greater historical meaning.

The Sydney Olympics has been described as Australia's Coming of Age: the country held up a mirror to itself and very much liked what it saw. Sandy Hollway, the CEO of the games, talks of how the opening ceremony dealt a fatal blow to what was labeled "the cultural cringe", an ingrained sense of inferiority. Samaranch described the opening ceremony as the "most beautiful" he had ever seen.

In a setting where metal provides the currency of success, for 16 days in September 2000 Sydney set the gold standard for the rest of the world.

I'd love to hear your memories of the Sydney Games, or what you think was the meaning attached to them. And why were they the best?

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