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Gold Doesn't Always Glitter - July
2004
Three weeks
after winning an Olympic Gold Medal in Atlanta I was
sitting in my Land Valuation office in Werribee when my
secretary, Nancy, put a call through to me claiming a
guy from a far away Kingdom was on the phone wanting to
know if I would show some Prince how to shoot clay
targets for a month. My first reaction was “yeah
right” which idiot friend of mine was this on the
other end of the line trying to fool me. I told Nancy to
make some excuse up and get rid of him. I had no time to
entertain anyone’s sense of humour. Twenty minutes
later he called back. As it turned out it was not a
practical joker, this Prince was the real deal and was a
full-blown member of the Worlds richest family, the
Hassanal Bolkiah’s from Brunei. Not all Olympic Gold
Medallists have this luck. (I actually never learnt
from this experience as I told someone who sounded
remarkably like John Howard to call me back when I
wasn’t so busy. This was a few days after I left the
Liberal Party as a very disgruntled candidate prior to
the 2001 Federal Election. Again I thought it was one of
my friends having a lend of me. It wasn’t! It was the
Prime Minister.) There is a mistaken belief in this
country that once you have won gold everything that you
touch for the rest of your life will turn into the same.
This is far from the truth.
If I mentioned
the names Tom King, Simon Fairweather, Adam Pine, Scott
McGrory, Belinda Stowell, Julie Towers, Stuart Tinney
and Gail Miller most people would have no idea of whom I
am talking about. Not only are these athletes all
Olympic Gold Medallists, but also they all won at our
own Sydney Olympics less than four years ago. None of
these Olympians would have earned more money in 2000
than a first year rookie at any AFL club. The strange
thing is that you don’t hear many Olympians
complaining about it. That is a unique characteristic of
the Olympics. Athletes compete willingly for free, or to
be very honest, at a huge personal loss in time and
finances mostly at the expense of their families. There
are always the exceptions to the rule obviously. It is
hard to argue that Cathy Freeman or Ian Thorpe have not
made a tidy sum cashing in on their gold medals from
Sydney, Cathy probably is the only Olympian I know that
has done well financially from a silver medal after her
run in 1996. Tatiana Grigorieva arguably didn’t do too
badly out of her pole vault silver in Sydney either, but
one would find it hard to name too many others. I was
saddened to hear that Mike McKay, probably one of
Australia’s greatest ever rowers and one of the
founding members of the famous “Oarsome Foursome”,
was struggling to make ends meet in order to go to
Athens.
I
consider myself fortunate to have won in 1996 with a
home Olympics coming up next so the opportunities to
market the gold medal were considerably longer than
normal. After the homecoming parades were finished in
2000 some of Olympic Medallist’s seem to vanish into
thin air never to be seen again. I will watch with great
interest what happens after Athens this year, as there
are no parades planned at this stage to and secondly the
team arrives home on the eve of the AFL and NRL finals.
I accept that the only way for most Olympians to make a
small fortune is to start with a big fortune, but I have
always struggled with the inequity in recognition that
is given to our Olympic Team in contrast to what is
given to other largely domestic sports such as football
and cricket. The Olympics is a collection of
twenty-eight sports played by just on two hundred
countries. Cricket has half a dozen serious
international contenders and the AFL has none. NONE! The
problem with the Olympics of course is that it is held
only once every four years and those twenty-eight sports
are crammed into 16 days, which doesn’t leave much
room for exposure for the lesser profile events. Whether
it is Athletics or Archery it requires the same level of
commitment to first of all make the team and then
something extra to be successful. I am not for one
minute suggesting that any of our team going to Athens
are craving publicity or are expecting to be showered
with money if they win. The majority of our team members
are amateur sportspeople in the true sense, they have
very little in the money in the bank and in some cases
have about ten seconds between their Olympic experience
starting and ending. Tens seconds isn’t a whole lot
when you have trained three hours a day for at least the
past four years and more than likely the past ten.
Whether they win or not is irrelevant. It is a hard cold
fact that the majority of the 479 athletes that will
represent us in 27 of the 28 Olympic sports (Handball
didn’t make it) will return home without a medal.
However it is amazing how many of our team will
perform a personal best at the Games and will go
unnoticed. Unfortunately pb’s don’t always win
medals and they very rarely help pay off mortgages.
Remember that in August when you are being a little too
critical of one of our Olympians performances.
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