2/06/00
What Price Gold?
Summary:
A new study has worked out that every Olympic gold medal an Australian athlete wins costs $40 million. Is it worth it? And is there any evidence that spending this money at the top end of sport inspires the rest of us to be physically active? That's been the theory behind Federal Government sports policy for the past twenty years. But according to KEVIN NORTON, co-author of the study, and SHANE CONWAY, president of Sports Medicine Australia, it's not working.
HENNY OLDENHOVE, who runs the Active Australia campaign at the Australian Sports Commission, details new strategies designed to capitalise on the Olympics as a way to motivate more ordinary Australians to join sporting clubs.
And JAN WRIGHT, from the Graduate School of Education Research at the University of Wollongong, questions whether children's fitness and involvement in physical activity is declining to the extent that some reports and tests are indicating. She believes that motor skills testing of children is biased towards very particular sports skills, and therefore gives an inaccurate reflection of some children's abilities and fitness.
Details or Transcript:
THEME
Amanda Smith: On The Sports Factor this week, the price of Olympic Gold. How much does each Olympic Gold Medal cost the nation, and what are the returns?
And coming up also, are our children as unfit and inactive as recent reports are suggesting? Or is there perhaps a problem with the way that children’s physical skills are being tested?
Jan Wright: If we take ‘the catch’, for instance, which on the surface would seem to be a fairly broadly generic kind of activity, you see that the positioning of the hands that is required is actually more appropriate to a cricket catch; that you’ve got the hands together with the little fingers touching, and it doesn’t really cater for a whole range of other forms of catching such as netball, basketball, softball and baseball. So children, and I’d have to say would primarily be boys, who are experienced at cricket, who’ve had lots of time to practice and play cricket, would do very well at that skill. But other children who may actually be able to catch different sized balls and in different ways, would turn out to actually be deficient in that particular skill.
Amanda Smith: And more on that later in the program.
Before that though, to a study published in this month’s Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, which has worked out how much each Olympic Gold Medal won by an Australian athlete costs. The point to doing this has been to work out whether the Australian Sports Commission is meeting its two objectives which are: excellence in sports performance, and increased participation in sport and sports activities. The Australian Sports Commission devotes 90% of its budget to that first objective, that is, to elite sport, and 10% to the second, participation. The theory being that if we pay for success at the top, then the rest of us will be inspired by that success to also be physically active.
Kevin Norton, one of the authors of the ‘Price of Olympic Gold’ study, thought it was time to put that theory to the test.
Kevin Norton: I think we questioned ourselves about the notion of a trickle-down effect. For a long time we’d always accepted as a matter of fact, that when we’re successful in international sport, at the elite level, then everybody feels good about it and it translates into a higher level of mass participation, if you like, at the community or grassroots level. And we started some studies looking at children, and seeing that there’s a pretty dramatic rise in the level of obesity and overweight levels amongst children, and also a decline in their fitness. And we thought, Well in the last 15 years we’ve been very successful at the elite level in sports, but at the same time we’ve had this sort of blowout in terms of obesity at the adult and child level, and we see a decrease in participation. So it didn’t seem to link. So there wasn’t much direct evidence for this notion of the trickle-down effect.
Amanda Smith: Well the Federal Government expenditure on elite sport over the past 20 years Kevin, from the Montreal Olympics to the Atlanta Olympics, it’s gone from what to what?
Kevin Norton: In 1976-77, there was approximately $1-million on elite athlete programs. In 1996-97, so 20 years later, that was about $105-million, all adjusted to 1998 levels.
Amanda Smith: So that’s about a 100-fold increase isn’t it?
Kevin Norton: Yes, and it’s doubled since then. I mean this year it will be closer to $200-million in the preparation for the Sydney Olympics.
Amanda Smith: Well from that, you’ve done an interesting calculation, which is to work out how much each Gold Medal that’s been won by Australia over that time, has cost. And the figure is?
Kevin Norton: The figure is around $40-million if you just look at coaching and sports science and technology and so forth, and over $50-million if you include money spent on infrastructure, buildings and other facilities that are the hardware of sports.
Amanda Smith: Well that sounds like an extraordinarily high price. Is a Gold Medal worth $40-million or $50-million?
Kevin Norton: Well that’s an interesting question that I guess everybody in the community has their own opinion on. I think there are many benefits that we didn’t cover in the paper. I mean clearly there are benefits in terms of national pride, people feeling good about our successes at the international level; we are known as a sporting nation because of those successes, despite the fact that we have such a low participation rate amongst the rest of the community. It translates into the ability of Australian sporting organisations to bid for and succeed in holding international sporting events, and that translates also into increased tourism. There’s also some export of technologies, sporting technologies such as bicycle components, and other bits and pieces that are used in different sports. So there are many benefits that we haven’t covered, but generally that is outweighed significantly by the fact that it’s estimated that it’s costing us many billions of dollars in lost productivity and health costs because we have such a high percentage of the population doing nothing, they’re completely sedentary.
Amanda Smith: What you have established though is that there is a direct linear relationship between money spent on elite sport and medals won. In other words, the more we spend on elite athletes, the more medals they’ll get, the relationship is that direct.
Kevin Norton: Yes, it’s pretty clear that the more money you put in, the greater the level of success.
Amanda Smith: Well you’d have to say that the Australian Sports Commission is meeting its first objective, that is, to achieve excellence in sports performance from what you’ve studied; but what about that second of the Sports Commission’s two objectives, the one about increasing sports participation?
Kevin Norton: It’s a really difficult one to answer definitively. We’ve had to pull together as much information as we could over the past 20 years. Unfortunately the Bureau of Statistics have only recently, in the last two or three years, systematically surveyed the general community throughout Australia and asked them similar questions each time. The way in which we’ve approached it is to look at the question that has been asked in a similar way each time and that is "How many of you in the general community put your hand up and say you do nothing? That is, how many of you are sedentary?" And when we put those results together, it shows quite clearly that the percentage of the Australian adult population who say they are sedentary has increased from 29% back in 1984 to over 40% last year, in the most recent survey.
Amanda Smith: Well Commonwealth sports policy over the past 20 years, has essentially been underpinned by the philosophy that by achieving international elite sports success, then the Sports Commission’s second objective, of increasing participation, will follow on from that. But are you saying that this philosophy hasn’t worked? So Ian Thorpe can win Gold Medals galore in Sydney, and we might swell with national pride over his achievements, but it won’t make any more of us go to the pool and swim a few laps for exercise?
Kevin Norton: You’re right, Amanda, there’s no evidence that it does, at least in the long term. It certainly makes people proud of Australia; they rank international sporting success the Number 1 factor for national pride. So it’s very important in terms of national pride, but it doesn’t seem to have any long-term impact on the participation rates in physical activity in Australia. It may in fact have short-term benefits, how long they last I don’t know, it may be days, it may be weeks, possibly even months, but there’s no evidence that it lasts from one survey to the next when the Bureau of Statistics looks at participation rates in the country.
Amanda Smith: Would it be fair to say that the reverse effect may in fact apply? And by that, I mean that the more successful we are at the top end of sport, the less likely we are to be motivated by that success to become more active ourselves because in a way the gap seems so great between our top athletes and ordinary folk.
Kevin Norton: I think that’s a really good point. There’s only one study that we could find in the literature, which also had a look at this notion of a trickle-down effect. And that was done in New Zealand around about the time of the last Olympics. And what they found was that when they looked at children and asked children what sorts of physical activities they were doing in and around the Olympic Games, and whether there was an inspiration for them to go out and become more active during the Olympics, a lot of the kids responded in the way in which you’ve just described, that is, that if they thought that there was a really big gap between their level of competence and the level of competence required to be an elite athlete, they were more likely to drop out, and so it seemed to be having a reverse effect. And the sorts of things we see happening throughout the country, and we have seen for the last decade or so with a lot of success on the one hand, and that is the talent identification programs which go into schools and select kids with abilities. They seem to put other children off who don’t quite reach that level, so if they’re not selected in those talent identification programs, the gap, or the perceived gap between their competence and the elite level required for international competition, turns them away from the sport, and the drop-out rates are quite phenomenal and are starting at a younger and younger age.
Amanda Smith: So the children who aren’t identified as having talent are in fact discouraged by the presence of talent identification programs it would seem?
Kevin Norton: Well that’s one of the conclusions of that New Zealand report, that’s what they came up with, yes.
Amanda Smith: So does the philosophy that’s driven the Federal Government’s sports policy over the past 20 years need a major overhaul, if it’s ever to meet both those objectives of excellence and participation?
Kevin Norton: Well I think so. There is every possibility that perhaps back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and maybe even into the ‘70s, that the inspiration effect of our elite athletes winning international competitions was evident in our social fabric back at that time, we can’t prove it or disprove it. But to perpetuate this idea, this philosophy, that international sporting success by our elite athletes trickles down and results in everybody else joining gyms and being more physically active themselves, is misleading. I think it’s inappropriate to use that as a basis of our funding policies in the future.
Amanda Smith: Kevin Norton, from the School of Physical Education, Exercise and Sports Studies at the University of South Australia. And his study, ‘The Price of Olympic Gold’ is published this month in the Journal of Sports Medicine Australia.
Well, how should we rethink policies to do with sports participation, as Kevin Norton suggests, especially when the Federal sports budget is reducing after the Sydney Games?
Shane Conway is the President of Sports Medicine Australia.
Shane Conway: Post-Sydney Olympics, there is going to be a decrease in funding for sport. We would argue though, that this becomes a health issue and not just a sports issue. I mean we would argue that the amount of money being spent in our health budget is increasing, and we would also argue that if we could target some of the funding that is going to be spent in health or in sport into grassroots participation, we can certainly increase the health of the Australian population. We can achieve probably a reduction of the amount that has to be spent on health, and that some of that funding can therefore go into targeting areas of participation in sport and activity for the Australian population.
Amanda Smith: One thing that I think has possibly been problematic as far as Government intervention in public participation in physical activities goes, and for the public also, is that medical opinion has varied over the years as to how much and what kind of physical activity we need to do in order to maintain a level of fitness that for example, reduces our risk of heart disease. Do you acknowledge that that has been an issue and a confusion?
Shane Conway: Yes, look I do agree that there has been some confusion over the years, and there have been various recommendations put out as to the amount of physical activity that people have to undertake. Part of it I think is due to the fact that it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. I mean as a physician who looks after athletes as well as general practice population, I was always taught that people had to do 20 or 30 minutes of exercise three days a week to achieve a specific heart rate, to achieve a training effect. Well a training effect is to improve your cardiovascular fitness, and that’s one aim that you might have in prescribing exercise to a patient, or to the general population.
But I think the more important overall message is that any increase in activity for our population will improve their health and fitness, and will hopefully achieve a reduction in the amount of funding that has to go into looking after their health.
Amanda Smith: Well if the prime aim of encouraging Australians at large into physical activity is for health reasons, and that health benefit for example can be achieved by a brisk walk a few times a week, it does seem that that has very little to do with sport, and therefore the second objective of the Australian Sports Commission to increase participation might be more appropriately brought under the Federal Health rather than the Sport portfolio. Are there pros and cons to that?
Shane Conway: Well I don’t see a great difference between the two aims. I mean, certainly the second objective of the Australian Sports Commission is to increase participation in sport and sports activities. I think that’s a worthy objective of the Australian Sports Commission, but I also think it merges with health, it meshes with health, and to try and separate them is probably not sensible. I mean it may separate them in terms of funding, whether the Health Minister wants to put money in to getting the Australian population out going for a walk. I mean we are asking Health Departments all around the country in all the States and at Federal level, to look at these issues, and I believe it is something that Health Departments and the Federal Minister for Health and the State Ministers for Health all around Australia, should be looking at and should be looking at how targeted funding into increased participation and activity can help reduce health spending in the future.
Amanda Smith: Dr Shane Conway, who’s the President of Sports Medicine Australia.
Now the part of the Australian Sports Commission that looks after community participation, the part that gets 10% of the funding, is the ‘Active Australia’ program. Henny Oldenhove runs this program; she’s the General Manager of Sport Development at the Sports Commission.
And while the ‘Price of Olympic Gold’ study found no direct or lasting link between Australian athletes doing well at the Olympics, and the activity levels of the rest of us, Henny Oldenhove believes that there will be a small window of opportunity around the Sydney Games that Active Australia can capitalise on.
Henny Oldenhove: Well we’re trying to leave, if you like, an Olympic legacy. We know that there’ll be increased motivation as a result of the Olympics. Unfortunately that bubble, if you like, only seems to last for about six months. So one of the things that we want to do is to say "Well, if that heightened motivation is there, how are we going to capture it?" So we’re taking a three-step approach: we want to be able to talk to all the clubs and organisations around Australia in the next few months and get them ready. What are they going to do when the Olympics stop? How will they be able to get out to the community and get people to come and join their organisation? So it’s a getting ready stage. Then the second stage of the campaign will be the Active Australia Day, which will be held on the 29th October, which is the last day of the Paralympics. And what we really want to be able to say is "Look, you’ve been sitting down watching all of this for the last six weeks, now it’s your turn. How about joining the community and getting active on the day?" But one of the things we recognise is that we don’t want just one day that people are active, so we want to follow that campaign up with a more targeted television campaign, which is saying one way of keeping your activity going and one way of making new friends and being part of the community, is to actually join an organisation or a club. So we’re going to appeal to people to think about looking out in the community what’s available, and entice them to join a local sporting club or an organisation.
Amanda Smith: I’m wondering though, Henny, how appropriate a strategy is this, when the trend for a lot of Australians, seems to be a move away from structured, organised group sport and recreation, into more informal and individual patterns of activity?
Henny Oldenhove: Look I think, Amanda, you’re right, this is an interesting conundrum that we have. On the one hand, people are very time-poor, they try and fit in activity the best way they can, they like to not be too overly organised or too regimented, or lock themselves into a program of a season which is a commitment of 22 weeks. So I think that is a truism, and that impacts on how we deliver sport.
But on the other hand, and this is the other side of the coin, what some of our research is telling us is that people still want a sense of belonging, they want to do things with groups of people, they want to have fun, they want to enjoy the camaraderie of a group of people having a game of tennis or playing a game of netball. So I think there is still a significant role that organised sport and organised physical activity plays. I think the biggest challenge for our industry is to recognise that we might need to offer sport in a whole range of ways, not just the traditional way of your 22 week season, two nights practice, turn up on Saturday afternoon; that will capture part of our market, but another market might be the Thursday morning young mothers netball game, or the Monday night over-15s social group. So I think we’ve got to be careful we’re not in danger of sort of losing the baby with the bathwater, of saying organised activity’s too hard, therefore organised activity’s struggling. I think we just have to help sport in particular reinvent the way that they offer those programs, because intrinsically people want to do it socially and have fun, that’s almost the greatest motivator.
Amanda Smith: Henny do you think Australians at large tend to think that they’re more sporty or more active than they actually are? And I’m wondering this because Australia is regarded internationally, and Australians generally regard themselves as sports obsessed. But are a lot of us actually under a bit of a delusion that we’re sporty because we’re enthusiastic supporters?
Henny Oldenhove: I think you’re right, it is part of our psyche, it’s part of our culture. We watch it, we see it, we celebrate it, we make sure that our kids experience it, it’s so much part of I guess the traditional cultural values that we have. But I think a lot of people are starting to struggle in terms of time and with costs, and with access. The challenge for us is how do we capture people’s imagination to convert that into some meaningful physical activity? And one thing people are telling us, "We know it’s good for us, don’t tell us that. Find a way of inviting us to be part of it in a way that it adds to my quality of life by the fact that it’s great fun, there’s enjoyment in it, that I get to meet new people, that I socialise". I mean take for example in Australia, the average lawn bowls club. Now some people could put a heart-rate monitor on the bowlers and say that they’re insufficiently physically active. I would say, "Well, who cares? Have a look at the social camaraderie, and the sense of purpose of getting together that it does for our community". So I think we have to make sure that we constantly balance, if you like, the physical health needs, which are clearly there, but also the social and the community benefits. And in a sense, that’s where sport plays a very unique role, because it still helps to bring people together.
Amanda Smith: Henny Oldenhove. the General Manager of Sport Development at the Australian Sports Commission, who’s responsible for the ‘Active Australia’ program.
Now then, are our children really so much less physically active and skilled and fit, than previous generations of Australians, as recent reports are leading us to believe?
Jan Wright is the Co-ordinator of the Graduate School of Education Research at the University of Wollongong. She’s also been working with the New South Wales Department of Education and Training on issues to do with physical education and gender in schools. And Jan Wright questions how conclusive the evidence is, that there’s been a decline in children’s fitness of late.
Jan Wright: Amanda, I’d have to say, particularly when you use the word ‘conclusive’ that that’s not the case. We don’t have longitudinal evidence to compare with, so that especially when we talk about the notion of decline, there’s nothing there to demonstrate there’s been a change from the past to the future. A lot of it is I suppose, people’s feelings about things, their observations, the sort of things that people say about intergenerational things, "It was very different when we were children" rather than any kind of hard evidence to demonstrate this.
Amanda Smith: Well although you’re saying that trying to compare the fitness of children today with those of previous generations is problematic, what about the tests that are being done now on children’s physical abilities, which are showing that many children or groups of children, lack fundamental motor skills. Are the results of those tests in and of themselves, clear-cut evidence of an inactive physically unskilled generation of children?
Jan Wright: Again Amanda, I don’t think so. I suppose my position on this is that the kinds of skills that are actually being tested are very narrow, and they certainly are skills that as a society we value, if you take what we see on television as evidence of what we value. They’re mostly skills that are associated with a fairly narrow range of traditional team sports that have been part of our British heritage.
Amanda Smith: All right, so tell me more about those tests then, and how these fundamental motor skills tests might be giving some children for example, an inaccurately poor result.
Jan Wright: Well the sorts of tests that are now being used quite widely, they were used in New South Wales for the Physical Activity and Fitness Test, they are underpinning much of what’s happening in Victoria, in terms of physical education and sport education, are a very specific range of tests, adapted from I think, American work and designed by people in Victoria. And they cover I think approximately 11 fundamental motor skills. Now these skills, while I think some of them might include running, they are much more specific skills to sports, so they’re skills like an overhand throw, or a particular kind of catch, or a kick, or a vertical jump, so that when you look at them they, I think intentionally, are seen as the skills that are fundamental to learning competitive sports.
Amanda Smith: So if the tests are very specific to specific sports skills, does that mean some children are being disadvantaged in the testing process?
Jan Wright: Certainly any child that hasn’t had a background or experience in these specific sports skills, is going to come out poorly. And at the very beginning, you mentioned the word ‘lack’, and in some ways that’s what I suppose I’m particularly concerned about, because it creates this notion of deficit. Those children who don’t do well at these fairly specific skills, are then seen to be deficient, more broadly in terms of their motor skill.
Amanda Smith: Well given me an example of how specific to a specific sport those fundamental motor skills tests might be.
Jan Wright: Well if we take ‘the catch’, for instance, which on the surface would seem to be a fairly broadly generic kind of activity, when you look at the criteria and there are very clear criteria for actually assessing the quality of each of these skills, you see that the positioning of the hands that is required is actually more appropriate to a cricket catch, that you’ve got the hands together with the little fingers touching, and it doesn’t really cater for a whole range of other forms of catching, such as netball, basketball, softball and baseball. So children, and I’d have to say would primarily be boys who are experienced at cricket, who’ve had lots of time to practice and play cricket, would do very well at that skill, but other children who may actually be able to catch different sized balls and in different ways, would turn out to actually be deficient in that particular skill.
Amanda Smith: Well if the tests are generally looking at skills that relate to a pretty narrow range of sport skills, then is it possible that children who engage in other types of physical activities which require and develop different skills to, say, catching or throwing, or kicking a ball, will return a poor test result, where in fact they may be quite active and skilled in things like gymnastics or aerobics or skateboarding or BMX riding?
Jan Wright: Exactly. I think that’s quite likely to be the case. If that’s where you’ve been putting all your time and energy, you won’t come out as well unless you’ve been doing the other things in addition.
Amanda Smith: So our children may not in fact be as physically incompetent, or inactive, as these sorts of test results or reporting on them, are suggesting?
Jan Wright: I think I would like to suggest that, that they are not as incompetent and as inactive as these suggest, because I think we’re not measuring it accurately, and we’re not really taking into account all the sorts of things that kids do, you know, dancing on the weekend for instance, dancing … my daughter dances in her bedroom and dances with her friends, that just wouldn’t feature in terms of these skill tests.
Amanda Smith: Jan Wright, from the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong, with a somewhat less alarmist view of the state of our children’s fitness and physical abilities, compared to some of the reports we’ve been getting of late.
And that brings us to the end of The Sports Factor.
Michael Shirrefs is the producer, and I’m Amanda Smith. Until next week, cheers.
Guests on this program:
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Kevin Norton from the School of Physical Education, Exercise & Sports Studies at the University of South Australia and one of the authors of the 'Price of Olympic Gold' study. |
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Dr Shane Conway President of Sports Medicine Australia. |
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Henny Oldenhove General Manager of Sport Development at the Australian Sports Commission. |
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Jan Wright from the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong. |
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Michael Shirrefs
©1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation