When Scotland’s rugby team lines up against Australia at Murrayfield tomorrow, they will believe that they have a very real chance of victory. The last time the teams met, at the 2015 World Cup, Australia sneaked the win by a single point but even then, the victory was courtesy of a controversial refereeing decision. Australia are the bookies favourites tomorrow but make no mistake, Scotland could upset the odds.
That Scotland can consider themselves real challengers to Australia is a scenario that, in the past, was utterly unthinkable. Between 1982 and 2009, Scotland didn’t beat Australia once. In fairness, the Aussies were a strong team; when they won the 1999 Rugby World Cup, they became the first nation to win the William Webb Ellis Cup twice and they came within a whisker of becoming the first nation to retain it, only losing to England in extra time four years later.
It was not only rugby union in which they dominated; Australia’s cricket team were head-and-shoulders above the rest of the world in the 1990s and early 2000s, winning a hat-trick of World Cups and eight consecutive Ashes series’. They had tennis’ world No.1 male player in Lleyton Hewitt, plus one of the greatest athletes on the planet in Ian Thorpe and Australia’s Olympic team was punching well above its weight, particularly in the Sydney Games in 2000 in which the host country won 58 medals.
The real push for Olympic success by Australia came in 1976 when their Olympic team failed to win a single gold medal at the Montreal Games. In the aftermath of that fallow Games, the Australian Institute of Sport was set up. In the following decades, the Australian sporting set-up came to be the envy of the world. There was a central hub as well as regional centres and money was pumped into supporting the athletes. Australia became one of the front-runners in sport science and many of the physiology ideas that are still used today across the globe were conceived by staff of the Australian Institute of Sport.
Their investment paid off, particularly in Olympic sports. The rest of the world sat up and took notice of Australia and its success; how was a country with a population of just 23 million producing so many world-class athletes? After GB had a quite horrific Olympic Games in terms of gold medals in 1996- they won only one- it was decided that something must be done in this country to rectify the situation. So where better to look than Australia, who seemed to have the secret worked out? Scotland in particular decided that replicating the Australian model as closely as possible was the best way forward. When the Scottish Institute of Sport (SIS) as it was called then was established in 1998, half of Australia came to Scotland to work here. Ok, not quite, but at times it felt like it. Anne Marie Harrison, the former CEO of the Sports Federation of Victoria (Australia’s most successful sporting state), was brought in to be chief executive of the SIS, along with numerous physiotherapists and sports science staff who had come through the Australian system.
There can be little doubt that the SIS worked; it made elite sport in Scotland more professional, and I experienced first-hand the change in approach that the Australian staff brought. UK Sport also decided that bringing in Australian expertise was the way to drag the level of British sport up. There are countless examples of Australian support staff turning up in Britain but perhaps most notable was Bill Sweetenham, the swimming coach who was charged with reversing Britain’s fortunes in the pool. The Aussie was almost universally unpopular but he did what he was employed to do; he transformed British swimming. On his watch, Britain produced its first world gold medallist in the pool since the 1960s when Katie Sexton won 200m backstroke gold in 2003. It was not just certain individuals who benefited from Sweetenham’s presence though, the entire British swimming squad raised its level and while Sweetenham may be long gone now, it is hard to fully disassociate the Team GB’s swimmers success in Rio with the system he brought in.
However, there is a danger in assuming that Australia has the perfect model for elite sport. Yes, they devised an excellent way to improve standards but are those methods enough to produce sustained success? In Rio, Australia finished a lowly tenth in the Olympic medal table, their Ashes team has lost four of the past five tests, and earlier this year, England’s rugby team claimed an historic whitewash when they visited Australia for a three-match test series.
This is not to say that Australia has lost the plot, neither is it to suggest that they no longer worth looking towards for tips on how to succeed on the sporting stage. But perhaps their current performances are a warning that however good their system may have looked, it is not infallible.
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