Empires rise and fall: such is their nature. The only thing more astonishing than the rise of a formidable power is its inexorable fall from grace.
Throughout the chronicles of golden sporting eras there have been fewer greater all-round empires than the colossally talented and success-hungry Australian sports stars of the 1990s.
Sportsmen and women from Down Under stood like Ayers Rock — immovable, spectacular and intimidating on the world’s sporting stages in nearly every arena they graced: cricket, rugby, hockey, cycling, swimming — the list is exhaustive.
Australia’s golden age was long and fruitful: rugby union and cricket world champions, gold hauls at Olympic Games that was nothing short of a Midas touch, and above all else the forging of a feared and respected brand and ethic into the sporting conscience in perpetuity.
Australians spent many a golden summer on the shores of Bondi, Noosa and the Swan River cheering their compatriots onto victory after victory throughout the nineties and into the 2000s.
Gen Y travails
But the oceans of time have inevitably swept the golden heroes of a generation ashore and away from the spotlight. And so the current no-less-talented generation faces the most daunting of tasks: standing on the shoulders of giants such as Stephen Larkham, Steve Waugh and Ian Thorpe and maintaining the iconic Australian sports brand.
As if the task wasn’t overwhelming enough, a slew of off-field transgressions over the past 12 months committed by today’s worshipped Commonwealth Stars have smudged the image of Australian sporting culture.
Consequently, poor on-field performances have come under excruciating scrutiny. Now the very fibre of the Australian sporting culture is under the microscope — the societal consequences of which cannot be ignored.
The Australian Football League (AFL), the country’s most popular sport, was rocked by allegations of cheating at the Essendon Bombers, one of its most successful clubs, where the use of performance-enhancing supplements in 2012 created a “disturbing picture of a pharmacologically experimental environment”, according to an independent review commissioned by the club. After an investigation by the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) it’s alleged that a meticulously planned substance enhancement programme was going on at Essendon in which former sports scientist Stephen Dank and coach James Hird were complicit and found guilty by the Supreme Court, where the case had been referred.
Speaking about the AFL scandal, then Justice Minister, Jason Clare, proclaimed: “The findings are shocking and will disgust Australian sports fans. It’s cheating but it’s worse than that. It’s cheating with the help of criminals.”
Speaking to GN Focus from Melbourne, Paul Hovart, the sports solicitor who represented Essendon Assistant Coach Mark Thompson in court, says: “There’s no doubt [the AFL scandal] has damaged the brand and unfortunately there’s not a lot you can do to speed up the process when it’s the job of a governmental agency to conduct an investigation.
“I’m saddened by the tarnishing of our international reputation, particularly as clean athletes. And that’s a sad thing because I treasure that very much and I don’t want people watching Australian performances in the future and thinking ‘I wonder if these guys are using something or not.’
“The current examples will lead to some of that speculation, and there’s nothing we can do in the short term, and we’ve just got to work very hard to claw back that reputation.”
Nose for trouble
Rarely, if ever, has there been such a widespread malaise affecting the fabric of a culture in such a short space of time. Speaking exclusively to GN Focus, Wallaby legend Stephen Larkham, who spearheaded Australia’s 1999 Rugby World Cup win in England, says sports professionals’ behaviour hasn’t changed much since his day, but the conditions have, and players need to learn that fast if they are to warrant their exorbitant pay packages.
“Some things that are happening now were happening in my day, but it wasn’t scrutinised as much. However, that is the scenario at the moment and players have to learn that,” Larkham says. “The majority of players realise they’re under constant scrutiny, but there’re a couple that think it doesn’t apply to them. Particularly with social media: if you’re not a very smart person [off the field] then you can get caught out.
“These guys are not really aware of the position they are putting themselves in and aren’t smart enough to get themselves out of it, or be smart enough to make smart decisions,” Larkham says, referring to the Australian rugby union squad.
When the Wallabies’ Quade Cooper (left) took to Twitter to vent his outrage at being left out of the Wallaby set-up, he was acting instinctively — as sportsmen will — but the consequences are far-reaching, explains Dubai-based Sports Performance Psychologist Caren Diehl at Up and Running Sports Clinic.
“When a player undermines a coach, it destroys trust. The rest of the team thinks, ‘if something goes wrong the whole world is going to find out about it. He’s gonna run to Twitter and blast it out there’.
“For many of us, [not in the public eye] we’ve got so used to Twitter being our vent that we can just go there and get something off our chest.
So, if I had a player on my team, and after we have an argument he goes and posts it on his Twitter page, I’m not going to be able to trust him anymore. And trust is a huge thing in team sports.
“You don’t have to like each other, you don’t have to become best friends, but you do have to be able to trust and respect each other. And if that doesn’t work you can’t play together as a team,” Diehl explains.
The combination of social media and 24/7 media scrutiny over results and off-field behaviour has created an environment for the modern sportsman that can feel a little like entrapment. And the consequences are symbiotic: fans want all-hours access to their sporting idols while players and coaches want as close to a normal life as possible.
The problems of elevating mere mortals to demigod status because of the way they can physiologically control their legs and arms over their tongue and Twitter feed unleash profound questions of whether sports idolatry is in itself an entirely good thing: a media-packaged product demanded by the masses or a reverence earned by individual athletes?
Egos and attitudes
Diehl says that the spats gone public in Australian dressing rooms can be explained by the classic mine-is-bigger-than-yours competitive nature of elite athletes who haven’t bonded as a team.
“At an elite level players tend to be more ego-oriented, because it’s all about winning. And so a coping mechanism [ego-centric] performers have is to blame someone or something else before we look at ourselves.
“That’s why the players, if they were dropped, or yelled at, react by saying ‘actually it’s the coach’s fault — he’s playing the wrong players, he’s not doing his job properly, etc.’, before they even reflect they may have done something wrong,” she explains.
Blame culture is not normally associated with Australia. Underlying personality conflicts in teams that have assumed a right to success rather than worked for it have caused ruptures in the Australian team ethic and undermined the image of the Kangaroo nation.
Poor performances on the pitch are explicable in the wake of one of the greatest breeds of sports stars. But the attitude and off-pitch public image needs to be remedied soon for the sake of the super sporting power that once was. And for the sake of the generations to come that will carry the fire of the land Down Under.