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“Greatest Olympics ever”? Australia certainly trounced the world on one measure

Australia Olympics, Paris

Touted as “Australia’s Best Olympics Ever”, the Paris 2000 Olympic Games showcased brilliant performances from Australia’s athletes. Michael West looks behind the numbers at the sport, business and politics.

“Australia’s Best Olympics ever”? It was a ‘good’un’, but only the best on one measure. Yes, on gold medals, the count was the highest in history, but then there were more events than ever, more athletes, and on a per capita basis, we were shaded by at least three other countries.

On total medals, Paris was second behind Sydney, so the media contorted its way to making it Australia’s Greatest Games by – not unreasonably – pointing out that it was the best Olympics on foreign soil and besides, in Sydney we put up more athletes than in Paris. A bit like we did in the preceding paragraph. We can all have fun with numbers.

And it is reasonable to assume that Australia, which sent 462 competitors to the Games – the third in sheer numbers behind China and the US – has a national economic advantage. It would be an interesting analysis, although tricky, to work out public subsidies for per athlete competing versus other countries. We spend a lot of public money on sport.

Did Australia spend the most of any nation per gold medal? To ask these questions is not to detract one bit from the magnificent performances of Australia’s athletes.

And there is a case for public spending, both in terms of the global goodwill and tourism income from advertising Australia; and the social benefits which arise from sport. Children are inspired, and sport brings people together, nations too. 

Raygun blasts World

To this, it is no small irony that Australia’s most celebrated performance globally, and its most controversial, was that of breakdancer Rachel “Raygun” Gunn, who managed to score two zeros for her kangaroo-hopping breakdance but command headlines around the world. More headlines than any other athlete.

On this measure, the hallowed Aussie tradition of ‘piss-taking’, Raygun was the GOAT. Good on her. She cracked the BBC, CNN, Associated Press, Forbes, Variety, USA Today, Times Magazine – you name it – and trended for days on social media for her iconic performance in daggy baggy green.

(In this case we believe it is permissible to deploy the word ‘iconic’.)

The detractors were many. “I’m starting to get obsessed with how this lady scammed the Australian government to pay for her French holiday and all she had to do is pretend to breakdance” said one social media post. To which another responded by posting this excerpt from Gunn’s academic work:

Yet her admirers drowned them out. The performance was funny, it made a point, and a good part of it was about sheer endeavour too. Raygun’s breakdance was superior to the swimming of Eric the Eel or the ski jumping of Eddie the Eagle.

Whatever the raw athleticism, the 36-year-old lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia with a PhD in cultural sciences (breakdancing in fact) gave it a shot, and why not? It was performance irony, by her own admission. And her innovation brought a lot of joy.

The dark side – politics and business

The Olympics is big business and huge politics. Ever more so. Yet, for many, the hypocrisy of the Paris Olympic Games was too much. While Russia was banned from competing over its war in Ukraine, athletes from the Israel Defence Forces were allowed to compete despite IDF war crimes.

Indeed the extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu – financed by the US – bombed four other countries during the Games and continued to burn families alive in Gaza amid other assorted atrocities while the International Criminal Court had a warrant out for his arrest.

This was an Olympic first; a genocide live-streamed daily while the Games were afoot. With the passage of time, historians will make sense of it. Suffice to say that the answer to this grotesque hypocrisy lies in money and power.

The International Olympic Committee is funded by multinational companies, including Coca-Cola, Allianz, Intel, Alibaba, Toyota, Visa, Samsung and Deloitte. Some 61% of its revenues come from selling broadcast rights to multinational media groups and 30% from selling marketing rights.

It’s a gigantic corporate gig. And the leading shareholders in many of the companies are the two dominant global money-managers, BlackRock and Vanguard. And so, politically, the Paris Olympics could have been a lot messier, were it not for the nationalistic coverage of the event by corporate media.

Then again, it’s just sport … isn’t it? Politics should not get mixed up with sport …

This post was originally published on Michael West.