Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

in 1960 at Rome; six at Tokyo in 1964; five in Mexico in 1968. Apparent revival at Munich in 1972 masked the underlying trend: six of eight gold medals were in swimming, three of them to fifteen-year-old Shane Gould. The other two were in sailing, the sport that won two of three bronze medals at Montreal. Even before the Montreal shock to a public anxious to see Australia ‘punching above its weight’ in international sport, plans for reform were taking shape. In 1973 John Bloomfield, president of the Australian Sports Medicine Federation and soon foundation professor of UWA’s pioneering Department of Human Movement, had been commissioned by the Whitlam government to prepare a plan for the development of sport and recreation in Australia. His recommendation that the federal government establish a national institute of sport became the blueprint for revolutionary changes. In 1975 Bloomfield’s arguments were supported by a government study group headed by Dr Allan Coles. The argument that politics should be kept separate from sport was still dying a slow death after being monotonously reiterated in the early 1970s by opponents of the demonstrations and boycotts that ousted racist South Africa from the international sporting community. It could no longer be kept alive after the Montreal Games, when the ascendancy of both the Soviet Union and East Germany, above even the United States in the gold medal tally, showed how far sport had become an expression of serious international rivalry. Australian swimming, always the country’s strongest Olympic suit, was eclipsed by East Germany whose women won all but two events after never winning a single gold medal in previous Games. Yet suspicions, later proved to be fact, that these feats were the result of systematic state-sponsored doping, did not encourage Australian sport to cling to its amateurism or suddenly embrace the ideal of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, instigator of the modern Olympics, that participating was more important than winning. The Fraser government’s promotion of the Moscow boycott implied that it now accepted that international sport and politics were linked. It certainly did so in 1981 when it accepted the recommendations of Bloomfield and Coles by opening the Australian Institute of Sport [AIS]. Bloomfield became founding deputy chair and later chair of the AIS and later co-chair of the Australian Sports Commission from 50 1976-1981