Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

Chapter Five 1993-2002 Claims that the Australian Institute of Sport ‘has earned an international reputation as the world’s leading body dedicated to the training and development of elite athletes’ might have complete conviction if they came from overseas, rather than from the AIS’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in 2006. Yet there is no doubt that the statistics are impressive: in 1981 there were 152 AIS scholarship holders, in 2004 some 700 in 26 sports, supported by 75 coaches. AIS athletes took 65 per cent of medals won by Australia at the 2004 Athens Olympics, including ten of Australia’s record seventeen gold medals, theoretically making AIS ninth on the gold medal table, ahead of countries such as Great Britain, Greece and Canada. Of course, by 2008 achievements at the Beijing Olympics, especially in cycling and swimming, showed that Britain had finally heeded the Australian example of pouring large financial resources into sport. In a manner nobody could have predicted, when he was juggling the demands of first-class cricket, international hockey and medical studies in the 1970s, Ric Charlesworth became arguably the most respected figure in this post-1981 sporting environment. He began his coaching career with the Australian women’s hockey team in circumstances ‘not ideal’, both on and off the field. His immediate predecessor as national coach, Brian Glencross, remained AIS head coach before Ric assumed both roles in 1995, with Glencross taking on a more administrative role as high performance manager. Even before beginning as coach Ric had sent a questionnaire to all established international players, as well as to up-and-coming juniors, in an attempt to discover what was needed to end the national team’s recent slide in form. After winning the gold medal at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and second place in the World Cup in Sydney in 1990, the team had slipped to fifth place in the recent Barcelona Olympics. Ric had seen little of the players since Seoul because the AIS hockey programme in Perth had been preparing players for the Junior World Cup in 1993, with many senior players based elsewhere. 65